“You came at the wrong time!” It’s the first thing owner Sujith D’almeida says to me when I phone Urban Tandoor the day after my visit. Apparently if we’d come a bit later in the evening — say 7pm-ish — there would have been dancing and singing, loud music: Sweet Caroline, Come on Eileen, YMCA. In the middle of it all, D’almeida, 44, working the microphone: announcing guests’ birthdays and “people getting married for the third time, divorce celebrations”.
“He says we came at the wrong time,” I explain to my mum. I can hear the grimace in her voice. “No, I think we probably came at exactly the right time.” Quite.
We had gone to Urban Tandoor because Urban Tandoor is famous. Famous, specifically, on TikTok, which is usually not a good sign for a restaurant. I tend not to know if a restaurant is big on TikTok because that app gives me a headache and makes me hate humanity with a passion that disturbs even me. But this restaurant is so famous that I ended up reading about it in The New York Times.
Most of the time, when that august newspaper writes about Britain, they invariably seem to self-righteously find that we are a sad, rainy island of fascists — and fascists who can’t even run the trains on time at that. So I was pretty surprised to see them celebrating a little Indian restaurant in Bristol.
The thing that had caught our American cousins’ eye was this: D’almeida and his team at Urban Tandoor have spent the past couple of years posting on TikTok. Specifically, they post campy, slightly terrible videos of themselves dancing through the restaurant — a darkly lit, colourfully decorated place festooned with fairy lights — and singing adaptations they have written of well-known pop songs (Bhaji Girl, Mr Riceside).
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I know. Awful. But it has worked. Before they discovered social media “we had a tough start”, D’almeida tells me. Urban Tandoor is down a slightly random backstreet in Bristol’s town centre, and a series of businesses had opened in that spot and closed in quick succession. When the restaurant opened in 2013, everyone expected it would be the same. But now people come from all over the world — New York, Australia, New Zealand — to eat D’almeida’s bhajis.
They aren’t really here for the food: “Less pressure on me and the chef,” he jokes. Although the grub is decent, at the upper end of what you’d expect from a classic local British Indian place. We have palak kofta (spinach, paneer and onion dumplings) in a slightly tomato-soupy sauce, and manage to mess up our starter order by securing two dishes — samosa chat and mustard paneer tikka — which both taste primarily of the green mint, chilli and coriander sauce that accompanies them. But they are all perfectly edible, and the beef sukka — fenugreek, cardamom, fennel seed, cumin, coconut cream — that I get on the waiter’s recommendation is excellent.
But as I said, people don’t really come for the food. There’s something else here — and even on the quiet 4pm shift on a rainy afternoon you can feel it. All the campness, the passion and the lack of self-seriousness you can see on the TikToks is somehow suffused into this place: into the enthusiasm of the waiters, even into the decor, which is a brightly coloured hybrid of Mumbai murals alongside the Clifton bridge and graffiti to represent Bristol.
D’almeida tells me about a man who turned up to Urban Tandoor before brain surgery, dressed as Jesus. His surgeon had told him this would be his last supper, and he wanted it to be here. A family who brought their terminally ill child here. A customer who told him that her husband has chronic depression, and the only time he has smiled recently was watching Urban Tandoor’s TikToks.
“It’s very emotional — very, very emotional,” D’almeida says. “We’ve got a lot of national awards but that doesn’t mean anything to me. If you can give someone two or three minutes of happiness, that means everything.” I find myself thinking maybe he was right: we did come at the wrong time.
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It’s the same theory behind the TikToks. “I wanted to get some positivity into people’s lives,” D’almeida explains. Just 60 seconds of laughter on their way into the office or when they are sitting on the train. What a wonderful thing he’s built here: silly, warm, magical. I hope when the Americans think of us, they think of Urban Tandoor.
★★★★★
urban-tandoor.com
