Jan 10 - Cafe Bangla, Rushden

Hey, here we the night before the next curry club and I'm making a post. Not only am I on time this month, but we usually don't have a Jan meet. The story is that we have been contacted by a reasonably local establishment and invited to come along for a special curry evening. I won't say who now as we will wait until next month. We had considered going this month, but time was short to get people together. So watch out for next months post. Anyway, having thought a few of us might be out this month we decided to go local to .. yes the Cafe Bangla. There is a bit of snow around and so we thought keep it to walking distance. Funny, I spoke to a curry club member this week on the phone who said it was snowing heavily and that he had some on the ground. I opened my door and saw a clear sky and not a flake around. Weird thing is this guy was about 4 miles as the bird flies from me. Talk about localised weather.

So Tony, Alan, Keith, Colin M, Paul, Tom and Tom's Grandad, Julian, Nathan, Lindsey, Nathan, Steve & Steve, Keith's mate, Bill and someone else who's name I didn't get made their way down town in the ice and remains of snow.

We were seated quickly and ordered the usual first round of drinks. Cafe B is consistently a good scorer and they are striving to better the score every time we meet. One issue for us is that these guys are local and give a great service so we tend to go back often.

So early discussion included Baxters soup and smoked beachwood bacon. Now I'm not sure how much beer had been drunk at this point, but I just don't know what this was all about. While we were choosing our meals there was loads of discussion about side dishes and what they contain. We got in and sat down at 7:15 and were asked for our order at 7:45, which is not great. Most of these places assume you will have 47 popodums and various chutneys followed by 3 pints. As we don't tend to have the pre-starters, mainly due to cost, it does mean we feel that we are waiting a bit longer than we should. The starters came at 8:10, so that does mean we waited nearly an hour and there were some hungary men.

We had the usual cars conversations and someone raised the issue of why people have to drive in the middle lane of the motorway when the inside lane is clear. I think it is just a lack of confidence and they feel safer in the middle of the road rather then near that dangerous hard shoulder. Someone disagreed with me and said they just shouldn't have been given a driving licence. I guess there is one school of thought that if they are doing 70mph, then no one should catch them up anyway ...

I wonder if we should have lanes on the pavement? Have you noticed how some people wander along and you are stuck behind them needing to get past. If we had lanes we could have the slow walkers in the inside lane and the faster ones on the outside lane. You'd even have an overtaking lane. Though I wonder how long it would be before those people that hog the middle lane on the road start walking along the fast lane! As I recall some swimming pools have lanes for fast and slow swimmers. I might try swimming slowly up the fast lane next time :-)

Some other conversations were Bill trying to find a piano player with no teeth, one of our members admitted to playing Father Christmas, eating Indian food in India, Chilli Chocolates, having a fat boys at the Red Lion pub in Weldon (maybe we should go there) and at one point far too much church talk. Pastor Ian wasn't there so we missed him bringing real world issues to the table like which is best, the Nintendo Wii or Playstation 3?

Anyway main course arrived and were great as usual and so when we had finished we did the scoring. I'll start with Ambience for a change, that got 4.1, Quality 4.7, Quantity 4.7, Price 4.7 ... bit of a theme here and finally staff 4.2. I think staff might have got more if we had scored later as the boss man came in after we had scored and we had loads of banter with him. Great guy down there. Of course we were offered the usual night cap of any drink. So the final score was 22.4, the 3rd highest ever and giving Bangla Cafe the top 4 places in our restaurant league.

Of course as usual the opinions expressed here are entirely personal and represent our visit on the night. Next month, we are going to the Red Hot in Northampton (no this is not a strange night club around the back streets), it is the world buffet bar. I have a feeling the guys there might just break up the Bangla's dominance. We've been invited specifically as they want to start a curry club. I no I've given the name away ....

Until the next post, kit fit and don't let your aloo saag.