Noorani Indian Restaurant, Fair Oak

I fear this may sound like I’m laying down a challenge, but I have to say that southerners are nancy’s! Since moving away from Manchester, Simone and I have been really disappointed by Indian restaurants in the south of England – until we found Noorani.

Indian food should taste like Indian food, not like English food dressed up with some novelty sauces that have a hint of spice. If a dish is meant to be hot it should, but a good chef will still manage to bring through its flavour.

Everything about Noorani impressed us. Simone and I had a buffet meal for £12.50 each. Unlike other Indian buffet meals we’ve had, it wasn’t just a combination of dodgy leftover sauces, rubbery rice and scrag-ends of meat. There was a good selection of main dishes ranging from mild to hot and including both vegetarian and meat-atarian options. There were also various samosas, bhajis, etc. I have to confess that I didn’t just go back for more once!

The service was very good. Unlike our previous experiences, especially in Rusholme (Manchester), we asked for a jug of tap water and weren’t then pestered throughout the meal to buy expensive drinks. The restaurant had good air-conditioning, didn’t smell like a pub with beer and cigarette smells lingering in the carpet, and even the gents toilet was clean and fresh (so often nothing more than a cupboard with a urinal in the corner requiring you to wade through a sea urine and sick to use it!).

If I lived in Eastleigh or anywhere more local to Fair Oak I would go to Noorani as often as I could afford to. Saying that, the cost was no more than a meal in any other kind of restaurant and was about right.

Noorani is an excellent little Indian restaurant and I would recommend it to anyone.