17-07-2025
‘My new favourite Indian restaurant': William Sitwell reviews Permit Room, London
Permit rooms came into being in Bombay after the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949. They allowed those who wished to partake of liquor 'for health reasons' to do so once they'd secured a permit – and enabled civil servants to revel in another layer of exquisite bureaucracy, with more paperwork, files and rubber stamps.
The concept is recalled in the name of a new restaurant in the Dishoom portfolio, adding to the evocative nature of the place. Permit Room on Portobello Road (at an address I remember way back when as First Floor, a restaurant that was a little grungy, all dark wood, dim lighting and candles) is decked out in colonial rattan, with lots of tropical plants and South Asian art.
It's the fourth in Dishoom's offshoot group of Permit Rooms (Brighton, Oxford and Cambridge are lucky to have the others) and I wish they'd look kindly upon me, see the desperate yearning in my eyes, and open one near me at home. West Somerset needs a Permit Room; it needs Dishoom's co-founder cousins Shamil and Kavi Thakrar to put a pin in, say, Wiveliscombe, and grant us an establishment with fabulous staff, serene bedrooms (they call them lodgings), a wonderful bar (epic negronis…) and, at its heart, a seminal Indian restaurant.
The menu offers a colourful array of dishes, some of which are solidly mainstream Indian but just epic examples of them. We started with prawn recheado, which the menu declares is a 'Goan go-to' (not that I ever had the pleasure of eating it when I languished in Goa post-school, aged 17). It's a chilli-hot dish of prawns that gets the beads of sweat gathering and had us glugging their very decent and fresh Spanish garnacha, chosen from a tight list.
Then the real fun started, as I tested them on their versions of standard Indian-restaurant fare: lamb curry, tandoori chicken, rice and naan. Our half-chicken tandoori was wonderfully tender, delivering a whole leg and breast rather than ubiquitous anonymous cubes of meat. It was properly charred, with a subtle hint of chilli, and it came with a garnish you actually wanted to eat – a refreshing kachumber (finely chopped cucumber, onion and tomato), along with a little dish of zesty green chutney.
There was a rich and moreish bowl of deep, dark lamb curry, the lamb similarly tender and the spicing modest. I wanted lashings upon lashings of the glorious stuff. Even better was a bowl of black daal, stewed for 24 hours – a dish I'd like to eat at least once a week for the rest of my life (even if the amount of ghee in it would, I suspect, limit the rest of my life to mere weeks).
Rice was fluffy and a plate of Tenderstem broccoli a tremendous line in the sand: look at this broccoli, charred and cooked to just the right side of al dente, and with not so much as a teaspoon of wretched sauce to ruin it. Along with some puffy naans, it was all a picture of kaleidoscopic, perky and on-point Indian cookery.
We ate all the puds – their error, not our greed, as they brought a chocolate brownie by mistake. But it was a great mistake, such was its richness and softness, the wonder of milky malai (clotted cream of the subcontinent) lifting the dish further with hints of sweet jaggery and the subtlest tingle of chilli. The coconut caramel custard, meanwhile, had a decent wobble and good richness, and a gulab jamun was very sweet and swimming in rum.
