The first thing you notice at Qumins is the size of the menu. What, no list of twenty-odd "classics", all available with any meat, fish or vegetable of your choice, all served mild, medium, or hot to your taste? How will the average Brit cope?
We stuck to script to start with: poppadoms and chutneys whilst we decided what to order. The chutneys barely went with it though, being exceptionally good. The mango chutney was properly fruity; the tomato chutney had a bitter bite from onion seeds; the onions in the fresh chutney had been salted, or sugared, or maybe both, to make them less angry and more floppy, all the better to drape over a crisp shard of fried dough. It all went very well with a cocktail (hang on: cocktails at an Indian? Something wrong here), chosen from a list which actually complements the food: a couple of fruity fizzy options and a couple of herby mojito-style drinks. The wine list, too, offered some sensible choices, including the oily Gewurztraminer that I chose. There's beer, too, if you want to be a bit more trad.
We skipped the interesting starter list (possibly a mistake: I'm still regretting not having tried the spiced sardine pasty), so once we'd munched our poppadoms I dove straight into the Marathi Lamb Steak Korma. It wasn't a lamb steak, actually, it was a shank, but I'm certainly not complaining. There was an absolutely massive amount of meat on my plate, spoonably tender, swimming in a highly fragrant, and not over-sweet, sauce. The menu says that this is the way Korma is cooked in Bangladesh, and if that's true, I'd like a word with whoever invented the vastly inferior British version and decided to give it the same name. The flavour of cinnamon and cloves had penetrated the meat right down to the bone, and the flavour of the meat ran right through the sauce: this was the product of lots of marinading and slow cooking, not a pre-cooked meat; pre-cooked sauce; combine jobby.
My partner went for the slightly more regular-sounding Chicken Rhogan (I'm unclear why it's lost the "high heat", the "josh", from its name, but has kept the "oil", the "rhogan"), from the "Traditional" section of the menu. Admittedly there IS a "Traditional" section of the menu, but it really is much smaller than in most restaurants. It was admittedly milder than you would get in most high street Indian restaurants, but still very highly flavoured. The chicken was breast meat, which I'm normally wary of in curries; there's a tendency to overcook it to the point of dryness. This, though, came in large chunks, so was still moist inside.
A side of Saag Dal was a little salty, and contained much more dal than saag. It didn't feel quite as nourishing as versions I've had elsewhere, and was a little too liquid for my taste: dunking a naan into it just resulted in a moist naan, rather than a naan with actual lentils or spinach on it. That naan was a peshwari, our standard order, and was an excellent example of its genre, not too sweetened. They clearly have some proper equipment in the kitchen, too: it was deliciously charred in some spots but fluffy elsewhere.
We considered ordering dessert, but this was where Qumin's let us down most seriously, presenting us with a menu of unexciting, pre-prepped, frozen sundaes. India has a great tradition of sweet making: where is the Indian restaurant in Oxford that will show us Brits some of that?
Qumins claims to cook homestyle Indian food, and in doing so they've placed themselves considerably ahead of most Indians in Oxford. It wasn't a perfect meal, but it was pretty close and I'll certainly be back, not least for the intriguing vegetarian options (chickpea flour and yoghurt curry, anyone?). It's stylish and welcoming but, most importantly, the food is just damn good.
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