Babur, 119 Brockley Rise, London SE23 1JP, Tel: 020 8291 2400 www.babur.info

To help them to celebrate their 24th ‘Birthday’ Babur have created a themed tasting menu for their customers. The concept was developed by Babur’s head chef, his idea inspired by each year representing the number of hours in a day and the four meals: breakfast; lunch; dinner and midnight snack, that you might have during the day. This novel idea brings together some fifteen different creations over the four courses, the first three of which progressively grow in their spiciness and the fourth, delivering a sweet ending to the meal. Aside from this Babur is still running its normal menu, which offers a great range of excellent, beautifully presented dishes to their customers.

We tried the special menu and were very impressed. For the breakfast course you can savour some meaty fishcakes, with a creamy buttermilk jelly, uppma, and rice lavas with a little coconut mayonnaise: these four elements, having been delicately spiced, give your palate a gentle introduction to the tasty array of morsels to come. The lunch course, brought us chicken kebabs that were nicely moist, with some slight heat and freshness from its seasoning, served with dhokla (a sort of polenta cake) with a lovely smoked mango chutney, smoked aubergine salsa and smoked cumin popcorn. The combination brought together a great range of complementing flavours in your mouth. After a palate-cleansing raspberry sorbet, the ‘dinner’ course brought us 24-hour marinated goats shoulder, which was beautifully tender, served with spinach gnocci, brown onion gravy that had a full flavour with some chilli heat and chilli garlic grissini. This was a little more challenging on the palate but a great dish, which left our mouths tingling and excited by the flavours. Finally our ‘midnight snack’ arrived, a slate board carrying its cargo of pumpkin halwa, sweet, but not overly so, a lovely masala tea kulfi, a beautifully tangy passion fruit yoghurt and a piece of sesame seed brittle that had a little edge from the caramelisation of the sugar, that was excellent.

This tasting menu is available at £29.95 per head, and if you wish you can add paired drinks to the meal, we did, and at an additional cost of £12 per head, it is well worth doing, given the wide variety of flavours that you will experience during the course of the meal. With very good, attentive service, in a stylish setting that wouldn’t be out of place in central London, this Brockley restaurant is offering a great opportunity try a well thought out, interesting tasting menu. This is a limited opportunity as the menu is available only till the end of August, and is well worth trying – we heartily recommend it.