After several residencies around London at spots like Albers, Naughty Piglets and Bruno, Firangi is settling in one place for the next three months. The roaming Indian bistro is taking over the kitchen at Highbury’s Top Cuvee, where chef Ruhi Parmar Amin and front-of-houser Simar Deol will offer the most “full Firangi top-to-bottom menu” yet. It will star nine dishes that reflect their travels through India, cookbook research and their own backgrounds – Deol grew up in in Delhi with a family rooted in the hospitality industry, while Amin was raised in a Punjabi Gujarati family in London.
“[Top Cuvee is] a place where showcasing different types of wine is a big focus,” Amin and Deol tell Broadsheet. “That works really well for us because we want people to think of Indian cuisine in an out-of-the-box type of way, and one of the ways in which it has always been pigeonholed is this idea of very classic wine pairings. So for people to be able to come to a place where they can try natural, biodynamic wine and funkier flavour profiles when it comes to drinks, and then combine that with the hyper-regional dishes that we’re presenting makes a really good fit.”
The space will allow the pair to continue their research and development of dishes from lesser-known Indian cuisines and cultures. “There are quite a few dishes I think Londoners wouldn’t have had before,” Amin and Deol say. “The first one I’m thinking of is our fried vermicelli courgette with inji curry. Inji curry comes from Kerala, it’s a ginger-based, sweet, salty and aromatic curry with ginger being the predominant flavour. It’s very specific to Kerala, so I haven’t really heard of this being had anywhere else outside of the state of Kerala.”
Another dish Londoners may not have tried outside of India is the corn kees, which is eaten around India, but hails from Indore, a city in the central-western state of Madhya Pradesh. “You take fresh, tender sweetcorn kernels and grate them, cooking them out with curry leaves and aromats,” the pair say. “It’s got a really nice earthy flavour to it and in the state of Indore it’s had as a creamy street food snack, often at breakfast time with flattened rice, but we’re doing it at lunch and dinner with [chicken] skewers.”
In fact, no rice at all will be served at Firangi: each dish is complete without it. Other grains will be introduced to the menu, including jowar, an ancient grain that is used to bring texture to a tartare, and sabudana, like an Indian tapioca, which is used in a dish of grilled lemon sole with tomato khichdi (lentil stew).
Another dish that may make it on the menu is daulat ki chaat. “It’s basically like an insane street food dessert from Old Delhi which is made from whipped sweetened milk and cream, but it has this crazy cloud-like, foam-like texture,” Deol and Amin say. “It’s usually got lots of different toppings, saffron, khoya (condensed milk), pistachios, silver leaf. So we’re just figuring out what our take on it would be and how we would serve it, because it is quite delicate and it’s a fiddly little item but we would love to do it at some point.”
The fact that this is Firangi’s longest residency so far gives the pair latitude to explore and refine their menu, ahead of a research trip to Indian next year and plans to open a permanent restaurant. “It gives us the opportunity to actually hone in on dishes and make them better every day, and respond to how customers are eating and enjoying our food. That makes it different to what we’ve done before.”
Firangi is at Top Cuvee until December 20. Service runs Wednesday to Friday, from 6pm¬–10pm; Saturday 1pm–10pm; and Sunday 1pm–4pm.
