Saffron Room - Prestbury - Review

T 01625 828 220

A The White House, New Road, Prestbury, Cheshire, SK10 4DG

E info@thesaffronroom.co.uk 
W www.thesaffronroom.co.uk

The Saffron Room is located in the leafy village of Prestbury in the heart of Cheshire.  The 70 cover restaurant opened in November 2010 and offers a mixture of both fusion and classical Indian cuisine.

The CurryCouncil Visit

The CurryCouncil's View

My first impression of Saffron Room was good.  This swanky restaurant is located in a large grade 2 listed building that boasts plenty of character from the outside while the inside of the restaurant contains wooden roof beams, old fashioned fire places and a quite minimalist purple interior.

Poppodums, served 2 per man, were fresh with a good selection of dips.  We had an extremely long wait for our starters and perhaps should have said something to the waiter but we did appreciate that the restaurant was extremely busy for a Wednesday evening and there appeared to be only a couple of empty tables throughout the evening.

Lamb Chops

I settled for the lamb chops for my starter which were pretty tasty but after an almost hour long wait anything would have impressed me as I was that hungry.  The starters also came accompanied by a second tray of different dips, which was a nice touch.

I teamed up with Jord and we shared two main courses to get a good selection from the menu.  The main courses, after another long wait, were very good.  The flavoursome Chicken Tikka Haandi (£9.25) was nice and rich - perfect for eating with my naan.  I also had some of the Tandoori Chicken Jaipur, which contained a full whole chicken breast on the bone with a nicely spiced tomato based sauce.

Tandoori Chicken Jaipur

This month we were down to just five CurryCouncil members being on duty and this odd number   always somehow manages to disrupt the mix of rice and naan.  Jord oddly opted for vegetable rice (which generally feels a bit too much like Chinese for my personal taste) and a few of the lads are now sadly shunning the traditional pilau rice for boiled rice.  Surely they must be calorie counting, as swapping your pilau for boiled rice saves you just 280 calories.

I’m still flying the flag for my beloved pilau and the Saffron Room delivered a good standard of pilau rice (and we can’t forget the plain naan which was pretty decent but could have been with slightly warmer).

I thought the food at the Saffron Room was of a high standard but felt slightly disappointed with the long wait for the meal.  In hindsight, I think that waiting patiently for good food may be a better option than waiting a short time for poor food and for the Saffron Room I may have to make this exception.

I thought that the restaurant was located in a lovely picturesque village. Plenty of car parking at the rear (not that Bean would know, as he parked in Wilmslow). Very busy for a Wednesday night.

Pops were tasty and plenty of the usual dippage.

Starter was a Chef Speciality one of ‘Lamb Chaat’ (£4.95) – great portion size and lamb was really tender with fresh salad/lemon on the side.

Main – Signature dish of ‘South Indian Murghi Balti’ with pilau rice and Pashwari Naan. My typical choice these days – mixture of tandoori chicken (off the bone) and minced lamb in medium balti spices, in a masala style (£10.95). It was excellent. Absolutely huge portion which could have done 2 people. Plenty of meat and tasty thick tomato-based sauce.

Cobra was fine throughout the meal and finished off with nice little Elizabeth Shaw mint chocolate at the end.

£30 was fairly steep but food and surroundings made up for it.

The only real negative was that we had to wait so long for our food. We were there just after 7.30pm and did not leave till well gone 10pm.  Great curry talk on the night ranging from super injuctions through to Dayo's now 12 month absence from our curries.



Visiting the Saffron Room in Prestbury made a very nice change to the usual City/Town scene we are very used to it made a nice change walking down a nice countryside road in a picturesque village.

The restaurant had an expensive feel and an air of class, I felt a little bit under dressed in my jeans and t-shirt in a very busy restaurant. The  restaurant was extremely busy for a Wednesday night with the tables pushed very close together probably due to the popularity of the restaurant.

 Pops were very fresh, I had the mixed kebab for my starter which was Sheek, Tikka and Samosa a good portion size not to filling to spoil the main! Very tasty highly recommended !

Pop Dips

For the main I had Tandoori Chicken Jaipur (I think? Bean choose both meals) was very nice very spicy had a good kick to it if you like hot curries wont blow your head off but is quite strong!

The only real criticism would be the service we had a long wait for the food the price we paid I would expect first class service.

Overall a nice place to take your wife/girlfriend or both!! On the expensive side but worth a visit if you like good food in nice surroundings.

This is a very posh top end indian restaurant. No gimmicks, no offers just excellent food and very professional service.

I had the Tandoori chicken Jaipur and chicken Tikka Handi which were both delicious and of good portion size.
 
I felt this restaurant would be better to visit as mixed a sex group or couple if you wanted to impress the mrs.

The prices were very reasonable for a restaurant in an expensive area.

The Saffrom room offers a large and varied menu, with nice tasting food in pleasant surroundings.

The main courses were a particular highlight and came with good portion sizes.  The restaurant service was slow but the food slightly made up for the long wait.

Exterior view of the restaurant

Help CurryCouncil win the Curry Lover Of The Year Award

The folks over at the English Curry Awards now have opened up online nominations for the first ever English Curry Awards that take place this July.

You could previously only vote by printing off a nomination form and posting the paper form.

It will only take a minute of your time to nominate http://www.currycouncil.com/ for the Curry Lover Of The Year Award or why not vote for you favourite local Indian restaurant to win the Restaurant of the Year award?

Please follow this link http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=NKNEIN_16f65b19%20to nominate us for the award and hopefully get us shortlisted for this spicy and well deserved accolade.

You will need to be quick as the closing date is Monday 20th June 2011.

Waitrose Punjabi Thali banquet For 2 Review

I, like any self confessed curry addict, know that usually a sit down meal beats a take out curry hands down and supermarket curries sadly come third in this pecking order. Tonight I decided to put my theory to the test and sample a supermarket curry.

I splashed out the princely sum of £9.49 for Waitrose’s Punjabi Thali banquet for two which provided me with an opportunity for an impromptu 'solo' CurryCouncil review.

The box

The oven ready meal for two comes packaged in a large cardboard box that contains a large thali dish that houses all of the curries, rice, vegetable side dishes and rice.

Its plastic thali dish makes cooking the food very simple and easy without having to cook the curries and rice separately like most other supermarket curries.  I did have the option of microwaving some of the dishes and also grilling the naan bread but I just banged all of the dishes into the oven for convenience.

Minimal packaging

The meal takes around 35 minutes from start to finish and with a bit of time to kill, I reached in to the fridge for a nice cool bottle of Cobra to quench my thirst.  I found to my horror that Mrs N had sneakily removed my Cobra bottles from the fridge and put them in the garage (why?).

The bottles of lager felt almost as hot as the curry I was about to eat (with the temperature outside topping 25c today).  I quickly decided to improvise and stuck the offending bottles into the freezer for a super chill before my meal was ready.

I also noticed to my delight that the curry box provided me with 2 of my 5 a day portions of fruit and vegetables.  This small health benefit made me feel a slightly bit better about the monster 1017 calories that I was about to consume with my half of the curry box.

Samosas

The first dish out of the oven was the vegetable samosas. I thought that the samosas were perfectly adequate and fresh but a little bit too mild for me.

Thali for two

The main course came out of the oven, after cooking my naan breads (with a splash of water) for the final five minutes.

Firstly I tried the flavoursome butter chicken which was of a good standard and came with a small, yet satisfying, spicy kick.  The chicken saag masala was OK but far too mild for my personal taste but contained plenty of chicken and spinach.  Both dishes contained decent pieces of fresh chicken which you would definately expect from a premium meal deal costing almost ten pounds.

The naan bread had a beautiful buttery aroma and surprisingly was much better and lighter than the vacuum packed naan that you can buy straight off the supermarket shelf.

The side dishes of cauliflower and broccoli masala, masala dal and mushroom rice were all very good.  The dishes contained plenty of cardamom pods and bay leaves to give them a quite authentic Indian (or should I say Punjabi) taste.

All in all, I felt satisfied with my purchase and was averagely full after the meal.

The volume of chicken pieces was slightly dissapointing but it would not really be fair to compare this amount against a take out that may have cost me £6.  I think that this thali meal would be perfect for sharing and provides a wide variety of dishes.

The milder dishes may more suit those with a low threshold to spice but sadly it did not have enough kick for my own personal taste.  However, the meal had good quality chicken, fresh tasting ingredients and good mixture of spices which compensated for the mildness.

The box has minimal packaging and this may appeal to the more environmentally friendly curry eater.

The Punjabi Thali Banquet for Two would definately be worth a try for you at home if you fancy a change from your usual take-out.

Stats, Chaat and Welcome Back

Where have the CurryCouncil been? You may ask after our two and half week hiatus.

Last month in May the CurryCouncil re-visited the Delish Spice restaurant in Bramhall and also tried The Saffron Room in Prestbury.  These two new and fabulous reviews will be published very soon.

We hope that the judges of the English Curry Awards and our regular readers will go easy on us after this small but self imposed break!  Lets not forget that we are trying to get ourselves recognised as the nation’s biggest Curry Lovers and need your help to get us nominated for this new prestigious award.  You can read more about nomination process here (The closing date is 20th June 2011)

We are not usually the type to brag, but you may (or may not) be interested to know that this is the 296^th blog posting here at www.currycouncil.com and we will soon be hitting our magic 300^th post.

That’s certainly a lot of curry content, restaurant reviews, recipes, industry news and much much more.  We hope that you will tikka few minutes looking through our archives to find out more about your favourite Indian cuisine and gain an insight into the strange yet interesting world of the CurryCouncil.

In August 2011 the CurryCouncil will be reviewing our 50^th (yep you read that correctly, that’s right,  the FIFTIETH) restaurant to place in our review section (look to the right hand side of your screen for the full restaurant review list).

The golden 50 will consist of all our unique restaurant reviews since 2005 but you can also take a look at our hall of fame for a much more comprehensive list of all the restaurants that we have visited since the early 1990’s.

Sometimes we did even not review the restaurant and other times we did some re-reviews. There are many more reviews and features than the 50 restaurants listed at the side of this page.

Do you have any recommendations for the location of our fiftieth restaurant review?  If you have a restaurant tip or know of any hidden gems that we have missed on our travels - please post a comment below or contact us personally at mail@currycouncil.com

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Regular Blog Updates

The more eagle eyed readers amongst you may have noticed that that all new content is now being regularly published on both Mondays and Fridays.  This will give you the perfect start and end to your curry-eating weekend and provide you with a regular CurryCouncil fix.