Biriyani Boy Ltd — Restaurant in Chelmsford

I've been wanting to dine at Biriyani Boy for a while now, but was let down. The food was good and seemingly cooked from scratch - this is great but not for people in a rush (even though we were there for 2 and a half hours...).

The service, however, wasn't great. 1 person in our party of 4 wanted 3 of the starters to be served as a main - instead of having a curry, Biriyani etc. That being said, they were served as starters and almost 45 minutes before everyone else's mains.

When the starters were delivered, we had to ask for cutlery. We asked for tap water which was given to us in a jug (no problem), but we then had to ask for glasses.

The worst bit of the service happened when we were paying...We were originally given a bill that was missing one of the starters (unknown to us), which we calculated our individual totals off. The waitress soon realised this and provided us with an up-to-date bill including the missing starter (totally fair!), so the person who had this starter added it to their total. We were all paying separately, but when we started giving our totals to the waitress she didn't believe we'd added the missing starter to this - so she got her calculator and started adding it all up. Our totals came to the one on the updated receipt...

Food was good, but not good enough to think about eating...

A lovely and clean Indian-style atmosphere.

It was a Sunday and the service was extremely slow - we, a table of 5 were the only customers but food took about 45 minutes to arrive, aside from a couple of takeaway orders. This may have been because one of the chefs was not on duty. Biryani - the restaurant's namesake was unavailable as were some of the other dishes. One of the dishes we had ordered, the server forgot to tell us it was unavailable. We only learned after 45 minutes when all the food had arrived.

The food was great though - served piping hot, everything was cooked well, and the flavours were spot-on. One of the best Indian takeaways I've been to in the UK, in terms of flavour. (P.s. I'm Indian). The lamb chops tasted nice but the pieces weren't, - they didn't't have a lot of meat on them unfortunately.

Recommended dishes: Pakoras, masala chips...

Asking Biriyani Boy to cater at our wedding was the best decision we ever made for our South Asian/ British fusion wedding - Sana and Josh, who were so friendly, were very flexible and attentive with our needs. They made sure to visit the venue a couple of weeks beforehand to ensure they had everything so it all went smoothly. In comparison to other caterers, their prices were extremely budget friendly and their food was amazing - compliment from all wedding guests! The lamb biriyani, chicken karahi and chickpea curry was beyond delicious, with so much left over - we were eating biriyani for well over a week. Josh was kind enough to stay a bit longer as we ended up needing to use their equipment to serve homemade chai. Don't have enough words to thank these lovely people, forever thankful for a lovely experience and we hope to visit the...