Abu’s — Restaurant in England

I'm frustrated by this restaurant. Glowing reviews, particularly for in house customer service. My experience left me feeling that takeaway customers are left out in the cold.

The order. Monday 9.30pm ish. 25/11. Just Eat estimated a delivery time of 35 minutes. Arrived on time. Polite delivery man. I live less than half a mile away from the restaurant. It takes 2 minutes in a car. Yet the food was warm not hot. Really disappointing. I could have walked and it would've been the same temperature. Delivery 4/10.

Popadoms, onion salad and three dips included complimentary as is expected of a £30 order. No green salad - no matter.

Plain Nan. Standard size. A little chewy but still nice. Nan 7/10. Pilau Rice. Tasted like fried rice. Odd. Unhealthy. But tasty. Disappointingly container was of the smaller type and was only 80% full. Rice 6/10.

Lamb Tikka Korahai. This was a dish of really mixed quality. Large size foil container which was 100% full. Described as quite spicy. It was mild. Contained several deliciously tender pieces of lamb (among the finest I've had in a takeaway). But also contained a few very grissly pieces of lamb, an entire (near) raw onion. And one unchewable (I really tried) foreign object - appears to be the corner cut from a cardboard/foil food carton. Main 6/10.

I will not presume to provide feedback on my friends meal. However I can say that we both finished our meals. We are big lads and we were hungry. But rather than any discussion there was a notable silence afterwards.

Overall there was potential for a good meal but it missed the target in a number of places.

Having further inspected the numerous 5 star reviews for this restaurant I note that in some cases customers have submitted multiple (3, 4 or 5) 5 star reviews. Perhaps the restaurant has it's favoured customers?

I cant condemn this restaurant nor can I...

We finally managed to get the family together to visit Abus. Darlington has a good selection of Indian restaurants and we've seen lots of good things about Abus. It was nice to walk into the warm restaurant and be met by a gentleman with a big smile and warm greeting. Always a good start especially with my older parents who will always rate a restaurant with good customer service. The excellent customer service continued throughout the meal which was amazing. So fresh and tasty. We are all looking forward to our next visit....

This is not Indian food I am sorry. Loads of quantity per item but quality totally flat. No salt, no flavour, no spice. I have visited Darlington only on holiday and took a big takeaway.. chicken tikka biryani, veg biryani, paneer tikka, paneer masala (it can be sold as a desert to be honest not curry this one) , mushroom paneer And Chana Puri all were horrible and tasteless. Papodams they were generous. Never threw that much food. Please give this lovely town properly cooked Indian food kindly don't fool them with...