Akhi indian restaurant — Restaurant in England

Finally, I can write a proper enthusiastic review about a restaurant in this location on Grange Main Street. Over my 20 years in the vicinity of Grange-over-Sands I believe this place changed hands several times. Now, the current hands are the ones I would like to keep the restaurant, as it were.

We were lucky, there was four of us on this occasion and quite hungry too, so we could sample quite a range of mains and sides.

And yes, the portions are quite generous, so even though we were quite hungry, we will also have lunch tomorrow with what is left. And we will not have to force ourselves to eat the delicious leftovers.

So, more to the point: what did we have?

My biryani was excellent. Much more taste than you normally get even in good restaurants. The breadth of flavour, moist chunks of tropical fruit, not at all dried out chunks of chicken, delicate spices with only as much bite as my palate likes (I don’t like painful food, but if you do, Akhi will oblige with, I am sure, a suitably hurting vindaloo).

Chicken tikka masala - a little on the mild and sweet side, but thoroughly enjoyed by my son. I would have preferred a little less sweet and a touch more bite, but hey, I am the foreigner here. The locals, at least my locals 😊 , like it as it is.

I have not tried the butter chicken or the veg korma but I was assured they were delicious too.

We had a few sides. Sag aloo, then the garlic chan aloo (yesss!), a Peshawari naan that was just right, a cucumber raitha that was nice and refreshing for my quite tired by then palate, but I missed the usual smoothness and fresh dry mintiness that I would normally associate with raitha.

And then it was the rice. You may ask what about it, rice is rice after all. Well, you will not ask that again after you have tried their lemon rice. This was for me a revelation. I have tried various pilau rice varieties, all sorts of fried rice, but not this. The delicate lemon flavour, the amount of the rind, the depth of other spices blending with it, and yet not overwhelming whatever I had with it.

We will be back, and not...

Me & the wife were in Grange Over Sands. We love a curry & this place is the only curry place in town. We turned up just after 18:00 on a Thursday & know one else was in. It’s a small restaurant probably has around 10 tables. It’s a nice restaurant, nothing overly fancy booth style seating with the normal coloured lighting in the ceiling. It was a particularly cold evening & the restaurant even with the heating on was a little cold, however I’m not sure they’d be open that long.

For starters

The wife had Onion Barge, she said they were light & crispy. Also, massive in size.

I had: The mix tandoori stater, which consisted of chicken tikka & lamb coffta. It was nice & fresh, I wasn’t tasting anything special just a mild meaty taste. The chicken tikka was my favourite out of the two, tender.

For mains:

The wife had:Vegetable Corma, the wife said she likes her Corma particularly sweet & this wasn’t all that sweet. However it was very nice creamy with a good potion of vegetables in there.

For me: I had the Chicken Viderloo, this has to be red hot in spice no messing about & the dish delivers. I never expect anything less from a vinderloo & the spice was excellent. The only draw back was the level of flavour, I personally love a sweet dry rich spice. We got the spice & dry, not so much sweet again unfortunately. Still a solid curry👍

We also ordered: poppadoms, rice, chips, & we had a chutney tray. Just glasses of water.

Nothing out of the ordinary really with any of it, we noticed the nann bread was a little flat & thin we like our big and puffed up🤷‍♀️

As we were finishing our mains the restaurant was quickly filling up. It’s right on the high street it’s a bit of a nightmare to park & its unlicensed so you bring you own booze.

Over all a nice little restaurant, I’d go back if I was visiting. Thanks AKHI!

Total bill

£42.00 which I found...

On Good Friday 19th, April we visited an Indian restaurant called Akhi in Grange Over- Sands in Cumbria. We sat at the table and waited 15 minutes to be served which to me is a red flag and I wished we’d got up and left. “I will explain”. We order Chicken Tikka masala and King prawn Tikka masala, and it tasted awful. When our food arrived, we both looked at each other and said what on earth is this? Firstly, there was 5 small pieces of dry chicken in my dish which cost £10.95 excluding rice costing £2.55. My daughter had king prawns, she counted 4 pieces in her dish which cost £16.95 + £2.95 for Pilau rice. The sauce was dreadful. I called the waiter over and asked what is this sauce made of ? it has no flavour, and it looked like it came out of a tin of tomatoes? This isn’t curry. The waiter responds by saying that it is a mild curry. My response to him was I get that, but at least a mild curry has some flavour in it and this is very bland. He just walked away. (How rude) In a nutshell I think the chef needs to go back to catering school, not even Gordan Ramsey would eat this garbage. What we eat was not value for money. Tesco/Sainsbury do a better job when it comes to Tikka Massala mild or spicy, but we always go to a good quality Indian restaurant and unfortunately, we got unlucky. NEVER AGAIN! This is 100% by far the worst meal we’ve ever had. I felt that we got ripped off with the portion in our dishes, the lack of flavour and the price. For what it’s worth I don’t recommend this particular dish at this...