Shaheens Indian — Restaurant in England

I have to say we were so disappointed with our visit to Shaheens, we arrived at 20.25 for our meal which was booked for 20.30 we were greeted and told to sit where we liked as the restaurant only had 1 other couple in strange for a Saturday evening we thought?, the young waitress got us some drinks and gave us a menu to browse, within 5 minutes we were asked twice if we were ready to order , eventually we placed our order we both ordered a starter each and a main meal each, my wife's starter arrived almost instantly followed by our main meals 5 minutes later and which were only warm not piping hot as you would expect!, to which point I was told my starter was not yet ready (it arrived midway through my main meal) after getting 2 thirds through our meal we decided that there was no way the food had been prepared or cooked fresh for us as you would expect in a supposedly top rated restaurant, not once were we asked if 1, were we ok? 2, is everything ok? 3, was there anything else you would like? It seemed to us that they wanted us in & out as quickly as possible as the restaurant was empty! So all in all we were in the restaurant a total of 40 minutes from entering, ordering and eating and then leaving, I know they cook these meals for a living but no way can I cook a curry in less than an hour?, but Shaheens can water you, feed you and out you ( 2 people) in under 45 minutes, a very bad service if you ask me, after reading the reviews which influenced us into booking this restaurant I can honestly say I expected a lot more for my £56.80, we were very disappointed to...

Bland food and not very authentic - something I can attest as an Indian ethnic person and a fairly decent cook. The naans had huge swathes of frozen butter just simply scraped on top and the coriander naan had raisins in it for some reason. The gravy/curries were surprisingly small portions, under spiced and barely had any salt. The mango lassi was the saving grace. Quite underwhelming on the whole.

Update: 18 Sep 2024: The management at the restaurant have responded to my review. See below. They claim that I ordered the peshwari naan which is impossible considering that I know that naan does contain raisins and I prefer my naan not sweet. Therefore, they even got my order wrong. Besides, when we were ordering, I asked the staff member if one curry would be enough for the amount of bread we were ordering and was told that it would suffice. We ended up having to order another one later. Thanks to the management for deciding to promote healthy eating by not flavouring their food with salt. However, slathering the naan with frozen butter and the curries floating in oil probably defeats the purpose of...

We are not from the area and booked into Shaheen’s for a meal whilst staying in Durham when we arrived at Shaheen’s the restaurant was totally empty apart from one other couple which was not a good sign at 7.30pm on a Friday night we ordered starters and a main and quite honestly couldn’t eat the food it was swimming in grease the portions were tiny my husband ordered a chicken madras and requested it to be spicy which it definitely was not although a madras usually is my chicken tikka was a weird brown colour not your usual red colour the chicken was like rubber and the whole meal was very disappointing and inedible and when the guy came over and took our full plates away after asking us why we had not eaten it he still brought us the full bill at £60 which we paid and left hungry. The whole restaurant also needed a good clean I’d avoid at all costs a empty restaurant usually is an indication of a bad one and I wish we had left...