Chaiiwala — Restaurant in London

I visited the new Chaiiwala in Tooting. A small place with mediocre seating and plastic chairs. Interesting lighting arrangement and decor that reminds of 1930s india.

The server at the till appeared dishevelled, spoke with a barely understandable, thick south london accent and unrefined waiter/serving etiquette. The workers were dressed in their own casual clothing (tracksuit bottoms!!!). For a cafe with several outlets all over the country i would expect at the very least a basic uniform suggesting that the staff hadn’t simply walked of the street.

I asked about the difference between Roti and Paratha ( the item from their signature serving) and i was presented with vision of complete bemusement and utter befuddlement. A lady came from the kitchen to try and explain. After a while i gave up and went for the Roti and the remaining signature serving of omelette and dhal with Karak Chaii.

Service was a bit slow and took around 10mins to get the food. This arrives in polished metallic “thali” with a newspaper cutting( reminiscent of how indian street food is served in India). You get 2 rotis, a folded omelette and a small bowl of reheated dhal.

The tea was completely forgotten until we were later asked if we had received it.

The food is moderate palatable, omelette was fresh but the roti appeared to be a reheated version of the “Shana paratha” type. The dhal was again not made fresh for the day. The serving size is good but the rotis are on the small size and i would suggest 3 rotis as opposed to 2 would work better.

The tea was the highlight, tasted great. Only downside is that it was served in coffee shop type paper cups, a sharp contrast to the metal thali for the food and contrary to the illustrations of the traditional glass serving i was expecting.

In all a reasonable experience but one that could be improved by ironing out the issues...

Bad behaviours of some employees in Chaiiwala Toooting Bec

I used to love chaiiwala! at some point it was my most favourite place to go there and chill I spend lots of money on breakfast and drinks like every other day after work and on weekends, on the 10th of April we went out as couple and two of the workers of Chaiiwala one small guy had his glasses on and the other guy with green eyes dark complexion were extremely rude talking about us in a bad way making nasty comments in Hindi, they thought I don’t understand their language they were constantly talking about us and laughing and making fun of us, people like them are really bad to the business and they make you feel so uncomfortable with their negativity even though you love the Chiiwala in Tooting Bec you don’t feel happy to go there with these reasons, I didn’t confronted them because all their colleagues were supportive towards their negativity so I don’t like to embarrass myself in a place where I end up even get more humiliated by the Chaiiwala team in Tooting Bec, sad without being rude towards any of them spending lots of money in Chaiiwala end up in this kind of situation I decided I would never go their to keep my self respect please for the new customers speak to your team and sort of their individual negativity has nothing to do with their customers, happy customer happy business people go there to have a good time not to get disrespected in their own languages the way they treated us was extremely disrespectful and sad, who to speak no one ☝️ they all friends to each other and your words will be against you! Love ❤️ Chaiiwala best place best food, only feel bad about some rude and negative...

When Google asked me to review, I almost didn't because the only good thing about the food here (for our lunch group) was the cold coffee. Having starved myself for lunch at Chaiiwala, I was all set to have a great meal. We ordered the mogo, masala fries and chilly paneer to share with great hopes. The mogo was average with no spicing, the masala fries were dipped in ketchup (ostensibly the masala sauce, NOT) with a smattering of cheese ( for which I paid 50p extra) and the paneer was dry, chewy and smothered in run of mill barbeque sauce. Even between 5 people, we couldn't finish the paneer as it was so tasteless. We moved on to a more substantial meal including pav bhaji, veg roll and chicken Tikka sandwich (only because it was too late to go somewhere and maybe we were still hopeful!) The food was bland, the veg roll tasted like it had come a supermarket shelf with days old mint chutney. The bhaji in the pav bhaji was just about edible.

I am surprised by the quality of the food especially when they have competition from the umpteen restaurants in Tooting. I don't think I will be going back and neither will my friends.

We had very high hopes today that were dashed very quickly!

Sorry guys ... You made it worse by not being able to accept feedback in the...