Empire Indian Restaurant — Restaurant in Wales

Having been highly rated, Bangladeshi and an old haunt of mine in the 90’s, I thought it was time to revisit. This was previously The Balti Empire and King Balti. It was a very popular restaurant in Cardiff and I haven’t been since 1999. I ate on a Thursday evening with no prior booking.

The restaurant is modern decor, servers all dressed head to toe in black and it was immaculately clean and well presented. I was fussed over by the manager and his team as it wasn’t busy at all. I ordered two poppadoms, a garlic naan and some lemon water. The poppadoms were not fresh unfortunately and were very dry. Mint sauce and mango chutney was standard.

For the main dish, I tried the lamb shank jalfrezi but madras strength and pilau rice. The rice was a little disappointing if I’m honest. Almost tasteless and bland. I’ve had much better. The lamb shank was very tender and melted in your mouth. The curry was very spicy, to my liking and plentiful. I took my time so I could really enjoy and appreciate it. The texture, smell and taste was divine.

I couldn’t eat my garlic naan as I was too full. I drank a whole bottle of lemon water. I waited a good ten to fifteen minutes before having a mango kulfi for desert. I left a generous tip as staff were very attentive, courteous and professional. I had very high expectations but they weren’t fully met. Maybe next time I’ll be...

This is NOT an Indian restaurant for sure. This would be best classified as BENGALI street food. The Chef is Bangladeshi.

We dined in.. a party of 7. We had the worst dining experience ever. Everything was wrong with the food and drinks.

We ordered the butter chicken, chicken pasanda, chicken masala, dal, 4 different types of naan, popadoms, shrimps, chicken biryani, empire fried rice, white rice, veg samosa, soft drinks.

The shrimps were most certainly cooked from a very old frozen batch. It was “fishy” and had no taste. The portion came with two pieces.

The chicken was the worst we ever had. It smelled weird and fishy and had no taste.

The naan were no naan at all. They were like normal bread that had no taste.

All the dishes.. ALL.. were very sweet and had raisins in them.. which is very unlike Indian cuisines.

All the dishes were tasteless as the spices used are not authentic at all.

The soft drinks were all tasteless and were barely carbonated. We changed them but ended up with even worse drinks. They were basically weirdly flavoured water.

As for the table hospitality, majority of Indian restaurants would have provided complimentary nibbles like papadums and its sauces.. here they are charged. Who charges papadums?!

Overall, I...

The two times myself and my family have visited the Empire, once last September and earlier this evening (March) I had booked the day before on their own website and both times received a confirmation email of my booking. On BOTH occasions when we arrived there was no record whatsoever of our booking and then had to go through the whole 'well can you fit us in' business. Very inconvenient and very frustrating. On our visit tonight the waiter (older chap) was extremely rude and was desperately trying to hurry us to order, after a few minutes I think he may have realised how rude he was being and came over and, not apologised as such but did try to politely explain himself. So, as for customer service etc I think the Empire could really do with some improvements. The reason I gave a three star rating rather than lower is because even though in my opinion the staff are not very polite and the booking system is non functional, I have to say the food (which is what I would imagine most people would be mainly concerned about) has been excellent on both times I have had a sit down meal. I will say that I once had a takeaway from the Empire which even though was not terrible, it was no where near as nice as the meals we have had when seated in...