Every restaurant will tell you their food travels beautifully. Most of them are being generous with the truth.
The honest position is that some Indian dishes are genuinely better twenty minutes after they leave the kitchen, some hold up perfectly well, and a few should really only be eaten standing next to the person who made them.
We run Indian takeaway in Hampstead and Muswell Hill, so we have a fairly good view of which is which. Here is what we would actually tell you if you rang up and asked.
What Improves On The Journey
Slow-cooked curries are the obvious winners, and it is not just that they survive, they genuinely get better.
Anything built on a long-simmered base continues to settle as it sits. The spices keep marrying, the sauce thickens slightly, and the whole thing becomes rounder. A black lentil dal that has been cooking overnight and then sits in a container for twenty minutes on the way to Finchley Road is arguably at its best when it arrives.
Rich, dairy-based curries behave the same way. Korma, makhani, anything with cream or ground nuts in the base, the fat carries flavour and holds heat well, so they arrive hot and taste more developed than they did leaving the pass.
Biryani travels exceptionally well for a different reason. It is sealed, layered and designed to be steamed in its own vessel. Twenty minutes in a container is not far off what it was doing in the kitchen anyway.
What Holds Up Perfectly Well
Tandoor dishes are more robust than people expect. The dry heat of the clay oven leaves meat charred at the edges and tender inside, and that texture does not collapse in transit the way anything fried in batter would.
Lamb chops, chicken tikka, salmon tikka, tandoori prawns, all fine. They lose a little of the immediate smokiness you get sitting three feet from the tandoor, but the essential thing survives.
Grilled vegetables are the same. Our tandoor-roasted broccoli arrives with the char intact. It is a slightly different dish to the one served at the table, but it is still very much the dish.
Samosas and anything deep-fried and dry travel better than most people assume, because there is no sauce to soften the pastry. They stay crisp for a surprisingly long time.
What We Would Gently Steer You Away From
Chaat. All of it. The entire premise of chaat is the contrast between something crisp and something wet, assembled seconds before you eat it. Put it in a container and the crisp element surrenders almost immediately. By the time it reaches you it is a perfectly nice bowl of soft things, which is not what it was meant to be.
Anything crisp that arrives already sitting in sauce has the same problem. If a dish depends on a textural contrast, that contrast is the first casualty of a car journey.
Breads are more nuanced. Naan is fine if eaten promptly and genuinely disappointing if left twenty minutes on a kitchen counter while everything else is unpacked. Order it, but eat it first rather than last.
Dosa does not travel. Nobody has solved this and we are not going to pretend we have.
Ordering Better
A few things that make a genuine difference when you order Indian food in Hampstead or anywhere else.
Order breads for fewer people than you think
Two naans between four is usually right for a takeaway. Bread that sits is bread that goes cold, and you will almost certainly have rice as well.
Mix wet and dry
An order of four curries arrives as four bowls of sauce. Balance it with something from the tandoor and something fresh, and the meal has some shape to it.
Collection beats delivery for texture
Not by a lot, but by enough. Ten minutes in your own car with the bag on the passenger seat is kinder to food than a driver with three other drops.
Unpack immediately
Steam trapped in a sealed container is what turns a good takeaway into a soggy one. Lids off the moment it lands, even if you are not eating for five minutes.
Say if you are eating later
If food is going to sit for half an hour, tell us. There are things we can do at our end, packing differently, holding a bread back, that make a real difference.
Reheating, If You Have To
Curries reheat well. Gently, in a pan, with a splash of water if the sauce has thickened too far. The microwave works but heats unevenly and can split a cream-based sauce.
Tandoor dishes want dry heat, a hot oven for a few minutes rather than a microwave, which steams them and undoes the point of cooking them dry in the first place.
Rice is best microwaved with a damp piece of kitchen paper over it. Naan wants an oven or a dry pan, briefly.
Ordering From Us
We do Indian takeaway in Hampstead from 675 Finchley Road, and in Muswell Hill from Fortis Green. Both restaurants offer collection and delivery, and both serve the same menu as the dining room, modern Indian tapas, small sharing plates rather than one large main each.
Everything is prepared with certified halal ingredients, with vegetarian and vegan dishes throughout rather than confined to a corner of the menu.
Collection is available through our website. Delivery is on Deliveroo, and it is worth checking you have the right branch, we have two, and they are four miles apart.
Open seven days a week from 5pm.
Order Indian Food In Hampstead
Modern Indian tapas from 675 Finchley Road, Hampstead and Fortis Green, Muswell Hill. Halal certified. Open 7 days from 5pm.
Hampstead NW2 · Muswell Hill N2