Tharavadu, Leeds: ‘It’ll make you profoundly happy’ – restaurant review

Things are looking up: the dining room at Tharavadu, with map of Kerala on the ceiling. Photograph: Tom Martin/The Observer. Courtesy : The Guardian

With real friendly warmth and great cooking, this Keralan place in Leeds is putting itself on the map

The deep-varnished, wood-panelled interior of Tharavadu, a delightful Keralan restaurant in Leeds, is rich with illustrated maps of the Indian state. There’s even a long one across the ceiling of the upstairs dining room, which you can stare up at while trying to decide what to order. These maps tell you two useful things that you might not have known: first, Kerala has a long coastline; and second, it is thick with palm trees. Prepare yourself, then, for a fair amount of seafood and a lot of coconut. The question is, how much more is it helpful to know about a perhaps unfamiliar culinary tradition?

It’s worth asking because the menu at this 10-year-old restaurant offers quite the grown-up story time. Every listing comes with a narrative paragraph. “Embark on a journey through the authentic flavours of South India with our signature Rasam dish, a cherished part of Ayurvedic medicine for its healing properties,” starts the entry for a tomato, black pepper, cumin and prawn soup. “Experience the bold and flavourful taste of Kerala’s iconic street food with our signature beef dish, expertly crafted with sautéed onions, fragrant curry leaves and a blend of freshly ground spices and coconut slivers,” begins another, before going on for a further four lines.

The full Jackson Pollock: vazhakka chaat. Photograph: Tom Martin. Courtesy : The Guardian

It’s easy to roll your eyes at this stuff and clearly I’m taking that easy route. We’re already here and we’re going to order. Just as at Giovanni’s last week, I want to shout: enough with the hard sell, already. But this, I recognise, represents a cultural mismatch between a kind of chilly British reserve and a warm determination on the part of Tharavadu to show us a good time, which is what it does. In short, it’s my problem. Based on three of us ordering widely, I’m certain you could have almost anything here and it would make you profoundly happy. The cooking is that cheery marriage of layered flavours, bold aromatics and fire softened by all that coconut. Perhaps keep the menu as a source of reference for a few details, once the dishes have arrived.

Get a platter of its snacks and pickles the moment you sit down. Usually, it’s the kind of thing to be picked at absent-mindedly. This invites focus. It’s not just standard papad, but also the mellifluously named pappadavada: papad dipped in a batter spiced with ground chillies, turmeric, black sesame and the like before deep frying. There are dried slices of banana and crisp, golden ribbons of pakkavada made with rice flour, alongside cheeringly under-sweetened tomato and mango-based pickles, full of whole seeds with zip and pop. It’s a lot of crunch and dip for £6.95. The multi-textural vazhakka chaat is a mix of puffed rice, plantain and deep-fried sev gram flour noodles, all of which has been given the full Jackson Pollock courtesy of mint chutney, tamarind and yoghurt. For detail there’s chopped coriander and shiny seeds of pomegranate. According to the menu “every bite presents a perfect fusion of sweetness, spiciness, and tanginess, culminating in a harmonious burst of flavours”. I’m not going to argue. At which point I appear to have handed control of this review back to that sweetly detailed menu.

‘A stonking display’: padipura mix seafood. Photograph: Tom Martin. Courtesy : The Guardian

The padipura mix seafood is a stonking display of both fish cookery and loose portion control for £13.95. Thick lozenges of unidentified white fish have been paste-smeared and then blackened, but are still soft beneath the crisp exterior. There are hefty grilled prawns, a pot of heavily sauced green-lip mussels to be slurped off the shell and piles of crisply battered squid, the deep orange of a sunset’s end, which look like a savoury version of the classic, syrup-soaked sweet, jalebi. The plate seems all but unfinishable. Somehow, valiantly, we finish it.

A fish curry is a thick, rust-coloured broth, bobbing with similar ingredients. One of my companions says it’s “an Indian bouillabaisse”, which is profoundly irritating, because it’s a perfect point of reference. The ballast of seafood gives the dish heft, but the very essence of the tropical coast, the whiff of the Arabian Sea shore on a sultry afternoon, is in the depths of that assertive soup-turned-sauce. Alongside, we have a chargrilled chicken breast, topped with a tangle of deep-fried rice noodles and curry leaves, in a sauce made with handfuls of fresh green peppercorns. It’s the verdant shades of a hedge row, and popping with fire. As a side dish there is a deep, hugely comforting, egg curry. The boiled yolks merge with the sauce, and the firm, springy white acts as a raft for flavour. And, of course, we have a curling cylinder of toasty, crisp dosa, which houses a mound of soft, spiced masala potatoes. The next time I have a raging cold, I want this single dish delivered to me daily to make me feel better about, well, most things.

‘Thick, rust-coloured broth’: seafood curry. Photograph: Tom Martin. Courtesy : The Guardian

The service tonight is enthusiastic, verging on the excitable, perhaps because suddenly Tharavadu is having a moment. I learn, only after I’ve sat down, that, just two weeks before, they were visited by a chap called Gary who posts to his Gary Eats restaurant review YouTube channel. It has over 125,000 subscribers, and his account of his visit here has so far been viewed more than 250,000 times. It is somewhat positive. In the video title Gary says Tharavadu is “The BEST RESTAURANT I’ve Ever Visited In My Life!” (Uppercase and exclamation marks, Gary’s own.) I’ve watched the video. Gary clearly did have a very nice time. I never, ever, ever lurch into that sort of hyperbole but I appreciate his unbounded enthusiasm.

‘Toasty, crisp’: dosa. Photograph: Tom Martin. Courtesy : The Guardian

We finish with a chocolate fudge cake made with thick, bouncy layers of vattayappam, a steamed rice flour-based sponge. Alongside we have semiya payasam, one of those sweet, thickened milk puddings I just can’t resist. It’s heavy with vermicelli noodles, flavoured with saffron, cardamom and raisins and is the edible equivalent of a warm duvet on a cold night. At the end, we nurse tumblers of chai tea cream liqueur over ice which my companion says is “Indian Baileys”. I include this second description grudgingly, because again it tells you all you need to know. The staff tell us that, after a decade, they are expanding. They have taken over a top-floor space elsewhere in the city that can seat 350. More of what Tharavadu has to offer, to many more people, can only be a good thing.