Spicy, sophisticated dish

Darbar sits on the very brink of a side street, where the King's Road does a sort of shimmy and moves onwards into Fulham. The restaurant opened last autumn and, with its designer frontage and large, frosted glass windows, looks quite at home among the shops selling highstyle furniture and antiques.

It is fascinating to see how cleverly Indian restaurants adapt to their surroundings - Indian restaurateurs are highly focused business people and end up as gastro chameleons, always offering their locals a menu that suits, whether it's a curry house in Kilburn or an Indian restaurant in SW6.

Darbar is a slick new operation and has pricing to match. We have a strange attitude to Indian restaurants: somehow we feel cheated if they don't offer exceptional value, and our initial expectations are that they should be downright cheap. If the starters in a French restaurant were all about £7.50 and the mains were around the £10 mark, we wouldn't turn a hair, but in an Indian restaurant such prices make you think twice.

In Darbar the food lives up to the price tag. The head chef is Mohammed Rais, whose CV includes time spent in a famous restaurant in Delhi called Bukhara. Dishes are sophisticated and well balanced with a good depth of flavour. This place has a confident and modern feel to it. From the list of starters it's hard to improve on the traditional approach of ordering kebabs and bread. One of the best tests of a tandoor chef is chicken tikka, or 'murg saunfia tikka' as it is billed here. The large chunks of wellspiced chicken retain their juiciness. The raunaq-e-seekh - a minced lamb kebab - is agreeably spicy, but the salmon-dil-tikka may be the star of the show - smoky-tasting fish with a great texture. The selection of breads includes mini-nans, a paratha and a lachha paratha (the buttery, flakey one).

There's a short list of main courses, which range from a whole sea bass cooked in the tandoor, to rogan josh or anari chap - a dish of thinly cut lamb chops served in a rich and smooth gravy with pomegranate seeds to add texture --a delicious dish with very tender lamb. You should order a dum dish (where the food is cooked slowly in a sealed pot), as these are the chef's specialities. The awadhi gosht biryani is very good, as the lamb is cooked slowly so that all the flavours are retained in the rice. Veg dishes are also impressive. There's a good dish of spinach, but the other musthave is the famous lentil dish, dal Darbari makhani, where black lentils are cooked very slowly and the sauce is finished with an indecent amount of butter.

Darbar is a stylish, modern, Indian restaurant serving good food at Chelsea prices, which is entirely appropriate as that's where you'll find it.