The bizarre mix of curry and wine

This review was first published in February 2001

Bizarre is a memorable word, as anyone who has ever seen Renoir's droll film Boudu sauvé des eaux will remember. It's also useful in our "fusion" world, as the incoming tide of globalisation muddies once-neat cultural divides. Here it's both pun (Chor Bazaar is a "thieves' market") and description: this Mayfair restaurant is kitted out, bizarrely, like a bazaar. No two tables are alike, and you are encouraged to make an offer for any of the heterogeneous objects which crowd your sight line. My guest and I ate dinner next to what looked like a life-expired factory siren and a large ceramic pot. Our lives continue without either.

Bizarre, in the end, is also the word which floats to the surface whenever I drink wine with Indian food. There are collisions; there are misunderstandings. There is, agreed, the occasional felicity, as there might be if Bach's Goldberg Variations were played on the sitar. More often, though, it is a case of making do rather than making discoveries.

Wine is an intimate part of the European food tradition. The scents of white wines weave and blend with those of subtle herbs like tarragon, chervil or fresh marjoram; the fruit and tannins of red wines complete and amplify the flavours of plainly roasted meat. With a glass of fresh Chablis to hand, you don't even need lemon for your oyster; with a glass of boisterous Chianti on the table, the poverty of bread and olives becomes exquisite.

THE infinitely richer spicing of Indian food, the vividly charged emulsions of Indian sauces, the clatter of seeds, the cool tang of raita, the minor detonations of assorted pickles: all of these, in effect, render the contribution wine makes to a meal within the European tradition largely superfluous. Wine has nothing much left to say to peacock flavouring of this order. It tends to get stripped down to its elements: acidity, tannin, sweetness. Its fruit pales.

I can write this with all the more conviction thanks to the earnestness with which Chor Bizarre attempts to prove the opposite. The "Chor Bizarre Beverage Directory" contains a list of 30 wines, each of which has been tasted by writer and broadcaster Charles Metcalfe. The back of the directory then lists all the dishes, together with Metcalfe's suggested "very good" and "great" wine matches. The pairing of wines and dishes is made all the easier, in theory at least, by the restaurant's offer to serve you two half-glasses of different wines for the same price as a full glass of the cheaper of the two. Were the whole list available by the glass, you could then enjoy Metcalfe's ideal matches for each dish. The problem, as we discovered when we tried to put the scheme into practice, is that you are reduced to a mere nine wines (plus two sparkling wines) if you drink by the glass. I apologise if this sounds like the preamble to a maths-exam question, but from the two starters and two main courses we chose, only one wine of the possible eight recommended combinations was a non-sparkling wine available by the glass. I won't bother you any further with the detail, but it all got frustratingly complex very quickly. Since Indian menus, even helpfully informative ones like Chor Bizarre's, are something of an intellectual challenge for those relaxing after a hard day's work, it seemed unsurprising that the majority of diners were opting for bottles of Cobra beer (brewed, by the way, in crocodile-infested Bedford). If Chor Bizarre really wants to encourage wine experiment, I would suggest that wine flights or tasters (the little magic roundabouts on which dangle four or five glasses, as served at Osteria d'Isola and elsewhere) are the way to go.

It might also be wiser to allow Metcalfe (Britain's foremost expert on wine-and-food matching) a freer hand in choosing the wines. After a glass of Omar Khayyam, India's innocuous native sparkling wine, we ended up trying five different wines with our dishes, four of which were either dull or disappointing. The 1999 Domaine des Pomès Vin de Pays des C^TMtes de Gascogne (£16 a bottle plus £2 service, or £4 per glass plus 50p service) and the 1999 Organic Merlot Vignapura from Italy's Colli Berici (£24.75 or £6.19 including service) were both in the former category; neither had any real perfume or depth, though both were well vinified. The two General Bilimoria Vin de Pays d'Oc wines, a white Terret-Sauvignon Blanc blend and a red Merlot (£16.31 or £4.11 including service), flopped: the white was dreary and fruitless and the red pale and thin. A pity, since these have wide distribution in Indian restaurants (they are sourced and distributed by Cobra's creator, the charming Karan Bilimoria). Perhaps they are designed to show the domestic lager off in its best light.

The only good wine of our five, and also by far the best with the dishes we ate (thanks to its slight touch of sweetness) was the 1999 Devil's Rock Riesling (£24.75/£6.19). This is not an expensive list, but mark-ups are well above the norm of triple retail: the Norton Malbec, for example, is £4.99 in Tesco and £22 (£24.75) here, while the Oxford Landing Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz is £5.49 in Tesco and £28 (£31.50) here.

Most bizarre of all, I thought as I left, is the fact that, to my knowledge, no Indian restaurant has yet specialised in the huge range of superb, flavourful bottle-conditioned ales which are now produced by Britain's great regional brew-ers and microbrewers (and sold in our supermarkets).

Beer still strikes me as by far the best accompaniment for these dishes. To limit those out for an evening's subcontinental excitement to endless repetitions of Cobra, Kingfisher and Heineken seems cruel. Bring on the Bluebird; make way for Waggle Dance; let Summer Lightning abound.

Wine list scores one out of five.

Chor Bizarre
Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4HW