Curry Garden

Rating: 1

We ate dinner here in July 2025.

Garden paneer curry
Butter paneer curry
Plain naan
Cheese naan

Proudly returning to tradition, we received a bowl of sugary tomato soup here instead of one of our curries. It’s been a while, but this exact same complaint just keeps coming around for more. Yes, the kiwi palate is basic. Yes, we like things to be sweet and creamy. But not like this - it’s possible for a butter whatever (paneer in this case) to strike a balance between pleasing our basic tastes while not being targeted directly at 6 year olds.

The garden paneer, on the other hand, was a meal for grown ups in that it was full of veg. Curry Garden had done that classic Indian menu thing where they describe a curry as “chef’s delicious special sauce” or some such thing, then leave it up to your imagination to fill in the blanks. We concede that when you order this, you take on a certain amount of risk. However, if the thing is full of surprise mixed vegetables, when none of the other vegetarian dishes are trying to give you 5+ a day, a little heads up would have been welcome. Perhaps they considered the word ‘garden’ to be a heads up (it is where vegetables come from after all), but there is no excuse for shoving a couple of slices of warm cucumber in our curry like chips abandoned in a bowl of dip.

The naans both suffered a lack of fluffiness, but were otherwise alright. And they had used non-mozzarella cheese in the naan which definitely earns points with Business Andy. Unfortunately they were already in negative points after opening our meal with two of the oiliest poppadoms we’ve ever had and one water glass between the two of us.