Dish of the week: heavenly prawns

What?
Jhinga Prawn Tandoori

Where?
EastzEast, Blackfriars Street, Deansgate, City, M3 5BQ, 0161 834 3500 or Princess Street, City, M1 7DL, 0161 244 5353

How Much?
£14.95

Why?
Because these prawns are confusingly gorgeous, heavy like a Baroque altar-piece yet as light as a silken shift caught in the wind. They demonstrate how Indian food has been misrepresented in so many British curry houses. Take vindaloo for example. Yuck. Vindaloo is one twisted Frankenstein of a food, good for gluttons to impress each other with over the twelfth pint of lager: it’s the pitbull of Friday night troughing.

These prawns are the opposite of that, gently cooked and lovingly crafted, artfully presented and saturated with flavour, yet cheekily hot too, they provide a dish to bask in.

The menu description coyly states the sauce as emanating from a ‘secret’ recipe. Let them keep their mysteries, we say, sometimes it’s good not to know. Of course one obvious enhancement is the coriander which works its herb magic over the dish. The lemon pilau rice (£2.95) is a perfect sidekick for the prawns, the zest and zing helpful with the fish based main.

There are two places to enjoy this glorious food in Manchester, either on Princess Street, under a shockingly ugly Ibis Hotel, or on Blackfriars Street, over the river from Deansgate and technically in Salford.

The pokier of the two, Princess Street, provided marginally the better of the Jhinga Prawn Tandooris we enjoyed. There was 5% more quality in the cooking at the south central place. So get the prawns, but try there first.

The only problem is that neither of the EastzEasts opens till 5pm during the week. Boo. No lunch prawns for us.

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