Spice at Gilpin Lodge

Spice is a pan-Asian restaurant in the Gilpin Lodge Hotel, near Lake Windermere, with Tom Westerland as its head chef. There is an open kitchen, with a mix of tables and counter seats, accommodating around sixty customers at one time. The a la carte menu stretches from sushi to Indian dishes to Asian fusion dishes.

The wine list was fairy basic, with no vintages listed and only vague descriptions like “Malbec Chile” and “Pinot Grigio Italy“, so mostly lacking even the growers. It had 19 labels and ranged in price from £32 to £95, with a median price of £39 and an average markup to retail price of 3 times on the few unambiguously described wines. Sample references were Falconhead Sauvignon Blanc at £40 for a bottle that you can find in the high street for £7.20, Chateau La Tour l'Eveque Rose at £40 compared to its retail price of about £19, and Monsoon Valley Shiraz from Thailand at £60 for a wine that will set you back around £14 in the high street. It is the kind of lazy wine list that encourages you to drink beer, so I did, with Asahi being £6 for a 330ml bottle (compared to a shop price of £1.54 in Sainsburys).

Aloo tikki had a quite good potato patty that had lively spicing, with bhel, yoghurt and some pomegranate seeds for freshness. The dish was a little dry and needed more chutney and especially more tamarind but this was nice enough overall (12/20). Crab was simple but pleasant, a mix of white and brown crab meat with a lotus root crisp, shiso, calamansi, kaffir lime and shiso. This sounds rather more interesting than the reality, which tasted mostly of plain crab meat. There was not much in the way of cooking going on here, but the crab was decent and free of shell (11/20). Spicy tuna maki roll was fine, though the rice was fridge cold when, ideally, it would be at body temperature (11/20). Fried chicken maki roll with teriyaki sauce had the same temperature issue with the rice, but the sauce was quite good, and the chicken was cooked well enough (12/20). These were served with sesame and soy dips.

Goan style tiger prawns were probably the best dish of the meal, tender and reasonable quality, and above all with a nicely judged spicy coconut sauce with chilli oil and crisp curry leaves. The sauce was effective and the prawns were carefully cooked (13/20). Ox cheek was slow cooked until tender, served with rendang sauce, which has coconut milk and a paste made from fermented chillies, garlic, galangal and lemongrass, with crispy onion. I am not sure why the kitchen would not just make beef rendang, which can be lovely. This was just a rather bland ox cheek alongside a quite separate, mildly spiced, sauce. Both elements were decent in themselves but this felt like two adjacent cuisines thrown together on a plate rather than a coherent dish (11/20). Egg fried rice with togarashi, the Japanese spice blend, and soy sauce with a slow-cooked egg added for some reason, was perfectly pleasant, the rice cooked well and the gentle spice adding a little interest. Pak choi came with pickled ginger and was surprisingly good, the pak choi being tender and the slight sourness of the pickled ginger working well with it (13/20).

Spiced Jamaican ginger pudding was actually pretty good, quite rich and with the ginger quite effectively distracting from the inherent heaviness of the pudding. This came with a coconut and lime sorbet as well as candied hazelnuts and rum butterscotch (13/20). Mango kulfi “magnum” had white chocolate with mango, passion fruit and mint. The ice cream lolly mostly tasted of the rather bland white chocolate, though the diced fresh mango on the side was fine (12/20). Coffee was from Nespresso pods.

The restaurant was very busy on this Sunday night, with some tables being turned. Our servers were friendly if not especially efficient, the best server being a psychology student from Lancaster University. The bill came to £89 each with beer to drink, which objectively was quite a lot for some harmless but not especially memorable pan-Asian food.