Taste of Lahore Queensway

This is the Bayswater branch of a small group of four restaurants of the same name. The others are in Harrow (the first branch, in 2015), Watford and Wembley. The Bayswater branch opened in July 2024, located on the busy Queensway street, near Bayswater tube station. The menu has quite a wide selection of familiar Pakistani and north Indian dishes, with some emphasis on grilled meat and less on seafood. No alcohol is served, and none is allowed to be brought in either (no corkage option).

Popadoms were fried fresh to order and were crisp, if a touch greasy. These came with a selection of four chutneys: mango, chilli, garlic, and mint. These were fine, the chilli one being quite lively. A pair of vegetable samosas (£4.50) was large, crisp on the outside with a somewhat bland filling of mainly potatoes with a few pears, along with some spices that blended into a generic heat rather than being able to distinguish between the spices (12/20). A portion of tandoori lamb chops (£22.50) had no less than six lamb chops, though each chop was modest in size. These were very good, cooked pink and had quite good flavour (13/20).

Chicken tikka biryani (£13.50) looked nice, with colourfully presented rice, but the chicken pieces were rather dry. I hadn’t expected the traditional pastry covering around a copper pan that you see in posher restaurants, both in London and in India, but the lack of this meant that the aroma of the spices in the rice was rather lost (12/20).  

On the side, channa masala (£8.50) had chickpeas that were too mushy, though the curry sauce was decent (barely 11/20). Saag paneer (£10) had some taste of spinach but was very oily indeed, and the paneer did not have very good texture (11/20). This was also an issue with a prawn curry (£15), which used tiny, cheap shrimps and was overly oily (10/20). On the side, garlic naan (£4) was reasonable (12/20).

For dessert, gajar halwa (£6.95) was acceptable, tasting of carrot, but was too dry (11/20). Service from the quite large contingent of waitresses was friendly, though the odd thing was missed. The bill came to £62 a head, which seemed quite a lot given that we had just water and a lassi each to drink. To be fair, portions were large and we consequently rather over-ordered, so you could leave with a smaller bill than this and still have plenty of food. The problem is that, the lamb chops aside, the food was just not terribly good.