It can be hard being away from home for a long time.
Sometimes you find yourself missing the most banal of things Bovril and
Ovaltine, for example, or good European movies. You spend long minutes
staring at the imported Weetabix on the supermarket shelves. There are many
things that I miss, and all are of similar levels of unimportance.
Most recently, I have craved Indian food. Driven by
nostalgia for fine meals enjoyed on the Subcontinent and across Europe, my
nostalgia was not quite matched by the restaurants I had found on Phuket.
But that's before the yearning drove me to real exploration.
Sometimes the hunt is as much fun as eating the meal once
it is found. Weaving through the reams of clothing and market wares down
brightly-lit Patong back alleys can pique one's hunger with the zeal of the
quest. The Golden Elephant modest by anyone's standards may not at first
impress. Once the food is served, however, the true worth of this treasure
comes to light.
The ambience of this unadorned offshoot of the Narry
Hotel invites the complete devotion of the five senses to one's meal. Ours
began with some nicely spicy chicken tikka and a sizzling plate of
tandoori chicken. The small side dish of spicy salad accompanying the
tikka turned out to be very spicy indeed, and added an additional zest
to the early stages of the meal.
These dishes were followed by a fish tawa and
vegetable curry. As flavoursome as these were, they paled beside our final
main course dish. The chef's chicken ghungroo is one of his personal
favourites. This creamy North Indian curry dish featured tikka
chicken slowly marinated with an aromatic selection of Indian herbs and
fried in a shallow pan. We finished our meal with kesar kulfi, the
rich ice-cream sweetmeat that, despite its initial resemblance to a calorie
buster, in fact acts as an excellent digestive.
The Golden Elephant artfully presents many North Indian,
Punjabi and South Indian dishes. Many of these have found favour on the
local scene, with Club Andaman and several other restaurants picking up
speciality dishes from the Elephant's kitchen. The tour company Pathfinder
has also been impressed by the restaurant's fare, introducing many tour
groups to its menu.
The resident expat population is also finding the chef's
talents to their liking. A far larger draw for expats the Golden Elephant
caters heavily for the palates of Indian restaurant connoisseurs from the
West. London lads will be easily reminded in taste, if not in dιcor of
those wonderful Indian restaurants that served as a final stop before home
on a long night out.
The restaurant, of course, provides sustenance for the
hotel's guests as well, so the menu also carries a reasonable range of Thai,
international and seafood dishes, sating those who yearn for the beachside
restaurants of Goa.
