Lazeez @ Soho

Lazeez @ Soho is a hard restaurant to classify. Of course, it's an Indian restaurant, but it's not like the Curry House at the end of your road with its greasy chicken tikka and doughy naan. Café Lazeez is all about Indian food that balances flavour with health, so instead of oily sauces, you get something much lighter and much smoother. Now, at Londontown.com towers we're curry aficionados and the lovely Sadie has a particular craving for anything spicy, so when we hit the café we had high hopes and, readers, we were not disappointed. Our opening Chaat platter, which included some particularly delicicous wheat-shelled chick-pea construction, was excellent - a good example of the variety of Indian vegetarian cooking. For our main courses I enjoyed the chicken biryani with its wafts of meaty, scented rice, while my guest, always a sucker for spicy vegetables, had the aubergine steaks, which she described as "very satisfying".

It's true to say that Café Lazeez doesn't offer some of the more exotic Indian dishes that we are getting more used to, but its menu is still a good balance between the traditional and the new with the 'evolved' section looking both forwards and backwards in terms of Indian culinary history.

Ultimately, it's hard to better a restaurant like Café Lazeez. The food is great and it's good value for money. Definitely a place to visit if you want a good mix of the traditional and the modern.