Indian Cafe Racer began behind a curtain at the back of the Duke of Wellington pub on Bristol Street, Birmingham — a small, homespun operation with a Royal Enfield motorcycle, chequerboard floors, and a psychedelic Indian soundtrack. Azad Kayes built something culty, then oversubscribed, then in genuine need of more space. The new 65-cover restaurant on Bristol Street is the result, and it's a genuinely good news story for a Birmingham food scene that has watched the Balti Triangle — once 30 restaurants strong along Ladypool Road and Stratford Road — dwindle to just two. The menu dips across Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Kolkata, with a scattering of Indo-Chinese small plates that feel like the personality leaking out of an otherwise grown-up dining room. Gobi manchurian (fried cauliflower in sweet-and-sour sauce) and chilli chicken sit alongside gol gappa, chicken 65, and a shaktiman salad named after an Indian comic-book superhero. The cocktail bar runs potent liveners — Angry Young Man, Red Carpet, Tiger Rides Bike — alongside endless karak chai, a heavily spiced, very sweet, milky tea brewed with cardamom and condensed milk. The menu promises a 'mast taste of India. No visa required.' The dahi puri arrives first: crisp puffed flour shells, sweet yoghurt, tamarind and mint chutney. Eat them in one, as instructed — though these are so large and so liquidy that the instruction sits somewhere between extreme pleasure and a legal waterboarding. The chicken 65, named (depending on who you ask) after its position on a Chennai hotel menu in 1965, is fried with curry leaves, green chillies, and arguably a fraction too much mustard seed. Two tandoor-finished lamb chops — marinated overnight — are genuinely succulent. The tandoori king prawns in house masala are a highlight: zinging with crushed ginger, sticky with honey. The Rajastani lamb is the standout dish — slow-cooked, finished with smoked charcoal and butter, the kind of thing you remember. Dal makani is deeply, sweetly rich in its creamy tomato sauce. The naans, unfortunately, are thin and functional — the one kitchen fumble that registers precisely because everything around it is trying harder. The new room has a sprinkling of Dishoom about it: paper menus with faux-olde font, wipeable tables, functional rather than precious hospitality. It's elegant with small dashes of eccentricity, but the honesty of facing a dual carriageway through large glass windows, and rooms that err on the dark side, means the original venue's silliness has been partially tidied away. Some of the foot-to-the-pedal mayhem of the cafe racer spirit — those lads who once raced Royal Enfields between roadside cafes in the 1960s — has gone quiet in the upgrade. The Royal Enfield itself was made in nearby Redditch; today it's made in Chennai. The restaurant closes that circle. The cooking is sometimes bang on, sometimes a little slapdash — but then gobi manchurian arrives and piques your interest all over again. It opens every day, including Monday. It handles large groups well. It has enough range to satisfy the desi food enthusiast chasing Rajastani lamb and mango machli while not alarming the table's one spice-averse guest, who can have the paneer makani. At around £30 a head à la carte before drinks and service, it earns its place in the city.
