Basmati Indian Restaurant

Flavorless and bad. Don’t make me go through horror of reliving the details. We wanted a good Indian meal in midst of long European vacation and this was plain awful. We had three dishes, rice and naan, enough of a selection to know. Server was nice fellow from Bangladesh, but the food was not good. Nice valley view from table by rear window, but so what. I know Indian food. Be forewarned.

My wife and I traveled for two weeks in Ireland, and near the end, we were looking for something a little different. As we drove around Clifden, she spotted Basmati Indian Restaurant. We checked out the restaurant from outside. We want to mention that in the menu board outside, the restaurant has posted only the «take-​away» menu. That is fine because it is the same as the «sit down» menu, but the prices inside are two to three Euros more expensive inside than shown outside. What is misleading is that the take-​away menu says something like «No service charge for inside dining» or something similar, which we understood to mean that there was no upcharge for inside dining.. However, you DO pay a higher price and that gives me a bad taste in my mouth to start. The restaurant has, maybe 17, tables, two of which are in front of a large bay window looking out onto the valley of Clifden. If you can get them, those are the best tables in the house. My wife and I ordered three main courses… Lamb Vindaloo, Shrimp Vindaloo, and Aloo Gobi. They warned us these dishes were very spicy, and they were. We like spice so that was fine, but if you don’t like spice, this is an Indian restaurant where you can believe what they say about spice level. Rice was extra (rice is always extra and always ridiculously expensive in Europe… some more expensive than others (we’ve paid as much as 7E for a tiny fish container in Paris)). here it was maybe 3 or 4E. There were some strange issues. The menu says all meals are served with Chutney and pickles. Normally, that is served with poppadums. Not here. We got poppadums with small cubes of onion and vegetables as toppings. When we asked for the chutneys and pickles, we got a white yogurt mix which didn’t taste like chutney or anything else we knew. Also, we ordered two types of bread. my wife’s favorite NAN and my favorite Onion Kulcha. The nan was delivered with the meal and my Kulcha as forgotten until I asked where it was. The nan was served virtually cold… mine was served much later, but was hot when it arrived.
All in all, it was far from perfect, but it was also a nice change of pace and reasonably priced for food in Clifden. If you are looking for a little taste of Asia in southwestern Ireland, this is a reasonable stop.