76 Tavistock Street, Bedford MK40 2RP tel: 01234 364038
By Stephen Bywater @authorbywater
The Cochin is a Kerala restaurant, which means an Indian restaurant unlike any other. An Indian restaurant which serves food from the south west of India, an Indian restaurant where you won’t find the tried – tired – and tested. Kerala is south of Goa and in The Cochin is the hippie beach bar with lanterns. It feels like you’ve found your hostel, wandered along the beach and then stumbled – luckily – into what’s going to become your favourite haunt. It’s the kind of place you’d find Rick Stein enthusing over the authentic cooking, the natural ingredients, the mix of local dishes. Take the chicken stew, cooked in coconut milk with chopped ginger green chillies and flavoured with cardamom and cinnamon – a speciality of Kerala’s Syrian Christians. But while the chicken stew is merely a step away from the north there are other dishes which take you far from Tavistock Street’s usual fare.
First there’s the Keralan Tea Shop snack, pappadoms of all shapes and sizes and pickles – made by the chef – which taste of fresh lemon and ripe mango. Then there are the starters – exotic dishes such as doughnuts made of lentils and banana boli. There’s also the lamb coconut fry, tender lamb cooked in turmeric with ginger, garlic and curry leaves and finished with ground pepper and curry leaves. If you’re backpacking through Bedford on a tight budget I thoroughly recommend the lamb coconut fry – at £4.25 – as the perfect dish, along with a portion of rice. It was enough to satisfy my appetite and to convince me that The Cochin is well worth a return visit. But the wonderful Deejay, manager and ambassador for India – ‘Take the train from Mumbia to Goa. Nine hours on the train. Sleeper is best.’ – just kept bringing dish after dish.
There was the dosa, a lentil and rice pancake, reminiscent of the buckwheat pancakes you get in Brittany, though these were stuffed with potato marsala. Then there was the cochin prawn curry and a chicken pepper curry. Needless to say each dish was delicious and utterly different; able to reawaken the excitement felt as a child being taken to your first Indian restaurant. What else can I recommend? The spicy potato, the lemon rice, beans coconut thorn… It will be a voyage of discovery, surrounded by an eclectic mix of pictures and waited upon with a courtesy and enthusiasm which comes from a real belief in the dishes being served. So, in summary, head south this summer and give what’s labelled the spice garden of India a go.
