Posh Indian restaurant Leicester

No restaurant can have been more relieved to see the back of the old year, or be more entitled to assume that the new one will be an improvement, than the recipient of this column’s award for Most Outrageously Unlucky Catering Establishment of 2016.

Now, even the planet’s finest restaurants are at risk, however fastidious their attention to hygiene, of embarrassment on the food hygiene front. Heston Blumenthal’s Bray flagship The Fat Duck suffered that oyster-induced norovirus outbreak a few years ago; last February, 67 diners at Copenhagen’s Noma were afflicted with something similar.

If it can happen to two former holders of the San Pellegrino world number-one ranking, it can happen to anyone. In November, it happened to a south Indian joint in Leicester; the cruelty about this one revolving around the identity of the victims. The 10 diners taken ill after a works outing to Kayal were health inspectors from the local council. Unsurprisingly, they shut the place pending investigations. Equally unsurprisingly, the press coverage highlighted the limitations of the old saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity.

With this in mind, smelling salts were not required when we arrived at the newly reopened Kayal to find that our failure to book a table wasn’t going to be a fatal obstacle to our getting one. “Why is it so empty?” asked a suspicious friend.

“I didn’t want to mention this before, for fear of ruining your appetite, but…” I said, introducing an explanation that caused him to blanch. “Well, I must say, this is very decent of you, ” he said. “I’ve always wanted to try botulism. But wouldn’t it have been less trouble to buy an AK-47 off the dark internet, and shoot me in the head?”

(MARTIN POPE)

The decor did nothing to assuage him. “There’s far too much to look at; it’s like a Baz Luhrmann film, ” he sniffed, taking in a confused mishmash of blond wood, hanging lanterns, cheap mirrors, faux brickwork walls, a telly showing elephant-related tourist films from the owners’ native province of Kerala, and – resting for no apparent reason against a gaudy bar – a motorcycle.

He was so impressed with the cooking, however, that for stretches as long as 49 seconds he forgot the mortal peril in which he found himself. We were also besotted with the service from a waiter in an orange T-shirt, on the back of which was printed the legend “We enjoy seeing you!” Weirdly (how would anyone in their right mind enjoy seeing me?) it seemed a simple truth. This charming young guy could not have been friendlier, and his knowledge of the ingredients and cooking methods involved in every dish was astonishing.