Javitri review | Simon Wilkinson says progressive Indian restaurant is a backwards step

A new modern Indian restaurant in the southern suburbs tones down the spices and over-complicates the plating.

Founder and Head Chef Prashant Penkar at his restaurant Javitri, in Goodwood, Adelaide. Picture: AAP / Keryn Stevens

Truffle ghee. While this year of dining has barely kicked off, full of bright-eyed optimism, I doubt it will serve up another juxtaposition of ingredients more likely to make me run the other way.

The two words, and the connotation they carry of cultural and culinary mangling, tells much of the story about Javitri, a newly opened Indian restaurant that promotes itself as “modern and progressive” but instead feels decades out of date.

Here you will find some familiar dishes – butter chicken, lamb korma, beef vindaloo – pulled to pieces and re-imagined with unlikely additions and the most painstaking dot-and-smear-style plate decoration.

Take gulab jamun, the ubiquitous dessert of spongy milk dumplings in a spiced syrup. Javitri’s version takes slices of the dumpling and lays them in a stodgy tart base. This is topped with a second, smaller tart, cradling an entire ball with a plastic syringe of syrup poked into the top. Filling the rest of the plate is a scoop of cinnamon ice cream and two quotation marks drawn in berry coulis.

The overblown presentation might be forgivable if the flavours stood up. Most often, however, the spicing is muted and the sauces made with heavy-handed creaminess that makes a little go a very long way.

Chops at Javitri. Picture: S. S. Guliani

This feels like an Indian restaurant for people who don’t like Indian food, a cultural cringe that belittles one of the world’s richest repositories of culinary inspiration.

Or, in its own marketing parlance, “an endeavour to replace rustic Indian flavours with (a) delicate and subtle palate”.

Founder and head chef Prashant Penkar learnt his craft in the five-star surrounds of the Oberoi in India, before moving to London and then Adelaide, where he helped create the over-the-top, Insta-friendly indulgences of dessert bar 50SIXONE.

Taking over the long-time home of Assaggio, in Hyde Park, Prashant has given the space an extra touch of hotel-style glamour, with woven gold runners over starched tablecloths and staff dressed in beige waistcoats, complete with name badges.

While not particularly personable, their service is smooth and attentive. They certainly do their best to help us share plates that, with so many bitsy components, are really designed for the individual diner.

The best moments come early. A freebie shot glass of yoghurt lassi, spiked with cumin seeds, has an appealing savoury tang. A tranche of salmon, presented under a smoke-filled dome, hovers between raw and cooked, the flesh lukewarm but still translucent and a little wobbly. It is coated in fennel and mustard seeds, and rests on a fried roesti-style cake of shredded potato, stained turmeric yellow. With blobs of yoghurt and fish roe on top, it is the simplest looking plate and the most satisfying.

From there, Mr Squiggle takes over. Five crumbed crab cakes in different shapes are lined up on a piece of slate daubed with pointless patterns of mango chutney and beetroot coulis.

Crab cakes at Javitri.

Lamb three ways – dukkah-crusted double cutlet; firm, chevapchichi-like kebab; and strange, soft mince pattie – comes with a saffron-scented semolina porridge but also dots of orange and black.

Butter chicken is interpreted as a big bowl filled with a brick-coloured sauce of terrifying richness, extra stripes of cream and the chook turned into three discs of a roulade formed from pieces of breast and the ground darker meat.

Butter chicken at Javitri.

It must have been fiddly to make but give me some big chunks of chicken thigh, the edges charred from hanging in the tandoor, any day.

Lamb shank is a geometric marvel, trimmed so it stands upright in a deep pool of korma sauce like Excalibur rising from the lake.

Lamb shanks at Javitri.

The shank has been trimmed to the point that it gives up three slender lobes of meat that pull easily off the bone but are pale and lifeless – I reckon they’ve been poached in a bag sous-vide style.

The gluggy, insipid sauce reminds me of infant formula.

Yes, Indian food has more to offer than the same roll-call of curries found in many places.

But stripping away its essential qualities isn’t modern or progressive.

And neither is truffle ghee.

 

Simon says:

Javitri

92-94 King William Rd, Goodwood

8272 8276; javitri.com.au

Chef: Prashant Penkar

Food: Modern Indian

Appetisers: $15.90-$20.90

Main: $23.90-$35.90

Dessert: $15.90-$20.90

Drinks: SA-based list with steep mark-ups

BYO: $22

Open for: Lunch Thursday-Sunday; Dinner Tuesday-Sunday

Score: 10/20