The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally.
This chicken half tandoori ($12) was good, and well priced.
This shahi rice platter ($23) was huge. No one warned us about the sheer amount of food we were ordering. We didn’t even spend that much. It was unreal. The chicken 65 and tata hua gosht was good. The rice was rice, and the dal tadka, something I’ve never ordered by itself, was also nice to add into the mix for a slurry like texture and moistness. This rice platter probably could have fed the two of us just on its own. Great value.
I’ve spent years trying to replicate the first amritsari fried fish dish I ever had, and sadly this ajwain fish ($18) was not it. The crumbs were too crummy for me.
$5 for a mango lassi. Not bad, but not the best.
Overall thoughts: Great value, huge portions. Can recommend, but wouldn’t travel for. Order less, my friend.
We needed to find somewhere local to eat one night when I was on call for strokes. The idea was to have a quick in and out meal, at a place where I could still be back at work within the requisite period to do a quick NIHSS. The quick in and out bit didn’t go quite to plan, but the food was great.
The pappadums were free because they forgot to make our order for 45 minutes. My partner generally likes pappadums, I have no strong interest in them, but I’m happy we didn’t have to pay $1 each for them.
This half tandoori chicken ($18) was great. Such good flavours, whilst remaining not too salty, and so juicy on the inside as well. Served on a sizzling hot plate.
We had some keema naan ($8), garlic naan ($5), and cheese garlic naan ($7). No complaints about the quality here, though I guess it is a bit expensive at $5-8 per bread.
I was a bit embarassed about ordering the Dehli style butter chicken ($25), but this was actually a bit spicy, as well as yummy. It was, as the kids would say, ‘bomb’.
This kulfi, Indian style ice cream with pistachio, was also comped as an apology for the lateness of the meal. It tasted good, and at $7 is a nice novel thing to try. Though we were a bit miffed at waiting quite a while for our food, the subsequent service and free stuff more than made up for it. They were very apologetic.
Can recommend.
Not Just Curries 66 Wigram St, Harris Park NSW 2150 (02) 9893 8202
I don’t remember much about this Western Sydney Hyderabadi restaurant, even though it hasn’t been so long since I ate at it. I will instead attempt to entertain you with a few pictures, some scattered thoughts, and a fun fact that I learned from my Western Sydney North Indian friend (ES).
I enjoyed the chicken 65 ($15 – actually listed as $14.99, but they don’t carry 1 cent coins), though it was a bit wetter and saltier than others that I’ve had. I was surprised to find that my friend had never had this before. Maybe I’ve just had it a lot because there have been a lot of Indo-Chinese restaurants in the places I’ve lived.
My interesting fact of the day, relating to this mutton biryani ($16 – $15.99, who are they trying to fool?), is that mutton biryani can refer to biryani with meat from either goat or sheep, and it’s not possible to know which one it is unless you ask. Where in Australian English we always mean old sheep, mutton almost always refers to goat in the Subcontinent, and therefore in a Indian restaurant in Sydney it could literally be a flip of the coin. This mutton, whatever animal it may have been, was not too gamey (which is my usual concern with old sheep).
My not so interesting fact about this arachi chicken (let’s just call it $16) is that I’m not the only one who couldn’t recognise this based on the photo. See below a screenshot from a Google Review by ali rizvi838.
I don’t know what this is. I’m waiting on my friend to text me back at time of writing. (EDIT: it is ladoo) It was soft, sweet, and drowned in syrup. It was pretty good.
General comments It’s weird that I don’t remember much about this place, but the general vibe was that it was good and affordable. Much more memorable was the weird fact that I learned about mutton.
How can I call this a review? I have no recollection of eating here, but the photos are present on my computer to prove that I did. I don’t even know what we ate. Evidently some kind of garlic naan (a staple), some kind of curry, and some kind of chicken on a sizzling plate.
It looks like this meal was eaten with my partner after a particularly long day at work, the same day during which I got into a fight about putting enteral magnesium down a nasogastric tube, and also the same day when we got bubble tea towards the end of the day with the other registrars and interns and sent a group selfie to my then consultant, who was appalled at us all still being there at that time.
Looking back at this selfie, I think adapalene has made my skin demonstrably worse over the last 9 months.
PEGFEEDS, a food blog, but the food and the blog components are separate.
Don’t worry, I think there’s some regular content scheduled to be posted tomorrow.
Kohli’s is at least one of my nursing colleagues’ favourite Indian restaurant in Nowra. It is so highly regarded in the local area, that some online reviewers have taken to comparing it to the quality of South Asian food available in the golden 7.5km stretch between Pendle Hill and Harris Park. Keen to fact-check these claims against my hood, I took an unscheduled trip to Kohli’s on one of my last days in town, waiting no less than five minutes at the front of the restaurant in confusion before my existence was acknowledged.
This fish amritsari ($14.50) was not bad. The fish was appropriately soft, tender, and moist, though the batter was grainer than I’m used to. I’m certainly no expert in Indian cuisine though, so perhaps this is just a known normal variant. Not bad.
The cheese-garlic naan ($6.20) was also not bad. What I got matched what was written on the tin, though did not quite reach the dizzying heights of say Mazaidar Foods in Sydney’s subcontinental heartland, with it lacking a certain moistness of freshly tandoored bread.
The butter chicken ($22.90) the dish that Sid and Emma told me I had to try. Imagine their surprise when this review comes out after hanging in the queue for like 2 years in 2024. It was not bad, but again I think it’s probably unfair for me to compare Indian food from regional NSW to a restaurant like Nawaz Flavour of India in Glebe which had one that was exceptional.
OVERALL COMMENTS I’m sorry that you came to this site for a review of an Indian restaurant in Nowra only to find recommendations for alternate restaurants a 150km detour away. The food at Kohli’s was certainly very normal, I think I am just an extremely picky eater given I grew up in Western Sydney. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Kohli’s if you’re in town and absolutely fanging for a butter chicken, but I also don’t think that it reaches the point where it’s clearly on the top tier of restaurants in and around town. (DTC felt similarly, though we did not eat together)
It might also be worth hiring an extra guy to wait tables around peak periods.
