Colonel Saab — the opulent Indian restaurant with branches at Trafalgar Square and Holborn Hall — is running a kebab festival through late September, and it is not the sort involving pita wraps and garlic sauce. Think 12 regional Indian kebabs, many of them dishes you will struggle to find elsewhere in London.
The setting is half the appeal. The restaurant is named after Colonel Manbeer Choudhary, an Indian Army officer, and his wife Binny, parents of owner Roop Partap Choudhary, and their family collections fill the walls alongside serious chandeliers. It feels more like dining in a private mansion than a restaurant.
Head chef Rajeev Runa has pulled together a menu that skips the usual suspects. There is Awadhi Galouti lamb, Shikandari Raan goat and a Peshawar Chapli kebab, plus a Malai Lobster cooked in creamy coconut milk for those pushing the boat out, and a mushroom Galouti for vegetarians. Kebabs in this tradition — not skewered ones — have been part of Indian cooking since the 1200s, and the festival is essentially a tour of how the dish evolved across regions.
Two choices stood out in a recent visit. The Mughlai Shabnami Chicken, a rare sighting on London menus, pairs tender seasoned chicken stuffed with boiled egg, served with mint sauce, corn and lemon. The Banno Kebab, from the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent, gets an egg wash before roasting after a yoghurt marinade — light on spice, big on texture.
Do not skip the sides. The dal makhani takes a day and a half to prepare, boiled one day, then buttered and slow-cooked the next, and it is as comforting as that sounds. The char koni naan, a Hyderabad speciality baked with refined flour and Kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves), looks more like a savoury cake than a naan and is worth ordering out of curiosity alone. Biryani rice is, naturally, the default companion.
Dessert is a two-horse race: a bread and butter pudding served in reduced milk and topped with silver leaf, heavy on saffron, pistachio and cardamom, or a gentler almond rice pudding for anyone who finds that combination too assertive. A full cocktail list exists; a tropical fruit mocktail called the Punchu does the job if you are driving.
For travellers passing through London, this is a good excuse to pair a Trafalgar Square visit with a proper sit-down Indian meal that goes well beyond the standard curry house format — or to book the Holborn branch if you are staying around the West End's quieter edge. The festival wraps up in late September, so the window is short.
