The new New Tayyabs: or learning the hard way

Outside the Pride of Spitalfields, over the first outdoor pint I've had in a while, I described the New Tayyabs, the restaurant where we were about to eat. 'It's just off Whitechapel, on Fieldgate Street,' I began. 'It's really good; it's been there for years. I've been before with colleagues, but I read about it recently in Time Out's Best of London issue and decided to go again.'
'Oh I think my mum's mentioned this place!' exclaimed Amy, trying to assess how she felt about visiting a place big-upped by her mother. 'She said next time she comes down she definitely wants to go there. So, the word's reached York about this place!'
Visions of a chaotic queue began to form in my memory, and I urged the others to drink up so that we'd make our booking. These 'visions' were nothing compared with what we were about to witness.

Al and John were ahead and they walked straight past Tayyabs' bustling entrance. 'I thought that was a nightclub,' they said when we stopped them. This was quite a fair assumption to have made. I was equally struck with that distinct panic you get when you approach a club, proud that your name's on the list, only to discover that there are two queues each way round the building; you nervously approach someone on the door to say your name, only to be sent to the end of the larger of the two queues, being told: 'That's the guest list.'

We established the slightly shorter queue just out one door and made our guest list joke to the last person in it. We soon found our way into the restaurant and were met with absolute mayhem. The entrance area was crammed. There was no sense of any queue, just a body of hungry people. I lost any bravado I had had and gave in to the fray: I stood still and let my body be ebb and flow in the mass. Luckily Amy took control of the situation. Our situation, that is, rather than the whole situation - although I'm sure she could have done that if she had needed to care beyond our own immediate hunger. She approached a man in a black shirt with a smile that hinted at bemusement, who stood at a counter with a clipboard.
'We have a booking at 8,' she said.
'What name please?' he asked.
'Delaina Haslam...'
'Mmm....'
'There,' she pointed.
'Two people,' he said.
'No, it's for four,' Amy replied.
'Ok, for four.'
All that careful calling back to change the booking from two to four people for nothing, I thought. Good job it hadn't mattered.
'Ok, five minutes,' said the man.
We waited beyond the specified five minutes, during which time others approached the man, giving their names for reservations they'd made for 8 o'clock. All were given the same answer: five minutes.

We gave it another five minutes then confronted him with another enquiry as to when we'd get our table, pointing out that he had told several other people that they would also be seated in five minutes. We should perhaps have been angrier by now, but this man had obviously been allotted this role because he was somebody you couldn't get angry with. He maintained such an imposing calm amid chaos that an angry confrontation would bounce off him like bullets from a bullet-proof vest. Our second enquiry got us a tick next to our reservation. This again helped appease us, and we quietened down to wait once more, hoping that the tick was positive, and not a reminder to spit on our poppadoms.

While Mr Serene stood and made ticks and crosses on his sacred yet immaterial list, another front-man arrived and began to enquire of groups their numbers. He took whichever group fitted the spaces he had, and again, those who'd got near enough to him and shouted the loudest. We made sure we were one of these groups, and were led to a table 45 minutes after our reserved hour. It was only then that we realised I hadn't done my homework properly because they didn't sell beer. So Al and I promptly left again to head to an off-licence.

The food was good. The meat-eaters went for the lamb chops - I'd managed to glean enough prior knowledge to have an idea that this was the dish to order here (reams of lamb chops passing us as we wolfed down poppadoms confirmed this rumour). It was agreed that if we could ever face the fight for a table again, the order would go lamb chops followed by a meat and two veg curries (apparently they overdid it on the meat, while I kept my bindi to myself).

We went for two deserts between us, despite being full, just because we wanted to prolong the sensation of superiority as other less fortunate punters queued around us. One group of particularly narked-off girls provoked a moment of forced hilarity when one sat on the fire extinguisher and set it off.

We chose kulfi because we knew what it was, and rasmalai because we did not. The rasmalai (a sweet, dairy-based solid swimming in milk) had the edge in my opinion because the kulfi was on a stick and therefore not suited to sharing
.
Eventually we tore ourselves away from our precious table. It was 10.20pm and the queue was showing no sign of abating. We decided that if we came again it would be midweek. But we also imagined bringing Amy's mum here for an eight o'clock booking on a Friday, saying: 'Right, here we are, this is the restaurant you wanted to come to,' and watching her face. We'd thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and our meal, but were angry with the restaurant for deliberately overbooking in this way, and thus showing little regard for its customers, only for its hype and profits (although it cannot be denied it's very reasonable, with the bill for the four of us falling just short of £50).

Next evening I related my experience to the colleagues who'd first introduced me to the place.
'You want to go to the new New Tayyab's,' they told me. 'It was opened by the same people just round the corner. It's called Needoo Grill, and it's 98% as good as Tayyabs.'