The Ritual
Eating balti is a ritual, with its necessary ceremonies. The ceremony of eating balti in Ranelagh begins not in the Punjab Balti House itself, but a few doors down the block, in Jimmy and Aidan Redmond's excellent wine shop.
You head in here, first of all, to stock up on the necessary beers and booze with which to anoint your balti dinner, for the restaurant allows you to bring your own hooch. A quartet of Beck's? Some Chimay? What about some Portuguese, which I chose, reckoning the firm tannins of the red wines and wide fruit of their white wines just the business for teaming with nan bread and beefy balti.
With a couple of bottles of Peter Bright's fine Fiuza label - a Chardonnay and a Merlot - under my arm, the first part of the Saturday night balti ritual was complete.
The Reality
The important thing about the Punjab Balti House is that the reality has very little ritual about it. It is, appropriately, a simple place. Downstairs, the kitchen is tucked away in the right hand corner of the big room, with the cooks and the waitresses mingling and milling together, cracking together the orders and ferrying them out.
There are three banks of chairs and tables in the room, a single line along each wall and a central aisle of chairs and tables which are all pushed together. It is, in effect, a canteen, with paper tablecloths, low little candles on the table, and the lighting is dusky dim, with Asian lampshades on the walls. The music is serenely mellifluous Indian ragas, plinking and placating easily in the background. Things move quickly in the Punjab Balti House, especially on a Saturday night.
The waitresses take away your bottles to uncork them when you sit down, menus are presented, and someone is there quickly with a notepad to take your order.
First time, I reckon all this might seem to happen a bit quickly, but I think there are two reasons why they work so fast.
Firstly, the PBH is a haunt for regulars. I suspect most of their customers don't even need to see a menu, so confident and at home are they in the room.
Most of them order the balti dishes, from an extensive menu, and most likely ring the changes from the eight baltis offered.
Secondly, a meal in the PBH is not a big ritual, even on a Saturday night. This is simple, canteen food, and it is what folk eat on their way to a pub, a late movie, what-have-you. In other words, it is part of the evening, but not the whole evening itself. Having said that, if you want to linger and reminisce with your mates, as we did, then the service slows down. They are good at this: they know how to read the table. Even though the occupants of any single table can change two or three times in an evening, one is never rushed, and I suspect this single fact - their easy ability to marshal the room - explains much of the success of the PBH.
And it is a big success story. There are now 90 seats in the restaurant, and Mohammed Latif, one of the founders of the much-loved Bu-Ali take-away on Clanbrassil Street, has read the demands of his clientele perfectly. What do the good citizens of Dublin 6 want? Good food, good atmosphere, good value. Mr Latif gives them all three, and sends them out the door smiling.
The menu offers dishes under the heading of the principal ingredient - chicken, beef, lamb, prawns, vegetarian - with tandoor dishes and rice dishes also available. The focus, however, is firmly on the eight balti dishes, a style of cooking which the menu explains as "specially prepared in karahi (round bottomed iron dish) and balti (a deeper iron cooking pot) using fresh garlic, coriander, ginger, tomatoes, onion, green chillies, and flavoured with delicate herbs and spices from the plains of Punjab". Balti food is simple. It is a technique centred around the use of the karahi pan, which emerged from the practices of nomadic people in the province of Baltistan, a remote province which is now part of Pakistan, and which is surrounded by three of the world's highest mountain ranges - the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram. A few years ago a craze for balti food swept out from its UK base in Birmingham, but if Dubliners have taken rather more slowly to the idea, the PBH shows just how much they like it. From the range of nine starters, we chose chicken tikka, which is marinated in yoghurt, garlic and spices and grilled in the clay oven; vegetable samosas; and chicken pakora, which is coated in gram flour and deep fried. The chickens were both excellent, the flesh tender and moist and precisely spiced, the tikka the more vividly flavourful of the two. The samosas are, unusually, made with filo pastry, rather than a conventional dough, but they were light and enjoyable, the filling of vegetables a little tease for the appetite.
To accompany our baltis - lamb, beef and a Punjab Balti special - we ordered Peshawari nan bread and some paratha, nan bread cooked in butter. These were both particularly good, the Peshawari nan flavoured with dried fruit and flakes of coconut and just as light as air, while the more stolid paratha was still light, and instinctively judged.
The baltis come in their own little pans, which makes this enjoyable and easy food to share. The dominant flavours are designed to meld in the dishes, so no one should be put off by the roll-call of chillies, garlic, ginger and coriander. All three of our baltis were mildly flavoured, so much so that I think next time I might ask for an extra whack of chilli and more coriander, which I suspect the regulars do. But, once again, the judgement in the cooking was precise and accurate, and unlike some places where balti means little more than meat in a gloopy sauce, the cooking in the PBH offers diverse flavours.
My lamb balti was sweet and enjoyable - and matched particularly well with the Peshawari nan - while the beef was more robust. The star of the trio was the Punjab Balti Special, which mixes vegetables with pieces of lamb, chicken and beef, which sounds unpromising but was delicious. A little bowl of saffron flavoured pilau rice was spot on.
The Result
The success of the Punjab Balti House lies in its ability to apply finesse to food that is all to easily seen as being merely fuel. It may be simple cooking, but there is care and application in the execution of the dishes, and it makes for a great, fun meal. The prices, likewise, are splendid: starters are either £2.25 or £2.95, balti dishes range from £6.50 up to £8.95 for balti prawns, and breads cost between £1 and £2.95. Someone has dubbed it "the best Indian restaurant in the country", a slogan the PBH has understandably seized on. It isn't the best, of course, but it is likely the best fun.
Punjab Balti House, 15 Ranelagh Village, Dublin 6. Open Wednesday
Friday noon-2 p.m. Monday Sunday 6 p.m.-11.30 p.m. (11 p.m. Monday and Sunday). Major cards. Take-away service available.
The restaurant is currently running a special offer, with balti dishes and rice, and tea or coffee, available for £7.95 at lunchtime, and on Monday nights they offer a two-course dinner with rice for £9.95.