Brigadiers

Brigadiers occupies a large basement space in Bloomberg Arcade in the City, and the theme is an Indian army officers’ mess, complete with regimental memorabilia, dark wood panelling and screens showing sport in one of the rooms. It is one of the JKS Restaurants group, the team behind Gymkhana and Trishna, and shares their confidence with technique.

The kitchen’s focus is barbecue in the broadest sense, tandoors, charcoal grills, rotisseries and wood ovens all in use, applied to Indian dishes rather than the usual barbecue repertoire. A short rib curry, slow-cooked until it falls apart, is one of the more talked-about dishes, and the biryani baked inside a pie crust is a genuine bit of theatre that also tastes good once you break through the pastry. A weekday set lunch, two courses for around £25, offers a cheaper way into the kitchen’s range.

The room is large, spread across several connected spaces, and gets genuinely loud once the City crowd arrives after work, this is not a restaurant built for a quiet dinner. Service is efficient rather than especially warm, geared towards turning tables through a busy service.

Some reviewers have flagged inconsistent spicing between visits and questioned whether the pricing matches the portion sizes, a fair criticism given how much of London’s Indian dining scene now competes on value as well as ambition. It is a place better suited to a group occasion or a client dinner than an intimate meal for two.

For inventive, well-executed Indian barbecue in a City setting built for volume and noise, it holds up, provided you go in with the right expectations for atmosphere.

As part of the JKS stable, Brigadiers benefits from a kitchen team with genuine pedigree, and it shows in the more ambitious dishes even when the surroundings feel closer to a sports bar than a restaurant proper. The Bloomberg Arcade location means it draws heavily on the surrounding office crowd at lunch and after work, so evenings and weekends offer a calmer, more considered version of the same experience. A booking is strongly recommended given how quickly the main dining rooms fill once the working day ends nearby.