Before we get started on this review of Bristol’s newest restaurant, 4500 Miles From Delhi, I want to clear up a factual inaccuracy. Bristol is not 4500 miles from Delhi. According to my calculations on Gmap Pedometer, it is precisely 4279 miles away, measuring from the site of this restaurant, the former La Tasca on Colston Avenue, to Delhi’s historic Red Fort.
I think I know where the confusion lies, and for the perfectionists and cartography aficionados among us, it is a frustrating anomaly which needs rectifying.
4500 Miles from Delhi, which opened in Bristol last week, has a sister restaurant on Park End Street in Oxford (incidentally next to a Las Iguanas, a Bristol company made good). They seem upstanding fellows, so I take their word that the original Oxford outpost of 4500 Miles From Delhi at least is 4500 miles from Delhi.
4279 miles from Delhi at 4500 Miles From Delhi, one of Bristol’s largest restaurants is back in business. With seating for 200, these guys will have to be on top form if every table is full. None of this mañana attitude, all too often seen when this was La Tasca.
This is an Indian restaurant whose nearest Bristol equivalent is Myristica on Welsh Back, a restaurant rather than a curry house. This may be so, but on my visit for lunch earlier this week, a terrible muzak cover of the Whitney Houston cover of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You was being piped through the speakers. Atrocious.
Thankfully, the food was better than the music, as was the service, professional and courteous from an attentive team of waiters. The speciality here is tawa tak-a-tak from the Punjab, a dish cooked on a flat griddle, the tawa, while all the classics – korma, massala etc (£9.95) – are also all in place.
People were literally running into the restaurant off the street during my lunch. That was probably because of the pouring rain, but they then hopefully discovered the food, with the tempting prospect of an all-you-can-eat £7.95 buffet laid out on groaning tables beyond the bar, which has Estrella Dam on tap.
Being on the expensive side, the food had to be good, and it was, with my chicken tika massala – the standard against which I judge Indians – up there with my two favourite curry houses, Kohi Noor on Blackboy Hill and Lal Jomi on Harcourt Road in Redland.
They may have got the precise distance to India’s capital city wrong by 200 miles, but 4500 Miles From Delhi doesn’t get much else wrong. Whether they will be able to fill those 200 seats though is something they need to get very right.
4500 Miles From Delhi, 8 Colston Avenue, Bristol. 0117 929 2224.
Bristol Culture 
Had a fantastic meal here last night – far superior compared to your average indian resturant. A little pricier maybe, but worth every penny!