Four separate meals in two weeks from Arusuvai
A Review
The most recently-lobotomised-sounding influencer you follow, the one who talks to you as if you’re a toddler, would call Arusuvai a “hidden gem”. The criteria for being a hidden gem now being “not in a Landsec shopping mall” or “not owned by a FTSE 100 corporation” or “isn’t one of the four places parroted in every single Leeds Needs video”.
But it’s not hiding from anybody. These people just don’t know how to look beyond the PR invites in their DMs offering them, in the case of some recent openings, £500 plus a bar tab to pretend it “is good” to their followers. Which is to say: Arusuvai is in Kirkstall.
Specifically, at the bottom of Commercial Road, near the traffic lights that will guide you to Kirkstall Morrisons or to Horsforth, depending on whether you’re in the right lane or not, in the building that used to be Gallery FortyOne.
Gallery FortyOne was a sort of broadly-but-not-strictly Mediterranean restaurant where you could get an Arancini and Arabiatta and a Greek Salad, but also Tandoori Prawns, French Paté, Stroganoff and Sweet Potato Fries.
To borrow a phrase from Gen Z TikTok, a “coworker” restaurant. As in a well meaning colleague in an office you used to temp in might have told you it “is good”. The sort of place that keeps vinyl banner printers in business when they want to let passers-by know they’ve won an award from a local newspaper. The chef probably wrote “Happy 17th Anniversary” in chocolate sauce on the side of a dessert two or three times every weekend. You know the sort of place.
It looked fine! The sort of standard issue neighbourhood restaurant you find in most suburbs, all with almost identical menus, which form the backbone of the UK hospitality industry. They know their role and perform it perfectly adequately if unremarkably. I lived three minutes walk from Gallery FortyOne for 8 years and 4 days roughly, and in that time I was moved to actually visit there 0 times precisely.
By comparison, I first spotted Arusuvai while I was waiting at the traffic lights the other Sunday afternoon (on my way to Morrisons, in the lane to Horsforth) and 14 minutes later I was at home filling my JustEat basket for the first of four meals I’d eat from or at Arusuvai in the next two weeks. To put that in perspective, at the rate I was tempted into Gallery FortyOne when it was my local, my hypothetical fourth visit would have coincided with the heat death of the universe.
Not claiming to be the arbiter of authenticity in Indian food, but there are a lot of “this place looks legit” dogwhistles on the menu. There’s a focus on Southern Indian food so whole sections are dedicated to rasams and dosas, and ingredients like mutton trotters and bottle gourd are Trojan-horsed in around the choles and samosas.
It’s also one of the only places I’ve personally found locally that makes parotta my favourite way, stretching the sticky dough out until see-through, gathering it up like a paper fan, then twisting into a spiral and rolling flat on a tawa to create multiple a multidimensional bread labyrinth as flakey as weeknight plans in your mid-thirties.
Talking of green flags, ordering snacks and pickles and almost immediately hearing the scream of the fryer as it puffs and gnarls a handful of papad and fryums (tapioca crackers, similar texture to prawn crackers) cooked to order is a reliable indicator that you’re about to have a good time.
The veg starters section is full of bits you might find in Desi sweet shops like Anand: crisp mouthfuls like Paruppu Vada - dollops of lentil and chickpea batter that a heathen, not me of course, might compare to falafel - or Medu Vada which, look- I’m fighting the urge to compare them to seaside dinky donuts ok? But they are fermented lentil batter dinky donuts in appearance and texture and the hot spongey fun they deliver.
Best of the bunch is Podi Idli, where rice powder is turned into a batter and steamed into porous little cakey discs, and then tossed in a Gunpowder chutney which gets its name from the kick of heat, plus its extremely satisfying gritty crunch from coarse ground lentils and sesame seeds.
There’s a particularly good Chettinadu curry with all the spices melding into fragrant harmony and mutton shoulder stewed until it just shrugs away from itself, so get that. There’s also a rich but zippy tamarind curry which is definitely worth getting, the fish was a little over, though that one’s probably our fault as it was sat bathing in its sauce longer than necessary while we tackled The Dosa.
To be fair, they tried to warn us about it. They begged us not to order a Special Family Dosa between two people (they didn’t actually beg). But I’d seen photos of it online, and my iron will and commitment to the bit won out, so we had a very “three pints into hair of the dog” giggly Sunday afternoon tackling a lentil pancake two millimetres thick but three feet in diameter, served rolled up to the size of a five-a-side crossbar with pots of asafoetida-rich potato masala, sambhar soup, and chutneys. A dosa with zero respect for Instagram’s 4:5 image ratio. It’s not a gimmick, it’s a genuinely good dosa - the bubbly fermentation of its batter cooking out to create a doily around the edges and a springy, chewy centre. The leftovers were just as good for lunch the next day (they did warn us)
Appropriately-sized dosas are also available: the crepe type - filled with that potato masala or that gunpowder or paneer and folded up like a hanky - as well as Utthupam, a slightly thicker pancake more the texture of a blini, served open with an omelette fried onto its surface and topped with shaved lamb.
If you want to condense the experience of four visits into one, on lunchtimes they do an Express Lunch with a dosa (sensibly sized - think a rolled-up magazine you might fail to swat a fly with) plus sambhar soup, rasam - a rich, clear broth soured with tamarind that gets you right on the flanks of your tongue - a vegetable dry-fry, a curry, and dessert. The vegetarian version is £6.99 and the mutton is £8.99, either one is absolutely psychopathic value. I’ve gone on about it on my personal Instagram already, if you care, so I won’t repeat myself.
The name means “Six Tastes” - Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, Spice, and Umami - which is a nice reminder that Indian food contains multitudes actually! and doesn’t always have to be reduced to “is it hot?” (and that is absolutely zero shade to clipart-chilli-menu curry houses btw, “going for a curry” in any guise is a singular restaurant experience and one of my few true joys in life) but it manages to stay accessible and welcoming (if we’re being strict about it then the six Ayurveda tastes switch the last two out for pungent and astringent, but spice and umami admittedly sound more appetising). Your coworker and a Saturday night curry house crowd will find plenty to like here.
Ten years ago the idea of a regional Indian restaurant opening in Kirkstall would have been unimaginable, but the good work done by your Bundobusts and Tharavadus in introducing a wider audience to the breadth and variety of Indian food means that a Tamil restaurant serving trotter curry is thankfully now a viable proposition.
Arusuvai in some ways feels like a natural successor to Tharavadu, picking up the South Indian torch and running with it now that Tharas has set its sights on the dry-ice MAFS-wannabe rooftop-dining clubstaurant audience with their new “Uyare” place in Victoria Gate (and best of luck to them. Not to sound dramatic, but if I ever found myself on a Victoria Gate restaurant’s roof terrace I would rather throw myself off it than eat there) and four visits in (five by the time this is scheduled to go out!) it’s proving itself a more than worthy torch-bearer.