What Sets The Best Indian Restaurant In London Apart?
London has hundreds of Indian restaurants. The honest truth is that most of them taste nearly identical. Safe menus, familiar dishes, food that does the job and disappears from memory by the following morning. If that loop sounds familiar, eating at an indian restaurant in london like Paro is going to feel like something shifted.
It sits in Covent Garden which is not where anyone would go looking first for serious Indian cooking. That turned out not to matter much. People started making specific trips from Dalston, from Tooting, from Harrow, and then telling other people about it. Word spread the slow way. The place filled up. That does not happen to restaurants that are just decent.
What Sets The Best Indian Restaurant In London Apart?
What is different about Paro is not heat or portion size or a particularly dramatic room. It is that the food tastes finished. Like someone actually saw each dish through to its proper end rather than pulling it off when it was nearly there.
Gravies take days. Chicken marinates overnight before anything else happens to it. Spice blends are mixed in-house and tied to specific regional traditions across India rather than a single catch-all mix designed to offend nobody. Most London Indian kitchens skip these steps because fast table turns do not allow for a sauce that needs two days. Paro made a different call on that and it came through clearly on the plate.
The dining room is calm. No competing décor, no music working hard to set a mood. You stop noticing the room fairly quickly because there is always something on the plate that pulls your attention back to it.
The Story Behind Paro
The head chef spent over twenty years in professional kitchens across Mumbai and London before Paro opened. That background shows not in how dishes get described on the menu but in the calls the kitchen makes that no diner ever sees. How long something braises. Whether a sauce is actually ready or just looks like it might be. That kind of judgment does not come quickly.
The menu is not a greatest hits collection of popular Indian dishes put together to keep everyone happy. It is built around specific regions. Something from Kerala sits next to something from the Punjab and neither one has been softened to meet somewhere in the middle. They taste like where they come from. You notice it once you have eaten here a couple of times and it starts to feel obvious in retrospect that most other places are not doing this.
There is also something worth saying about what Paro has not done since it opened. A lot of restaurants start with a clear point of view and then gradually sand the edges off. The menu gets safer, the techniques get quicker, the whole thing becomes easier to run. Paro has not gone that way. The kitchen still works the same way it did at the start and keeping that up through busy weekends and full covers takes more discipline than it looks like from the outside.
Someone left a review on Google after bringing their father who grew up in Delhi. He said it tasted like home. It is a short review but that one line does more work than a paragraph would.
Which Dishes Should You Order?
The Butter Chicken
Most people have eaten butter chicken enough times that they have genuinely stopped tasting it. It has become a background dish. Paro’s version wakes that up. The chicken marinates overnight in yoghurt and a house spice blend, goes into the tandoor, and only then meets the sauce which has been going since that morning. What arrives is smoky and rich in a way that feels like it was earned rather than just heavy.
Regulars order it every visit without really deliberating over it. Not out of habit but because it keeps being that good. Get the garlic naan alongside it. That is not optional.
The Lamb Rogan Josh
Kashmiri in origin. The lamb comes from British farms and braises until it has fully absorbed the sauce rather than just sitting in it. The heat comes from dried red chillies and aromatic bark, not chilli powder stirred in at the end to get the colour right. There is a difference and you will taste it immediately.
What also holds up is the texture. The lamb does not go stringy or fall apart the way slow braises sometimes do when the timing is off. It holds together just enough that each piece still has something to it. Getting that right once is fine. Getting it right on a packed Saturday night repeatedly is a different thing.
It does not announce itself as the best thing on the table. You just find yourself thinking about it on the way home.
The Vegetarian Options
The Dal Makhani is cooked overnight. Most kitchens skip this because it means a pot sitting on the stove from the evening before and the honest reason they skip it is time pressure. What you get when it is rushed is thin and forgettable. Paro’s version is dense in a way that builds slowly as you eat it rather than hitting you immediately. You keep going back for more spoonfuls after you thought you were finished.
The Paneer Shashlik comes off the grill with a proper char on it. Not slightly marked, actually charred. The Punjabi spice blend it comes with has backbone. It is not delicate food and it is not trying to be.
On a recent visit the kitchen was running a seasonal dish with heritage beetroot and paneer that was genuinely unexpected and very good. The seasonal vegetable dishes rotate based on what is available locally and they change often enough that returning visitors usually find something new. Ask about them when you book rather than assuming they will be the same as last time.
For anyone looking for a halal Indian restaurant in London that puts the same thought into vegetarian cooking as it does into the meat dishes, this is genuinely worth knowing about.
How Does Paro Compare To Other Indian Restaurants In London?
Three names come up constantly when people talk about Indian food in this city.
Dishoom in Covent Garden has had queues outside most evenings for years now. It does Bombay café food and it does it consistently. The black dal is good. The bacon naan roll at breakfast has a cult following that is probably justified. It is fun and casual and you know broadly what you are going to get. That reliability is not a small thing. It is just a completely different kind of meal from Paro and trying to compare them directly misses the point of both.
Tayyabs near Brick Lane in Whitechapel has no bookings, takes cash and the queue on the pavement on a Friday night stretches down the street. The lamb chops are why people go and they are worth standing outside for. It is loud and cheap and the portions are the kind that make you quietly reassess how hungry you actually were. If you are spending a day around Brick Lane it is worth building into the plan.
Gymkhana in Mayfair has a Michelin star and the room is genuinely one of the best spaces in London to eat Indian food. The game dishes are the ones to order. It is expensive and formal and you feel that from the moment you walk in, which some people love and some people find slightly stiff. Paro is less formal than Gymkhana and more considered than Dishoom. Not because it is trying to position itself between them but because it is just doing its own thing clearly enough that the comparison does not quite land either way.
Where Should You Eat Indian Food Near Covent Garden?
Covent Garden tube is a few minutes’ walk from Paro. Leicester Square is close too. If you are already in that part of the city, around the Strand or walking along the Thames Embankment before dinner, getting to Paro does not require any real planning.
The area around Covent Garden has enough to keep you busy before a booking. The piazza, the Royal Opera House, Neal’s Yard if you want somewhere quieter to walk around first. It is a good part of the city for an unhurried evening.
If you have spent the day around Brick Lane eating your way east and want a proper sit-down dinner on the way back, the geography works. Covent Garden sits between east London and the West End and Paro is a natural place to land. The difference between what Brick Lane offers and what Paro does with the same cuisine is interesting enough that doing both in one day actually makes sense.
Families will find it comfortable. The menu covers enough ground that a table with different tastes does not run into problems and the room is calm enough for a longer meal without feeling like anyone is hovering. Book ahead. Weekends fill properly. Groups of six or more are better off calling directly than booking online.
Why This Keeps Coming Up In Conversations About an indian restaurant in london
The menu changes with the seasons which gives regulars a reason to keep coming back without it feeling like the restaurant is restless or trying too hard to stay interesting. The dishes people specifically make the trip for are still there. Both things being true at the same time is harder to pull off than it sounds.
The consistency is another thing. Cooking at this level on a busy Friday service is a different challenge from cooking it once for a critic. The standard at Paro does not seem to shift much depending on when you go. Talk to people who eat there regularly and that is usually the first thing they mention.
Staff know the food well enough to actually talk about it. Ask about a dish and you get a real answer about the region it comes from and why it is cooked the way it is. Not a recitation. An actual answer. It changes how the meal feels.
Final Thoughts
The Best Indian restaurants in London are fine. Paro is one of the ones that isn’t just fine. It’s an indian restaurant in london that decided early on how it wanted to cook and hasn’t changed that. The slow-cooked gravies, the properly charred starters, the overnight dal, the bread course that regulars quietly plan meals around. Book ahead and make the trip. It’s worth it.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is Paro actually worth the trip if I’ve already been to Dishoom and Gymkhana?
Yes and they’re not really doing the same thing. Dishoom is a café, Gymkhana is formal fine dining. Paro sits in its own space, more focused on regional Indian cooking done properly without the price tag that Gymkhana carries. If you’ve done both and want something that feels more like a considered meal than either of those, Paro is the one to try next.
2. Is Paro a halal indian restaurant in london?
Paro takes sourcing seriously across the menu. For specific up-to-date information on halal certification it’s best to call the restaurant before you come rather than rely on anything written here, as these things can change.
3. I’m coming from east London and spending the day around Brick Lane. Is Paro a good place to end up for dinner?
It works well for exactly that kind of day. Paro is in Covent Garden which is on the way back in toward the West End from Brick Lane. Covent Garden and Leicester Square stations are both close. Worth booking the table before you start the day though because you won’t get a walk-in on a Friday or Saturday evening.
4. What should I order if it’s my first time at Paro?
The butter chicken is the one most people point to first. Get the garlic naan with it. The Dal Makhani is worth ordering if you want to see what the kitchen is actually doing because it’s the kind of dish that’s easy to rush and they don’t rush it. If there are seasonal vegetable dishes on when you visit, ask about those too.
