If there is one good thing that our team at work is good for its organising “dos”. Tonight’s celebrations were for Jon’s Engagement and Akhlaq’s Leaving.

For some of us the celebrations started off fairly early with some drinks at Woodin’s Shades just near Liverpool Street. A few of us managed to get there very early (as we’d been at training and training days hardly last until the traditional end of the day at 5.) And actually it was quite a strange feeling walking about and going to a pub at that time – it almost has that cutting class at school feel to it! After a few hours there we moved on to the main event at Gulshan Tandoori Restaurant. Unlike the last time we did curry near Liverpool street Gulshan was thankfully not too far a hike from the pub.

There were 18 of us going to the dinner at Gulshan and although we kind of had a room to ourselves the restaurant’s layout didn’t really lend itself easily to physically accommodating such a large group. We ended up split at two tables with 12 at one and six at the other. I thought the least they could do was split the tables 50:50.

Service at the restaurant was quite good as we all know its not easy managing a group of our size. In general our food and drinks managed to be delivered to the correct people – which is always a relief. The other plus was that there was no attempt to rush us out of the restaurant at any stage which makes a nice change. My only complaint in relation to the service was how slow they were to deliver our food once we’d ordered. We even started the speeches because we had no idea when the food would come and, as sod’s law would have it, the food came in the middle of Caroline’s speech for Jon.

Food-wise it was a relief to see that many of the curries are quite familiar yet it also had some variety for the more adventurous. Staff were pretty good at answering queries about the types of curries. Quality of food-wise the curries were pretty good – quite tasty and decent-sized portions. Hard to judge whether the curry was value for money because there was quite a lot of alcohol flowing at the table and even after paying for some of the bill with part of the drinks whip it was about £15 (for shared naans, a rice and one curry each) which seems still quite high.

Dinner was followed by a visit to yet another pub where some of the more hardy of us stayed until we got chucked out. I think a good night was has by all.