No spice please, we're French

The task I set myself, ambitiously enough, was to find a good Indian meal in France. To qualify as good, the meal had to meet arbitrary tests on taste, service and cost.

If I were not a little choosy in these matters, I would declare the place where I have just eaten as the winner.

The Shahi-Qila, which promises Indian and Pakistani specialities in rue du Colisée, off the Champs Elysées, served my lunch companion a chicken tikka masala that he found excellent, while I enjoyed a lamb rogan josh. It was not cheap - 61 euros - but we could have opted for set menus at 15 or 20 euros each.

Our bill was bumped up by the extras: one portion of rice, another of vegetables, cheese nans, a small Indian beer each and tea.

Service was not brilliant; we had gone early to avoid the lunchtime rush, but still had to wait 20 minutes to pay. That was unfortunate but perhaps inevitable, and the experience otherwise confirmed my generally favourable impression.

Shahi-Qila is not a bad Indian restaurant. For France.

The qualification, I'm afraid, is important. Suggestions will continue to be made on where I should have gone, and I cannot pretend to have tried more than a fraction of the ever-increasing network of curry houses in France.

But for now, I have to say that no restaurant known to me here offers the quality and value for money we have come to expect as standard in Indian cuisine, at its most basic, in the British Isles.

As I have said before, this is not really surprising. The French palate is more attuned to the specialities left over, as it were, by a different colonial tradition. If I liked couscous, I'd be perfectly content in any French town.

"The style of Indian food we get in England wouldn't work here," said my friend, a Briton who has lived in Paris for most of his adult life. "The French would find it too spicy."

So I return to the do-it-yourself theme that had its origins on my previous blog.

My main course choice was deliberate. It was essentially the same dish that had been served at dinner by my friend's French wife a few evenings ago. Hers knocked spots off the Shahi-Qila version, just as Mme Randall's tandoori chicken is streets ahead of theirs.

So where did our dinner party hostess learn her secrets? From a book, Les Meilleurs currys indiens by Camellia Panjabi, who founded one of the great - though hardly cheap - London restaurants, the Bombay Brasserie, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

I assume the book is a translation of the English-language edition 50 Great Curries of India. My friend is happily working her way through the recipes, hampered only by her failure to find anywhere in Paris that sells one of Camellia Panjabi's recommended spices, Black Cardamom.

When I promised to return to this subject, I called it unfinished business, overspill from Another Place. My conclusions prove nothing much, and I suppose my search will go on, if less publicly.

And maybe the quest will one day end at Monflanquin, 35 miles south of Bergerac in the Lot et Garonne. That is where Meena Bedi has made her home, and where she is launching what she calls a "private curry supper club".

At a trial run, which took the form of a Pendaison de crémaillère, or house warming party, she served an elaborate menu of Punjabi cuisine to a mixed Anglo-French circle of friends.

Could Meena, British of Indian origin, be the one to show France the way? She is already "under huge pressure" from fellow expats to satisfy their own cravings. And the French? "They were intitially quite wary," she reports. "But I think I won them over in the end."