Colbeh - City of London,Westminster

The food is good but the service at Colbeh is awful! We once went for dinner and we were told to wait outside it was raining heavily outside so we tried to shelter as much as we could. Then finally a table became vacant and no one invited us in to the restaurant. So we went in and pointed the table out to them and enquirer as to whether we could sit there. They rudely replied that the table was for six people and that our group only had four people in it (despite the fact that there were no other diners outside waiting for a table We waited for ten more minutes and finally got a table after waiting a further 15 mims we were not handed menus but the waiter came to take our order!...read more

Fantastic. This place is awesome and deserves a lot more reviews extolling its virtues! The mixed starter selection was decent-sized and provides a great reason to stuff yourself with the amazing naan bread. The mains were huge and, for the most part, good though the chicken stew of kings was weirdly sweet (to be fair, the waiter warned us of this when we ordered). And it's very cheap particularly given it's byo...

If you hang around Edgware road you will know there is a big hype about this Iranian place called Colbeh, and there is always a very long queue outside this restaurant, located just off Edgware road. As you know there are a lot of Middle Eastern food places on Edgware Road so I was keen to go to Colbeh to see why this place attracted so much attention from the locals. Colbeh is very small (which really explains why you need to queue), family run. The best thing about this place is the home cooked naan bread, that they cook in a huge oven in front of you, it is delicious and feels quite healthy (this bread gets Colbeh an extra small m). As it is an Iranian restaurant you have to bring...read more

Persian food. I’ve always been a little bit captivated by it, since I was first introduced to it at boarding school, where there were a number of Persian pupils, refugees from the last days of the Shah. It must have been a bit of a shock for those evacuees, the journey from Teheran to Wallingford, what with the damp weather and the grim boarding school food. It was the boys in particular who used to try to recreate the food of their memories, in the school car park, on a simple primus stove. Thus it was that I first came across that wonderful crispy rice, tahdig, in a school car park in South Oxfordshire, circa 1979.

Persian, or in a more politically accurate term, Iranian, cuisine dates back to the ancient time when fierce Persian warriors brandished their swords against the sculpture-bodied Greeks, when God did not exist and Jesus was yet to be borne. Thanks to centuries of gastronomic tradition, no doubt has Persian food been so influential to many others of its neighbouring civilisations. These influences stretched, interestingly enough, as far as Thailand where many ancient courtly cookbooks documented a Biryani as Persian fried rice. Fast-forwarding to London 2011, Persian cuisine is not as much of a trend but a gastronomic obscurity misrepresented by the ready availability of kebab shops where...read more