Curried Rice Crispies - Snap, Crackle, Parp!

Broadway Market is at saturation point. No longer a catwalk for Hackney's prancing classes, it now resembles the Eton Wall Game, where the aim is to syphon overpriced snacks from a central scrum.


As civilian shitmunchers have flooded in, the bargains have bled out. Just last week, I paid five pounds for a meagre lump of Alpine cheese at l'Eau a Bouche. In la Bouche's defence, their wild mushrooms are a good deal - chanterelles and girolles for £15 the kilo.

Are these handsome 'shrooms some kind of fungal loss-leader - like supermarket bananas - whose low price shepherds us in like sheep for a fleecing?

The rip-off swings in roundabouts however - "what goes around comes around", as Marco Polo once said. No sooner had I handed my fiver to the cheese merchant, than he went sprinting out after a fleet-footed crack-head who'd done one with a truckle of Tomme.

So where are the bargains on Broadway? I actually doubt this box of curried rice crispies counts - it'll set you back £6. Nonetheless it is a great gustatory experience - a reminder that Indian food is more than naan, rice and the chilli challenge.

Gujarati Rasoi's Samosa Chaat has three layers:

Potato and chickpea curry
Sev and puffed rice
A samosa slathered in yoghurt sauce and a tamarind/date chutney.

There is also a hefty payload of raw onion, making this box a bad call for romantic strolls. If you're on your tod however, there are far worse ways to spend six British pounds on Broadway.

As a regular, take my advice: go easy on the onion, hard on the chutney, and hit the stall when the pot of curry is nearly finished. There, in its depths, lie the curry's starchiest sediments.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a bad wrap, but it's always worked for me. Though Broadway Market may be an exception, it can be good to come in at the back end of a good thing.