For the last twenty five years I have been chasing the elusive 5%. It has got to the point were I can identify the ingredients in a restaurants base e.g. whether it includes G/G.cabbage,carrot, coriander etc. I can pinpoint the flavour of cardamon (black and green), cassia,cloves,cumin etc. I can do this with a couple of mouthfuls of a basic curry. I can even tell how long the G/G has been cooked for and at what cooking stage ginger has been added. That last five percent has eluded me until now. Don't get me wrong I do not have an a solution to the final 5% but i believe I know what it is. It dawned on me a few days ago in a local greasy spoon round the corner from work. Everything in this establishment smells of a greasy spoon. Order a bread roll it smells of greasy spoon, take a can of coke from the chiller and as you are drinking it you can smell greasy spoon, order a ham salad and there is an odour of greasy spoon as you unwrap it and eat it. Indian take-away is no different. Everything that comes out is tainted by a smell that is a melange of everything that is cooked there.
I am now pretty sure that if any of us were to prep, cook and deliver a curry in an established BIR kitchen using any of the most popular recipes on this site it would have that missing taste. I am sure that the missing element is a permeating odor that builds up in BIR kitchens and 'taints' everything in it.
Even the small plastic containers my rice come in smell awesome. This is unfortunately why we cannot ever replicate BIR cooking at home.
In my opinion we should be striving not to replicate something we can never do but to use our combined experience to produce something that surpasses our our local establishments. I have seen and tried some recipes from this site that are better than anything anything I have ever had from a TA. I propose a new forum category entitled "Better than your BIR". Not to be filled with traditional indian cooking but only recipes members have found outstandingly tasty.
Opinion please.

Back home from holidays now so can write a review on a keyboard instead of a phone. My last review was for the Saffron Desi in York which was a poor experience. I am pleased to say however that the curry garden in Cambridge was a massive improvement. It was a very traditional experience, only missing flock wallpaper to make it complete. Excellent service, clean cutlery, hot tasty food, cold jug of water. The starters of popaddoms, dips and pakora were generous and very tasty. i really liked the pakora, it was very light and quite unlike a lot of the solid stodgy stuff I get in most of my local places. The mains were a bit of a let down, they tasted very like my own efforts on an off night. That is not to say they were bad but I always expect a restaurant curry to be superior to my own, after all thats what they do, all day every day, they should be good. The other three members of my party were happier than I was with the mains and raved about how good they were. The price was very reasonable given the tasty food and excellent service.
I could not say this was the best in Cambridge since it was the only place I tried there but it was nice. I had asked a bunch of punters (literally)  down by the Cam were to get a decent curry and this place was their recommendation.
Top class : no
Satisfy curry pangs: yes

Visited this place today for the first time in over ten years.
Has its own car park which is a bonus. Initial impression is that it has not changed one bit since my last visit. This is a good thing for me. Flock wallpaper, dull lighting, pink velour seats. Its a stereotype, but I like it. Staff were all very pleasant,  the place was very busy but the staff all had a smile and someone passed by at least every minute responding to our requests. So service and atmosphere gets a thumbs up.
The food however was a mixed bag. Started with mixed pakora that was a mix of veg, cauliflower, chicken, mushroom and one piece of fish. Accompanied by two dips, one radioactive red the other mucky brown. The cauliflower was superb, the veg was too small and dry, the chicken like all chicken pakora- tasteless-, they had managed to find the worlds smallest mushrooms to batter but they were ok. I did'nt try the fish but my wife thought it was ok. The dips were tasty enough but not memorable.
My group ordered four main meals. Chicken bhunna, chicken chasni, chicken korma and lamb rezala. To me they were all disappointing. They were all clearly based on a base very close to bb1's glasgow base sauce. While I do like this base and expect its quality from takaways I do expect better from a place positioning itself as a good quality sit-in. The bhunna had so much dried fenugreek it was bitter, the chasni was sickly sweet to my taste, the rezala was better but the lamb had been cooked so long it was beginning to break up and needed some fresh green chilli to lift it, the korma I would'nt like to comment on because its a dish I never like. Overall lacking in bir taste and a bit too greasy. We also ordered rice, garlic nan and chapati. The rice and chapati were spot on but the nan was the garliciest thing I have ever tasted, the cooks had dumped about a chefs spoon of raw blended garlic on a nan and spread it about, it was revolting.
This may sound very negative but I must just be a fussy customer as everyone else in the place seemed extremely happy with their orders. I also cannot fault the cost, we went for their express lunch and the bill for four was thirty five quid including two drinks (not each). Overall, good service, average takaway quality food, very reasonable price.
Overall 3 out of 5

Hello everyone, this is my first post as a long time lurker. Like most of you I have tried out a lot of the recipes here and tweaked to my own regional taste. Coming from lanarkshire (origin of the deep fried mars bar) this is as close as I have come to my local takeaway tikka. It's very similar to many recipes up here because I have used them as a starting point. It is especially close to Abdul's whom I owe a great debt for putting me on the path to tikka greatness.

For up to 6 chicken breasts

5-8 tbspn oil (any kind, it is a medium for the spices and helps brown the meat while cooking)
1 tbspn garlic puree
2 tbspn pataks tikka
1 tbspn pataks tandoori
1 tbspn mix powder (i like Abduls 8 spice made up using Rajah garam masala and kashmiri mirch. Spices must be fresh)
1.5 tbspn lemon juice (fresh stuff, dressing or squeezed, not the stuff that has been in the fridge for the last 4 months)
1 tbspn dried methi leaf
2 tbspn fresh coriander finely chopped
1 tbspn colemans mint
1.5 tspn salt
1.5 tspn cumin seed
Orange or red food colouring if you wish, after much experimenting on friends and relatives many of them like the way food colouring seeps deeply into the chicked thinking it is carrying flavour with it. If making it for myself I don't bother.

The resulting marinade should be quite thin and should not form a thick paste. If it is too thick add a bit more oil. I would cut an average chicken breast into 4-6 pieces, if you cut them too small they dry out during cooking. I usually cut mine up smaller after cooking if adding to a curry.

Method:
I follow Blade's method for cooking e.g.
get oven as hot as it goes (230+ if possible)
skewer meat and suspend over roasting tin
cook for 15 to 20 minutes max turning once
shut kitchen door and open window so smoke alarm does not go off
best served as quickly as possible since juices will escape from meat the longer it sits

Feedback from any central Scotland curryholics welcome