Grace Dent reviews Indian Café Racer's bigger Birmingham site
The cult curry spot has moved from a pub back room to a 65-cover site on Bristol Street. The Guardian's critic found the cooking uneven, from a sharp gobi manchurian to flat naans.
Indian Café Racer, the Birmingham restaurant that built a following from the back room of a pub, has reopened on a larger site, and Grace Dent's Guardian review of the move, published this month, finds the kitchen still finding its feet. The restaurant takes its name from the 1960s bikers who raced between cafés on Royal Enfield motorbikes, a reference Dent says has been softened, though not erased, by the bigger room.
The original Indian Café Racer launched in 2022 out of the back of the Wellington pub. The new site, a few doors down at 88–90 Bristol Street in the former Quarter House Coffee premises, has been open since September 2025 and seats 65, more than triple the old room's capacity, according to trade coverage of the move at the time.
A kitchen split between highs and lows
Sometimes excellent, sometimes careless.
Dent, writing in The Guardian and summarised in Hardens' weekly review round-up, calls the cooking inconsistent: sometimes excellent, sometimes careless. She singles out the gobi manchurian and tandoori king prawns as standouts, along with a slow-cooked Rajasthani lamb finished with smoked charcoal and butter. The naans, by contrast, come in thin and basic, a detail she flags as a letdown next to the stronger dishes.
On atmosphere, Dent writes that the new premises retain some of the original's quirkiness even as the move to larger quarters has toned down its edges, and that the overall feel sits close to Dishoom's brand of polished nostalgia rather than the scrappier pub-room original.
A bigger room, a harder test
Growing from a cult back-room operation to a 65-cover restaurant is the kind of jump that exposes a kitchen's weak points as much as its strengths, and Dent's review reads as a restaurant still calibrating for its new scale. Whether the naans and the inconsistency get ironed out will likely shape how Indian Café Racer is remembered a year into its bigger home, rather than the gobi manchurian that won her over on the night.
