Horn Please

Dropped by here after seeing the other Unilocal reviews, and am so glad I did! I adore Indian food, but this is so unlike your normal local Indian restaurant. A huge variety of craft beers, amazing atmosphere and insanely delicious food.
Sometimes I feel a little uncultured for always ordering butter chicken, but it is a favourite of mine and it was particularly delicious at Horn Please! The trio of naan breads was also delish.
For east/​south siders, try visiting the sister restaurant in St Kilda, Babu Ji.

Very good ambience and excellent food. But drinks are too expensive. Overall a great experience.

Horn Please had been on my list for some time and finally when I found myself wondering «where can we go for dinner tonight?» it sprung to mind as somewhere that wasn’t going to be overly expensive, fussy and was also within walking distance of home. 15 minutes there and back helped to build the appetite and also burn a little of the food baby off afterwards.
There’s no bookings at Horn Please but we got seated straight away on a big communal table. Don’t let the idea of that turn you off though, it was fun and felt like one big dinner party even though it was really only the two of us on our corner. The entire venue is a little rowdy and noisy, but I really liked the energy here. Perhaps not the best place for first dates, but for seasoned couples I think it’s a great dinner date option.
Apparently the menu changes regularly. When we were there we enjoyed the pappadums with «the works» of six things to dip in to — a condiment lovers idea of heaven! We also tried the yoghurt kebab which was a kind of cheese/​yoghurty fried puck of dense deliciousness. I’d never really had anything like it before. Delicious, but quite filling. You’ve been warned.
We were urged to try the chicken tikka and I’m glad I did. Super juicy, well seasoned and accompanied with a zingly salad of leaves and pickled fennel. I could have walked out then and there quite satisfied but we’d ordered curries. The goat curry was densely spiced and beautiful mopped up with a naan bread. The «dry» butternut squash with coconut was a lovely contrast but these two dishes alongside rice and naan defeated us both.
We were treated to sticks of spiced kulfi icecream to finish. Apparently the food had taken «too long» by their standards so it was a gesture to make up for it. Honestly we hadn’t found the service noticeably slow, but it’s great when a business cares so much about customers that they want them to walk away saying what a great experience it was. This tiny gesture said so much, and now it ensures that I will forever more order the icecream — it was excellent.
Pro tips: BYO wine for $ 10 corkage.

I’ve never been to India. However, I did live in London and Manchester, which gave me pretty high standards for Indian food.
So when people say, «hey let’s go for Indian food». Well. Let’s just say I’m usually pretty damned meh in my response. However, with strong assurances in place I decided I needed to give this place a crack.
Sunday is «Locals Night», which involves putting on a buffet. $ 20 for a very decent selection of curries. (Note: To keep the prices cheap it’s cash-​only).
Despite the appeal of the buffet I went for the menu. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a local, I felt that would be cheating? Or I wanted to load up on Samosas and Naan? Maybe the latter.
We ended up grabbing Samosas, Lamb Rogan Josh, the Horn Dahl, a single Naan. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but the two of us were rolling down the street afterwards. If you’ve not got a big appetite, a couple of starters and a single curry will do the trick.
They also have a very, very decent selection of beers. Very decent. The smaller local breweries are represented, and in number. I had a Stone & Wood Pacific Ale. Very unique tasting beer that went stunningly well with the hot curries.
The more I write about it, the more a winner Horn sounds. I’ll definitely make the journey back.

Sensational! Best Indian food I’ve had out of Mumbai. Tandoori chicken was amazing, as was the lamb rogan josh, the crab tikki, and the palak paneer.
Good beer selection and reasonably priced wines by the glass.
Service is excellent — attentive without being overbearing.
Leave a little room for the homemade ice cream to finish. It’s amazing.

This review is based on coming to Horn Please for a Good Beer Week event, so hopefully my experience was on level with a regular night.
We went for a five-​course India vs India meal, which was Indian food being paired with Bridge Road’s IPAs. The food we had was simply amazing and if a regular meal there is anything like this was then you will be in for a treat.
First course was two plates of «snacks» that alone would have been enough to have me leaving satisfied. A beer-​infused peanut salad and an Indian take on nachos were really quite amazing and like nothing I’d eaten at an Indian restaurant before.
Next, a delicious vegetarian samosa the size of a small child. Crispy, gooey and potatoey… yum! Third was a tandoori chicken dish that was full of some amazing flavours and left me ready to go and curl up in a corner for a nap before containing with the feast.
Curry was next and just because we hadn’t quite eaten enough, we were served three different curries (butter chicken, lamb an beef) along with rice and some of the best naan I’ve eaten. This was all finished off with a choice of cardamom or cinnamon kulfi, that was thick, creamy and tipped us over the edge from «I’m so full!» to «Oh my god I can’t move, somebody call an ambulance!»
As for the service, and once again, this may have been a special case due to the event that was on, but it was faultless. Everyone was friendly, helpful, prompt and kept both our plates and glasses full all night. My wife is vegetarian so the chef came over a couple of times to ensure that she had eaten enough and stayed to chat a little both times.
Horn Please will definitely see a return visit from us, perhaps for their Sunday $ 20 buffet. I don’t think we could possibly eat more at a buffet than at our first visit, but I’m up for the challenge!

You have to come here. If I thought that was enough to convince you I’d stop there. But I know you need more right? We came here for a ipa vs curry event for good beer week. We weren’t sure what to expect other than great beers and curry. It’s not often I prefer the food to beer. And it’s no disrespect to the brewery concerned, because their beers were PHENOMENAL. But I just couldn’t help from stuffing my face.
The first course was Indian nachos. Don’t ask, just try. You will never forget them! I wanted to knock scott out just to steal his serving! Next up was some fresh veggies/​salad on a pappodam. So fresh, tasty and full of flavour. Next up was a samosa, full of potato, pea and spices. A lot of times samosas can be dry or too greasy or too bland. But this one was amazing and i paired it with some of the delicious chutneys that were on offer. Let it just be known that after 3 courses and 3 beers, I was pretty much full already. But given how amazing previous courses were I couldn’t stop now.
Next up were 2 veggie curries (or 3 if you were a meat eater), with rice and amazing naan bread. By this stage any hope of walking home had gone out the window — i’d be lucky to waddle home.
Last up was cinnamon icecream that was so tasty, creamy and fresh that I couldn’t not finish it.
Horn please gave us an amazing night of food that ill never forget, mostly because of my inability to move or eat anything else for about 24 hours!
But seriously, the staff here were just so passionate and friendly and helpful it was a refreshing change in Australia. Normally I don’t tip in aus, but I just had to at this place as the staff just made the night, In Addition to the food, exceptional. They obviously care about their customers and want to ensure they enjoy the food and have a good time.
Even though I was here for an event, they have an amazing selection of craft beers on the line up normally and word on the street is they do all you can eat on Sundays. I think I’ve eaten all I can for awhile, but I will be back here and if you know what’s good for you, you will go too!

We tried this place on a Sunday which was the $ 20 all you can eat curry night. The curry on offer included a lamb korma, butter chicken, beef madras, a goat curry, punjabi khadi, dahl, a pumpkin and coconut curry and an aloo gobi.
Each dish was delicious, authentic cooking that tasted great! I usually loathe butter chicken but this one was lovely, a perfect blend of creaminess and spice. The South Indian goat curry was appropriately spicy and the lamb korma was wonderful. In fact everything was delicious.
The service was good, very prompt and friendly wait staff. Of course the buffet was largely self-​serve but they asked if everything was alright and were attentive to our drinks needs.
We will have to try a la carte sometime soon, but on the basis of the 8 – 9 dishes we tried last Sunday, Horn Please is going to get a lot of our custom.

India rolls into town — Horn Please, North Fitzroy
Southeast Asian, Mexican, Texan. If we have learnt one thing about the Melbourne dining scene, it’s that it is partial to trends. As waves of restaurants all offering the same style of cuisine open up across the city, we ask time and time again — when will Indian food be in favour? We are not even asking for a proliferation of curry houses, after all, it is about quality and quantity. The reason Touché Hombre, Radio Mexico and Chingon can all peacefully coexist is because they are good and they each bring something yummy to the table. Anyway, trends and whether or not the city is saturated with places wanting a piece of the latest must-​eat fad are topics of discussion for another post. We just want a decent curry, especially after being spoilt for choice during our five years in London.
We have found a few good places, Curry Leaf in Elwood has its moments, Kake Di Hatti in Brunswick East is a cut above and easily cheaper, while our absolute favourite has to be the awesomely excellent Discover India in Yarragon, which blew us away with its curries — infused with fragrant and flavourful roasted spices– crispy naan bread and authentic chai. Worth the two-​hour round trip from the CBD, honestly.
We have been planning to visit Dhaba at the Mill on Kyneton’s Piper Street for some time (we are guessing it will be reaping the rewards of a name check in the latest The Age Good Food Guide) and had a taster when we caught their food truck at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival last year. So, when we heard owners Jessi and Jennifer Singh were opening a casual, street-​food style eatery in Fitzroy North we scooted up there quick– quick. Horn blaring.
Forget the gaudy gold picture frames, moving waterfall pictures and flock wallpaper so typical of some curry houses, this place manages to make kitsch look cool with overly colour-​corrected studio portraits, Hindi proverbs splashed across the bar area and Bollywood films projected on the high white walls.
Staff are super-​smiley and quick to help, and we kick off with papadams with the works — fresh mint, date and tamarind, and sweet mango chutneys, alongside chilli sauce and mixed, tangy pickle. Non-​greasy, crispy papadums (4 of them) and a great range of dips — from the slow-​building, intense heat of the chilli sauce to the cooling zing of the mint chutney. Brilliant beer food — speaking of which, the papdi chaat — billed as ‘the Motherland’s version of nachos and salsa’ — offer pretty easy-​eating, too.
These puffed potato chips are smothered with cooling raita and sour green chutney, sprigs of coriander, studded with chickpeas and pomegranate seeds, and shreds of ginger. Addictive and healthier-​tasting than their sour-​cream-​and-​cheese-​covered corn chip siblings. No complaints — could always use a little more heat, but then that’s just us, and the fact that — of course — these dishes have to appeal to the masses.
Which probably brings me to my only gripe — while the two curries we ordered were really tasty, they did lack the va-​va-​voom of a really authentic, straight-​from-​India dish. I wanted to taste the roasted spices, I wanted the heat and the finger-​staining sauce. Have the Singh’s fine-​dining background conditioned them to cook curries for Aussies, as opposed to curries for hardened curry fans?
As I said, the Kyneton lamb simmered with fennel seed, cardamom, bay leaf and cloves (the rogan josh) and goat curry made according to a ‘classic village recipe’ were good, I would order them again in a second and without a doubt the meat was outstanding — slow– cooked, tender and top quality — that is definitely not always something you find at your local neighbourhood Indian. It’s just that it all felt a bit safe. Curry, but not as we know it.
Oh, and the naan was very fresh and fluffy (again, not as we know it, but in this case that was no bad thing!)
It reminded us a little of London’s Dishoom — touted as a ‘Bombay Café in London’, which for all its chat about ‘sweaty taxi– wallahs’ had all the trappings of a chain restaurant — a concept just waiting to be rolled out on a high street near you. I don’t for a second imagine the plan is to open Horn Please 2 next week (and anyway, Australia has managed to avoid replicating the clone culture of the UK) and this is obviously an opening borne out of passion and perfectionism, and is not about making a quick buck.
The fact is, just as the food at Chin Chin isn’t rough-​round-​the-​edges Thai home cooking, the food at Horn Please is a little more refined than bubbling-​on-​the-​side-​of-​the-​street food. Not a problem, just an observation.
We like Horn Please, and will be back to try more (especially as the menu changes every few days — that means heaps more daily-​cooked curries to try). The end of meal kulfi (ice cream on a stick drawn from a frozen metal cone — see above) and wine list focusing solely on the Macendon Ranges only helped seal the deal.

One of the best places I have been to for a long time. The tasting plate is great. The dessert was amazing. Owner is originally from San Fransisco and the place has just been open a month. We will be going back for sure.

The owners of Dharma Truck have opened their first restaurant and it is as awesome as the van!
The interior is a fresh and unusual take on the usual tired sterotype you find in Indian restaurants. It is funky, warm and entertaining. Old Bollywood films are projected on one wall. An open fireplace creates a nice atmosphere. Interesting Indian portraits cover the walls. The food prep area is tiled in lovely blue tiles.
The service is enthusiastic and warm. The menu isn’t long but it is a solid, modern interpretation of Indian food. The entrees are all vegetarian with many interesting selections based on Indian street food. You could do an entire meal on the entrees alone.
The takeaway service already seems popular. And there is a great deal option on Sundays for locals.
All in all it would seem the time spent running Dharma Truck has been a very worthwhile investment for the team at Horn Please.