Masala Zone, Piccadilly Circus: ‘A profoundly cheering venture’ – restaurant review

‘Boy, have they gone for it’: Masala Zone’s grand dining room in the Criterion. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Masala Zone Piccadilly Circus, 224 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HP (020 7930 6622). Small plates £4.50-£7.40, large dishes and thalis £13.75-£19.50, desserts £6.25-£7.25, wines from £28

At last. At long bloody last. The neo-Byzantine, gold-tiled glories of the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus have finally got the restaurant both they and London deserve. If this makes me sound old and weary and grouchy well, perhaps I am. This is the third restaurant on the site that I have reviewed over the years. Each time I have returned with hope in my heart and fear in my belly, desperate to recapture the true sense of the people’s palace it was when I used to drink here in the late 1980s.