Eat at the Cinnamon Club

Your author is a very frequent visitor to Westminster, and has always wanted to visit the Cinnamon Club restaurant, housed in the Grade II listed Old Westminster Library, so when the kind people at The Cinnamon Club and LastMinute.com offered him the opportunity to come for a free meal and write a review recently, it couldn't be missed.


The Cinnamon Club prides itself on its Indian haute cuisine, using age old recipes and ideas and combining Indian ingredients with local produce and Indian cooking techniques with European design. Your author still doesn't quite know what that means, and was worried readers might not be able to afford the dizzy heights of the £75 tasting menu, so he kept to choices from the low end of the menu, and house wines.

The Smoked loin of lamb with Chettinadu curry sauce, however, was still very impressive and the friend with whom your author dined described her Crab risotto with truffle cappuccino and pan fried king prawn as 'the best thing [she'd] ever eaten', so we can certainly thank Executive Chef Vivek Singh and his team for their work. The front of house staff and waiter Nicholas also come highly commended for their attentive service.

The restaurant has a reputation amongst journalists, lobbyists, Senior Civil Servants and anyone with an expense account which is hard to dismiss in an area with a real dearth of stand-out restaurants. The former Library is also a great setting and there's even the chance of spotting a journalist or politician at the next table. Indeed, your author had his own eyespyMP moment on his visit when he noticed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Shaun Woodward eating at the next table.

The Cinnamon Club is markedly above your author's usual price range but if you stick to the lower end of the menu, it seems to be present something a bit special at a realistic(ish) price. It is certainly deserving of a return visit. For more, see http://www.cinnamonclub.com/