Restaurant: Yak & Yeti
Location: London (Finsbury Park)
Address: 143 Stroud Green Rd, Stroud Green, London N4 3PZ
Nearest tube station: Finsbury Park (underground) + Crouch Hill (overground)
Opening times: Monday to Thursday – 5pm to 11:30pm, Friday & Saturday – 11:30am to 11:30pm, Sunday – 11:30am to 11pm
Food: Nepalese, Indian and Tibetan restaurant and takeaway
After my favourite local Indian take away (Everest Spice) closed down recently, I started hunting for a new gluten free friendly one in the area… And we decided to give Yak & Yeti a try. We walked passed it on Stroud Green road and randomly looked at the menu to find dishes clearly labelled as containing gluten or not.
Indian restaurants are generally pretty good for gluten free diets, mainly due to flour not being overly present in Indian cuisine, but it’s always best to find restaurants that truly understand gluten and cross contamination. Besides the glaringly obvious sides like naan bread and chapati, gram flour is usually the flour of choice whether it’s to thicken curries, for batter, onion bahjis, etc. But although authentic Indian food doesn’t tend to use wheat flour, there are a few potential issues to keep in mind:
- Some do use wheat in this country (because it’s cheap, I guess) so always double check first.
- Be careful with meat cooked in tandoors (as well as the curries that use tandoori meat). The reason for this is that restaurants often put naan bread in there as well and you guessed it, cross-contamination happens.
- Even if a restaurants tells you that their sides like popadoms and onion bahjis are gluten free, make sure they’re not fried in the same oil as gluten containing foods.
After questioning Yak & Yeti, they confirmed that they put naan bread in the tandoor and the sides are fried in gluten contaminated oil so we ruled all of that out.
The menu doesn’t state which curries use tandoor meat so make sure you ask them first. They were helpful and knowledgable though. We picked some curries and the waiter went through our choices advising us as to whether they’re safe or not. He double checked with the chef as well to make sure. Unfortunately we couldn’t have some of our favourite dishes (using paneer; they cook it in contaminated oil), but in the end we went for:
- Chicken chettinad: chicken breast cooked with green chilies, curry leaves and mustard seeds.
- Hariyali chicken: chicken cooked with fresh coriander sauce, fresh mint, fresh garlic, ginger and green chilies.
Both curries were delicious and flavourful, with a decent amount of meat and fresh tasting, good quality ingredients. And they were also quite spicy! So if you can’t tolerate too much spices or like your curries mild, I recommend asking them which curries would best suit you.
I’m sure we’ll be ordering from them again! And if anyone knows of other good Indian takeaways in the area, let me know in the comments! 🙂
Check out their website for more info {click here}
For the full menu {click here}
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