![]() We tear at soft folds of warm flatbread, and mop and dredge and mop again. There are sweet, crisp chicken pastilla, made with filo and more cinnamon, and nutty falafel and stuffed vine leaves. ![]() ![]() There’s a dish of hot stewed aubergine, making a virtue of the vegetable’s light astringency. There’s an olive oil-drizzled hummus topped with thick threads of spiced roast lamb shawarma and the cool barbecued aubergine dip moutabel, soft with tahini and sweet-sour courtesy of pomegranate molasses. There are pert meatballs in an intense tomato sauce, heavy with cinnamon. There are many joys among those small plates, which arrive in bowls perched on long slate platters, a utilitarian vehicle, rather than some deeply annoying presentation device. ‘Topped with thick threads of spiced roast lamb’: the hummus shawarma. Inevitably, we will leave tonight with warm foil containers packed with that which we could not finish. She’s the kind of woman to whom you want to entrust your evening and we do so, greedily. She does some quick mental arithmetic and tells us exactly how much it will cost. The boss looks at our nine eager faces and points at a £35-a-head deal: pretty much all the starters, platters of kebabs, tea and baklava to finish. Tonight, as there often is when BBC Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet is on tour, we are many and we are hungry. The menu is divided between a long list of small dishes at £5.95 each, and kebabs, grills and stews priced in the low to mid-teens. Inside, there are saffron-coloured walls to match the rice and rough-hewn furniture in candy crush shades as if the mood board for the makeover was a packet of Skittles. We navigate our way around the chaos and the hoardings, to the riot of colour that is Toot, its window bearing the legend “Persian food on fire”. The night I was in Plymouth the huge piles of felled woodland were still lying there, rimmed by high wire fences, now tied with coloured ribbons by locals to mourn their demise. An injunction was taken out an hour into the work, stopping the chainsaws, but by then the damage had been done. They did this in the small hours of the morning, like furtive petty criminals trying to get away with larceny. In March, after being told by the town’s citizens how much they liked those trees, the council started chopping them down anyway. It’s located just off Armada Way, a long pedestrian shopping precinct, its hard modernist lines softened by the broad, heavily planted woodland down the middle. ![]() The approach to Toot, which opened in Plymouth a few years ago, is not a happy one right now. ‘Heavy with cinnamon’: the pert Persian meatballs. ![]()
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