HERE’S a tip for teachers living around the capital: if you fancy a curry and want to avoid indigestion, pick your restaurant carefully. You could bump into the chief inspector of schools.
We glean this from the Spectator’s toff restaurant critic, Alice Thomson, who picked Chris Woodhead to join her and her husband (known only as “Ed”) to try out a posh new Indian in the Fulham Road.
As well as writing for the Tory party’s house magazine, Alice is also a Daily Telegraph columnist. She invited the chief inspector along because he’s a korma expert and, inevitably, “a tough marker” (amid other school-related puns). He proved predictably hard to impress, declaring that his local curry house in Wales does a better rogan josh.
Alice’s own tastes are suitably sophisticated. “The last time I ate Indian crab, they had come straight out of the sea in Bombay,” she said, adding “I’ve always preferred champagne with Indian food”. Staffroom gourmets take note of the right way to wash down your dahl.