The Open Guide to London: the free London guide

• Nearest Tube stations: Liverpool Street / Aldgate East / Aldgate / [Whitechapel]? / Shoreditch

Chillies is a nice, clean, fresh-looking curry restaurant in Brick Lane, London's "Bangla Town". Although the place is actually quite small, they've used mirrors and light colours very cleverly to make it feel spacious. I found it a very pleasant place to eat.

Like many of the other Brick Lane establishments, they have a tout outside trying to persuade people to come inside, in this case also offering the incentive of a free round of drinks. The menu looked good and varied, though, so we decided to give it a try.

The food was pretty good; I had the King Prawn Dansak (�7.95), which had plenty of prawns and a very tasty lentil sauce. The Saag (spinach), Begun (aubergine) and Fresh Bindi (okra) side dishes (all �2.75) were also tasty, particularly the aubergine, which is far too often just bland and greasy.

The service was friendly and fairly efficient. They did bring us too many coffees at the end, and took ages to sort out the bill despite the place being fairly empty, but these are minor niggles.

We paid �16.50 each in a party of 6, including poppadoms and chutneys, an additional beer and a coffee each, and a 10% tip (service charge is not automatically included). An even better deal is available at lunchtimes, when you can get a starter, any main dish except those involving king prawns, any side dish, and rice and naan, for either �6.50 or �7.50 (can't remember which, should have written it down).

[All prices as of June 2002]