Legacy Indian Cuisine, Wellfield Road, Cardiff: review

I’ve got an ulterior motive for buying you dinner tonight, he says.

Alan is a regular here. Wellfield and Albany are his home patch, and hardly short of Indian restaurant alternatives, but it’s here, to Legacy, he keeps coming back. This is his seventh or eighth visit, he reckons.

I get it. There’s something reassuringly old-school about the place. Proper tablecloths, ornately folded linens, teal banquettes. Indian music sitar-ing from the speakers. Food which has always impressed, he says. And if there’s one thing he knows, it’s how to eat well.

It seems like the right place to slip into one of those rare things, one of those old, easy friendships, even if the surface noise of daily life means you haven’t seen each other in far too long.

Legacy’s is a large menu. All the familiar staples of the British Indian kitchen are present and correct, but with some eye-catching details. Lobster bhuna, perhaps. Or baby squid, stir fried in the hot, peppery Goan style; or a lamb shank biryani served dum pukht, the pot sealed with dough? And while we are on the subject, how does the idea of ‘biryani brunch’ weekends for £8 grab you? Ah. I have your attention.

Tonight feels like an evening for the classics. We order big pint-plus bottles of Cobra and start with a mixed grill.

‘You can’t beat lamb fat, can you?’ It’s the sort of insight which has bound us together for the decades since we used to bunk off afternoon lessons to spend our lunch money drinking in Llandaff Village.

How long ago is that, now..? Some distant past, when lunch was a pint of Worthington’s Best Bitter and a packet of beef flavour crisps in The Heathcock, and you’d get change from a pound. (I don’t know if they’re still running that offer, best ask next time you’re passing). We would subtly alter our uniforms- a non-badged jumper here, an uncrested tie in school colours there- to give the pub plausible deniability before we even knew what that was. Much has changed. And yet…

Where were we? Ah yes. Hot lamb fat. After poppadoms- that coconut chutney is a standout- and a complimentary plate of pakora (crisp, light), a tumble of good things sizzling on cast iron plumes its headily aromatic way towards us. All the essentials: seekh kebab, finely minced and delicately flavoured, and hefty pieces of marinated chicken, and those chops thick and sweet. It is all exactly what you want and need from the old faithful (£9.90), and that old-school scarlet shade is note-perfect.

We enjoy a sesame prawn starter (£6.50) one of Al’s recurring must-orders, which shows again there’s a light hand at work here. The sauce is a subtle thing and allows the seafood to shine, plump and perky.

This I know to be true: just as you haven’t had a bacon sandwich until you’ve had one from a pizza oven, no good can come from an Indian restaurant with a drab keema naan. It’s a handy litmus test, like squid on Mediterranean menus. Get that wrong and you may as well make ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter’ your Instagram business bio. Happily, Legacy’s is lovely: generously stuffed, well spiced, the dough light and puffed, the slightest hint of crispness here and there at the base.

Impressive, and as good as any I’ve found in this style anywhere in the city.

A generous mound of prawn biryani is a fine example of one of my death row dishes (£12.90). A couple of curries: shatkora beef (£13.90) is tart and tangy, the meat impeccably tender with that telltale sourness from calamansi (Philippine lime).

The Malaysian roots of Malaba lamb (£12.95) are obvious: it is punchily spiced, but lemongrass and coconut make for a compelling bowl, oddly comforting yet bracing.

We count the mileposts marking the years. Girlfriends, wives, children, cities, countries, jobs. Those gone too soon. Time slips by far too quickly as the years fall away: but I’m at the mercy of Cardiff Bus tonight. Time to go. I’m making my way down Wellfield Road when I hear Alan call me back. Have I forgotten something? He passes me a packet, warm to the touch: when he went to settle the bill, he got the kitchen to make me another one of those impressive keema naan for the journey home.

Throughout, we have been very well looked after by Shah, although he has only us to keep an eye on. Which brings me to Alan’s ulterior motive in asking me here tonight. It is far too quiet. That shouldn’t be the case. Far worse places nearby are far busier this evening. He would like it to be busier. He is hoping I’ll like it enough to tell you about it though, and that I might persuade you to give it a try yourself. He’s just a regular visitor keen to see it do well.

So. Take this as a recommendation, and a strong one at that: there’s something reassuring about Legacy. What it does, it does well. It won’t remap Indian food in the city and take Cardiff on a journey of discovery, open our eyes to under-represented regions in the way Anand George has, for example: but this is the sort of place we all need to know about. Legacy feels like the one you keep going back to, where things are always good and you feel well looked after and you have long lazy dinners with all the good things they involve.

Let’s hear it for local restaurants you can rely on. Let’s hear it for late night bus keema naans. Let’s hear it for enduring friendships and those moments of reconnection. And let’s hear it for the places which make it all happen so easily.

36 Wellfield Rd, Cardiff CF24 3PB

Open every day, 5 – 1130pm