Prashad - wonderful Gujarati vegetarian food in Drighlington & one of only two Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurants in Yorkshire

I managed to get an early table at Prashad the other Friday, to celebrate the end of a busy week for myself and my wife. After eating lots of meat during the week, we decided to go vegetarian and I suggested Prashad in Drighlington, having not been for about 4 years.

Prashad is based in the small town of Drighlington and is a family based restaurant serving Gujarati and North Western Indian dishes. It has also been awarded a prestigious Bib Gourmand status in the Michelin Guide for the past few years. This award is given to restaurants who are deemed to serve high quality food at reasonable prices. It is actually named after Bibendum, AKA The Michelin Man.

The restaurant also featured in 2025’s Good Food Guide, has 2 AA Rosettes and was a finalist in the Gordon Ramsey TV show Ramsay’s Best Restaurants.

A bit about Prashad…

The word actually means “blessed food” and was set up in Bradford by Kaushy and Moham Patel in 1992 in what was once a community deli serving Gujarati snacks. Their two sons both inherited the parents passion for food with Mayur setting up the Bundobust chain of real ale and street food restaurants and Bobby becoming involved in the family business.

When Bobby married Minal, she joined the business and took over the kitchen in 2004.

Prashad moved to Drighlington in 2012 and Bobby and Minal have transformed Prashad into the award winning fine dining restaurant we see today.

Minal has now been the head chef for over 20 years now and is forever looking at new creations and flavours to showcase the Gujurati culinary heritage she still holds strong. She was also a guest on this year’s Great British Menu.

With the nights having drawn in, we arrived at the well lit site and pulled up in the car park next to a cross roads. Just walking from the car park, the smells coming from the restaurant were enough to get your taste buds going.

We entered the restaurant at 6pm and were met with a friendly welcome and shown to our table. The restaurant is set over two floors, but on this visit we were seated downstairs in an area which was already busy.

We ordered drinks, myself a pint of cold draft Cobra lager and my wife an interesting English dry white wine from Davenport Vineyard.

Just after the drinks arrived we were treated to an amuse bouche of spicy sweetcorn and garlic with some crispy rice noodles. This was great and I could have eaten more!

The menu had so much choice, but as I wanted to sample as much as I could we both went for the 7 course tasting menu which did look interesting. The cost of this was £60 each, which for the amount of courses and compared to other high end restaurants we thought was reasonable.

Our first course arrived called Sanku. Think of a samosa but in the shape of an ice cream cone. The filling was a mix of chestnuts and sprouts infused with mustard seeds and garlic. Served with pickled asparagus. It looked great and tasted better.

Course two was Lassan Paneer Tikka. This was a small block of paneer cheese, slightly crisp and spicy on the outside and softer in the middle. This was served with an oyster mushroom which has been infused with chives and garam masala.

I loved the differing textures in this dish with the mushroom complimenting the Indian “squeaky type”cheese.

Course number three was Chaat. Minal had combined crispy pastry top and bottom with a chickpea salad & tamarind based inner. The tamarind gave a rich spicy flavour to the chickpeas but this was offset by a really sweet yoghurt.

This simple dish is often served as a street food in India.

Next up course four was called Golla. This was a simple, flavoursome mixed berry sorbet. Sweet and tangy, it worked as a palette cleanser before the next dishes.

Course five was a real favourite of both of us. A Massala Dosa.

The dosa is a light rice bread, served rolled up as a tube. This was served with warm potato and onion in the centre of the dish, surrounded by a lentil soup. There was also a coconut chutney on top of the potato and onion.

This was a really memorable, delicious dish with so many flavours working together. The lentil soup tied everything together and was great to be mopped up by the dosa.

The sixth course was our last savoury one and looked superb. It was a Kofta.

The Kofta was made with spiced paneer and spinach into a dough ball. This was served with a small portion of cranberry rice and a gram flour honeycomb and surrounded by a rich vegetable sauce.

Again this was full of flavour and set the Tim’s taste buds a tingling, with the fruity rice working to balance the savoury cheese and spinach. Unfortunately for my wife, but fortunately for me, she was full by this stage so I did the honourable thing and finished her dish as well as my own.

The final dish and seventh course was Potli. The was a dessert and consisted of filo pastry filled with crushed pistachios, almonds and cranberries. This was served with a dark chocolate straw and a scoop of strawberry ice cream. A great end to the meal.

We were in the restaurant for about an hour and a half and felt that we really had experienced a wealth of different flavours on our tasting menu journey. I enjoyed the food so much, I bought a signed copy of Minal’s cook book on the way out, but doubt I will get anywhere near creating the stunning food I was treated to at Prashad.