Discover Benelux | Restaurant of the Month | Netherlands
A taste of Anglo-India on the Dutch coast TEXT: STEPHANIE LOVELL | PHOTOS: SUNAND RESTAURANT
Colourful, cosy and always welcoming, Sunand Anglo-Indian Restaurant serves authentic Indian cuisine; lovingly prepared to ensure the perfect balance of flavours and spices. Growing up in Essex, near London, Manjit Kharpal has fond memories of learning to cook Indian food with her mother. At an early age, she came to appreciate all the different tastes and flavours, and quickly learned how to create the right balance of spices. When she moved to the seaside town of Noordwijk in the Netherlands, she spotted a gap in the market for Indian cuisine and seized the opportunity to fulfil her dream of opening her own restaurant. Named after Kharpal’s two sons Sundeep and Anand, Sunand Restaurant attracts locals and visitors with its wide array of tasty dishes from North and South India. Alongside the everpopular curries, the tandoori specialities are
highly recommended. The tandoori mixed grill allows you to savour tender pieces of chicken, fish and lamb that have been marinated in yoghurt with herbs and roasted in an authentic clay oven. Vegetarians will find plenty to choose from on the menu: after noticing a lack of meatfree options in other restaurants around town, Kharpal decided to expand the selection of vegetable dishes at Sunand. “Our dishes range from very mild to spicy hot. One of our creamy kormas would serve as a great introduction to Indian cuisine for those who have never tried it before,” says Kharpal. “If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the menu, we’re often happy to make dishes to request. We have a very experienced chef who prepares everything from scratch, mixing all the herbs for the seasonings together himself to give every dish its own special flavour.” www.sunand.nl
I do it my way I have a brilliant coach. Just fixing the date of the next session gets me thinking about the issue I want to address next. The day before we talk, she sends me a preparation form in which I write down how I’m feeling right now, how I want to use the session, and what I’ve achieved since the last one, so I also have an incentive to respect my previous commitments. If I haven’t, I know she’s going to ask me – in the nicest possible way – why not. It’s almost a truism that defining the problem is half the solution and so by the time I’ve written down my chosen topic, I’ve already started thinking about some answers. In my latest session with her, I wanted to identify personal and professional challenges for myself for the next six months. By the time we actually started talking, I already had a game plan sketched out – one that hadn’t existed 24 hours before – and so during the session itself, my coach encouraged me to flesh out the details of this, to be clear that my objectives were SMART 90 | Issue 30 | June 2016
TEXT & PHOTO: STEVE FLINDERS
(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound), and to investigate some of the obstacles that might stop me achieving them. She also challenged me over one or two of the questionable assumptions I was making about my goals. I like to think that the fact that I had got quite a long way before even talking to her suggests that I am moving towards self-coaching, which is my eventual goal. But I know I still need her: committing out loud to another human being continues to be more effective for me than committing to myself for now. A capacity to fool myself about how realistic my targets are means that I still need my coach to help me deal with the obstacles which could stop me achieving them. What my coach does, through perceptive listening, questioning and challenging, is not to give me answers but to hold up a mirror so I can find the answers for myself. After
Steve Flinders is a freelance trainer, writer and coach, now based in Malta, who helps people develop their communication and leadership skills for working internationally: steveflind@aol.com.
more than a decade of coaching and being coached, I am more than ever convinced of the transformative power of coaching for individuals, teams, organisations and communities. If you haven’t tried it yourself yet, please do. It really could change your life.