Matchli tikka, for those who don’t know, is a herby, spicy chargrilled fish dish, delicate, dry but with a little moistness, which does a good job of overcoming the fact that the fish in question, boal, is feeling a little tired after its long journey from the Indian Ocean.

It’s a pleasure to eat slowly, in small bits at a time. Mezai chicken, meanwhile, is served on the bone, which gives the piece of ex-poultry a more realistic air than those abstracted cuboids of breast, halfway to being astronaut food, that Indian restaurants often serve. The dish includes mango and cinnamon, which gives it a sweetish spiciness that stops just short of sickly. The side dish known as toak has a superficial resemblance to Heinz tomato soup, but turns out to be more subtle, thanks to the bay, garlic and green chillies mixed in with the sloppy tomato stuff.

La’lia kebab, as a fellow diner observed, is nicer than it looks — its long brown cylinders look like props from the coprophagic scenes in Pasolini’s excruciating movie Salo or, to be more basic, like pooh in pooh sauce. They are therefore much nicer than they look, with lemon, mint and tamarind suffusing the lamb.

The observant reader will have noticed a quiet revolution taking place, in the craft of restaurant reviewing, which is that this review starts by talking about the food, rather than riffing on forgotten rock bands or classic TV ads of the Seventies. The reason for this groundbreaking approach is that the food is the most interesting thing about the Noiya Indian Kitchen.

Noiya is not claiming to be a new concept, and its branding and marketing is low-key. The décor, with white walls, black furniture and pinkish lighting, is in the style we still call “contemporary”, even though it was developed by the likes of Terence Conran in the early Nineties. Which is not to say that it doesn’t make a pleasant background for dining.

The main thing that Noiya tries to do is offer more imaginative variants, more skilfully done than usual, of the standard Indian restaurant fare. Hence the matchli, the mezai chicken, and the toak, and things like pomfret grilled with spices, and king prawn with garlic, mint, lime, yoghurt, mustard seeds and herbs. Hedging its bets a little, it also offers the usual parade of madras, korma, pasanda, jalfrezi and dansak.

It does a good job, with a crispness and cleanness of scents and flavours and an avoidance of excessive gunk. Basics like okra are served with simplicity, chopped small and retaining its crunch and freshness. Only sometimes does the food succumb to an overdose of elaboration. You are served slowly, but with good nature, and you can sit on an outdoor terrace that contributes to Lavender Hill’s nascent attempts to resemble a Parisian boulevard. Last Sunday lunchtime, it was a nice place to enjoy what I have to call an Indian summer.

The bill is a pleasant surprise, coming out at under £100 for five people whose curiosity led them to order more dishes than they strictly needed, and who washed it all down with plenty of lassi.

It would be nice if Noiya gained the confidence to ditch the conventional end of the menu and concentrate on its toak and boal but, even so, it’s a very welcome addition — neither conventional nor pretentious, but intelligent — to the city’s stock of Indian restaurants. I write as an east London snob, who is suspicious of Indian food west of Aldgate and, worse, south of the river, but Noiya overcame my scepticism.