There’s nothing like a good home-cooked meal, and when it comes to Indian food, I can’t help but compare any food I eat to what I would get at home cooked by my mother or previously my grandmother.  One problem with most Indian restaurants is that they try too hard to maximize profits at the expense of putting out good food (which is part of the reason most Indian restaurants serve buffets).  In North Carolina, I was informed that there was a good Indian restaurant that I should check out, called Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe.

First of all, I will say I was initially pleased with the naming of the restaurant.  So few Indian restaurants name it after the owner or chef, which creates a level of detachment from the food.  If I were to put my name on a restaurant, I create a level of responsibility on the quality of meal that you will get.  Calling an Indian restaurant Taj Mahal or Bombay Palace is not only cliche, it doesn’t identify who’s responsible for this crap.  With Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, I know if I have a problem with the meal, I go straight to Vimala.  Which is great because when I went there, I saw Vimala.  She’s responsible for running the kitchen and making sure all the food is great.  So before I even got the food, I knew it would be good.  Thus ends the educational portion of this blog.

I wanted to sample the full spectrum of fare that Vimala had on store, so I ordered the Vegetarian thali, which was a little pricey by North Carolina standards (~$14), but a bargain by Boston standards.  For the thali, I get two curries, rice, yoghurt, chutney, daal, papadam, and chapati (an Indian bread, thinner than naan).  I saw that there was idly and vada sambar available as well, which I wanted to try, so I asked the cashier who was Indian where he was from.  Which in hindsight is the kind of racist questions that I usually get annoyed about, but the reason I asked was I wanted to know if the sambar was going to be any good.  North Indians have about as much clue on how to make a good sambar as Chinese people know how to make Mexican food (I’ve had Chinese-Mexican food, it’s terrible).  But I assumed because he’s Indian that he was related to Vimala (which he wasn’t), though out of a strange coincidence, they were both from Kerala (a state in southern India).  He also offered me a sample of the sambar to try out.

Every item on the thali was as good as my grandmother’s cooking, so I will have to credit Vimala for that.  In fact it is much better than my mother’s cooking, though my mother is limited by having ulcers and high blood pressure, so she never cooks salty, sour, or spicy.  The rice and daal were delicious enough to eat on their own, just enough spice and flavor.

The beans curry and raita were both very fresh and tasty (you could tell that if they were batch-made, they were batch made recently).

The sambar was a home run!  Probably the best sambar I’ve had since I left India (sorry mom).  As they were Keralan, everything was chock full of coconut, which is bad if you eat it a lot, but deliciously amazing if you go out to eat it every once in a while.  And the sambar had legit vegetables in it like squash and okra in it, unlike even Indian sambars (which are usually just onions and maybe a rare carrot).

I’m not a fan of chapati or papadams, so I won’t make a comment about them, outside of the fact that they too were tasty.

Spicy chutney was offered in case you don’t find the food spicy enough.  I thought the food was just spicy enough, so I just ate it with the papadam.

Finally, my friend ordered a thali as well, but did not opt for the sambar (mistake).  He got aloo mattar as well, and even that was amazing!

I was thoroughly impressed with Vimala’s on multiple levels.  First, the food was all uniformly amazing, and vegetarian/vegan options are clearly delineated from non-vegetarian options.  It would be nice if she could make a pure vegetarian restaurant (just in case there is any meat contamination, though I don’t think there is), but I don’t think that’s sustainable in North Carolina.  What is even more impressive is her versatility to make delicious North Indian as well as South Indian dishes.  Also, the restaurant is very casual and friendly and not as ostentatious as most Indian restaurants attempt to be.  It is delicious fare somewhere of unparallel quality with an atmosphere somewhere between a roadside hotel and fancy restaurant.  Finally, I must give some credit for being very involved in the local community, including sourcing most ingredients locally (I presume the tamarind, fenugreek, asafoetida and other spices aren’t grown in North Carolina).  It’s rare to find an Indian restaurant that makes that kind of effort to make delicious food and ingratiate itself with the community.  Because of these reasons, I have to give Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe five cheese sandwiches.

Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe
431 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 
(919) 929-3833

Considering the wealth of Indians living in the Boston area, you’d expect there to be at least one decent Indian restaurant.  So far in my travels, I have been to every “great” Indian restaurant as deemed by such established food reviewers as the Boston Phoenix, Weekly Dig, and Improper Bostonian (based upon their yearly “Best of” issues).  However, not one restaurant recommended was very good or authentic Indian food.  Kenny, who is Indian, told me that the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (a.k.a. Hare Krishnas: the hippie white people dressed as if they were Indian) has a bi-weekly prayer service followed by a free vegetarian meal.  So, I decided to try out the Hare Krishna Temple to see how good the food there was.

I ended up going with Kenny, who wanted to go early to get a decent spot to sit down during the prayer service.  I don’t know if he’s very religious, I don’t believe in organized religion, so I don’t really subscribe to things like prayer service.  But if you’ve never been to a Hare Krishna temple, it’s an experience to be had.  Your first question is probably “Do I need to be Indian to go to this temple?”  No, there were plenty of non-Indian people there (white, black, non-descript ethnicities even!), so you’ll feel welcome.  Second, everyone is very friendly (as is the case with most churches/temples/synagogues I’ve been to), so you won’t feel weird being there.  But do expect a lot of singing and dancing for 45 min to an hour.  People really got into the music, there was a circle dance and conga line formed (of sorts), so expect a lot of fervor.  If you want, you can just stand in the back quietly and cross your arms over your chest (or even clap if you feel so inclined).

After the service, a line forms up front to get the food, and it is served out by a group of mostly women that cook every week.  The food is all fresh, fairly hot (they probably have to reheat it just before serving), and really tasty.  I am told by Kenny that the menu changes every time, and on this occasion I got a plate of rice, kasseri (a cream of wheat Indian dessert), pakora, potato and paneer curry (not very spicy), and tamarind sauce.  In theory these meals could be vegan, but they are not because it is obvious that they use a lot of ghee (clarified butter) in cooking.

You also get a small cup of rice pudding (payasum), which I normally don’t like, but they used really rich cream to make this payasum, which made it amazing.

Ultimately, the food at the Hare Krishna temple is without a doubt the best Indian food I’ve ever had in Boston.  For one, it’s free, although you do have to sit through a prayer service to get it.  Actually, you technically don’t have to come for the prayer service, you can just show up an hour after the service begins and get in line for the food.  But if you might feel weird coming to the prayer service, you’ll probably also feel weird just showing up and taking the free food.  I equate the food at the Hare Krishna temple to going to an Indian friend’s house for food.  If you just showed up and ask for a meal, they’ll probably cook one for you, regardless of your relationship (Indians are the most hospitable of all peoples in my opinion).  But it’ll be awkward unless you bring something or do something in return for it.

I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to convert people to Hare Krishna, I would do the same review if a mosque, synagogue, or church had a free meal that was equally amazing after a service.  I believe that religion is something that is best kept to oneself, but a delicious free meal is something that you should tell the whole world about!  But please, don’t exploit this opportunity to the point that they have to start charging for the meal.  I give the Hare Krishna four and a half cheese sandwiches (can’t give five because they are not vegan friendly).

ISKCON Boston
72 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02116 
(617) 247-8611

If there’s one thing that vexes me more than anything, it’s the Indian buffet. The only thing I despise more is when somebody on Yelp says “Their buffet is not very good…” as a critique for an Indian restaurant!  If someone told me a place has a good buffet, I would tell them that they lack a sense of taste.  Nevertheless, there are not many Indian restaurants near where I work, and I would walk past Tantric on almost a daily basis to get food from another place that doesn’t serve as an abomination to my people’s culture.  But at one point, I finally decided that I must go to Tantric if I can properly dismiss it like I dismiss every other Indian restaurant in Boston.

Tantric makes the mistake of every other Indian restaurant buffets by trying to combine North and South Indian cuisines into one.  I have never, ever, ever eaten at a place that serves both good North Indian and South Indian food.  Either they make the South Indian food too bland, or the North Indian food too indigestible.  Each cuisine deserves a certain amount of respect, and as such, should not be mixed.  On this plate (clockwise) is navratri korma (mixed vegetables in a creamy gravy), spinach pakora, lemon rice w/daal, and muttar paneer.  The North Indian dishes are definitely the specialty at Tantric, as the lemon rice was bland and too lemony.

I was surprised to discover that the meal came with a complimentary masala dosa.  Normally getting free things with a meal is nice, though on this instance it was almost a chore as I had to stomach the bland starch-wrap that pretended to be a dosa.  The coconut chutney and “sambar” were also boring and flavorless.

I came back for some more of the muttar paneer (which was actually not bad), naan, tamarind sauce and mint chutney and more vegetable pakoras.  While I’m not a fan of most Indian restaurants in Boston, I do find that the trend is making really good chaat.  The mint chutney and tamarind were not bad, though the pakoras were a little too greasy for my liking.  The naan had the look of a barren desert, and the taste of a rubber tire.

Finally, I decided to go with the rasagula, a milk sweet that is vastly inferior to gulab jamun, but I’ll eat it anyway.  It was obviously from a can, and didn’t taste very good cold.

Overall, as Dennis Green once said: “Tantric was what I thought it was.” A mediocre Indian restaurant with a buffet.  Perhaps their a la carte menu is better?  Unlikely.  From my experience, any Indian restaurant that willingly puts out crappy food in the form of a buffet does not care about what people eat.  So, I’ll give Tantric one and a half cheese sandwiches, primarily because they have a decent vegetarian selection.

Tantric India Bistro
123 Stuart Street
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 367-8742

Getting good Indian food in Boston is practically impossible, unless you go to my Uncle’s house, or I am cooking (it’s possible other households make good Indian food, but I can’t confirm this).  But since we’re not close friends (well, we’re as close as blogger-follower relationship affords us to be), you’re probably never going to get good Indian food in Boston.  However, every once in a while I do crave crappy Indian food at lunchtime, but don’t want to go to a buffet, so the discovery of D’Guru in the Financial District was a big one for my lunchtime dining repertoire.

D’Guru is an Indian catering service, better known as Guru the Caterer, for those who live in Somerville.  They recently opened a location in Boston that serves a fixed price lunch menu, where you can get rice, one curry, and a daal for $6.95 (if it’s vegetarian, $8-$9 if it’s meat).  All in all, that’s a pretty good deal, especially since there are daily two different types of curry that are vegetarian, as well as two different types of daal.  I took Vernon with me to D’Guru, which was refreshing, as he always leads me through the Chinatown’s culinary experiences.  It was nice to see him as perplexed over the difference between lalla mussa daal and tarka daal as I am with wrangling with the foodstuffs at a shabu place.

I ordered the palak paneer and the tarka daal, which were both very watery, but the nice part was that they were only moderately spiced.  My problem with most Indian restaurants in Boston is that they go crazy with the spices, to the point that my digestive tract spends days processing all that butter and cardamom.  The lightly spiced quality of D’Guru is great for those who want to eat Indian food and not have to pay for it the rest of the afternoon.  Also, it is not very karam* hot, so for those of you that fear such things, fear not.  Though, if you have zero tolerance for karam, you may still find it difficult, as there is a little bit.

I would say that I was very impressed with the lunch special, you get all that food plus a substandard naan for $7!  Almost the price you’d pay for a buffet, but none of the disgusting feeling you get for eating at a buffet.  And for that, I’ll give D’Guru three and a half cheese sandwiches.

*I’m appropriating this word from Tamil to define food that is spicy hot.  Spicy doesn’t necessarily mean hot, as something that has too much cinnamon and clove is too spicy.  So something that is jalapeno hot is karam.

D’Guru
185 Devonshire St
Boston, MA 02110 
(617) 319-4392