Food Porn: Tandoori’s Royal Indian Cuisine

I was kind of embarrassed that Buffalo Eats has existed for over 2 years and neither Alli or I have tried Indian food.  It wasn’t for a lack of wanting to try Indian food, but we have a restaurant wish list that’s currently over 100 restaurants long and it’s hard to try everything.  But we lucked out when Alli won a gift certificate from Buffalo.com’s TwitPic Tuesday Twitter contest (you should probably follow them already), and we suddenly had a reason to try Tandoori’s and experience our first Indian restaurant.  I asked my best friend Mike for ordering advice as he’s worked with people from India and has eaten at several restaurants himself.  With some suggestions we traveled down Transit to try something new, here’s how it went.

• Restaurant Type: Casual Fine Dining
• Cuisine: Indian
• Price: Most Entrees $10 – $20, Appetizers $5 – $8
• Location: Williamsville

Even if you have no idea where or what Tandoori’s restaurant is, you’ve probably have seen their stand at the Taste of Buffalo.  It’s hard to miss, they have one of the larger tents with live Indian music and dancing.  Again, we’ve never had Indian cuisine so it’s hard for us to proclaim how “authentic” these dishes were.  Really, this is just what we thought of the meal in general (service, quality of the meal, etc).  We know a lot of people who refuse to eat various cuisines because they assume the flavors are “weird” and they assume there wouldn’t be anything they like. Well, our appetizer at Tandoori’s would be loved by almost any Buffaloian who has a soft spot in their heart for fried foods.  We ordered their Vaishnu Platter ($9, pictured below) which was a large pile of battered and deep fried vegetables and cheeses.  The platter is made up of Paneer Pakora (fried cheese, which was OK but nothing really worth talking about), Aloo Pattice (fried potato, very good with lots of flavor),  Saada Samosa (fried puff pastry with potato, beans, onions) and Hara Bara Kabab (fried spinach and potato, this was our favorite).  Served with a spicy cilantro sauce and sweet and sour tamarind sauce (think a more flavorful  and higher quality version of that red sweet and sour Chinese sauce), it could easily serve more then 2 people.

The one food Alli and I were both really excited about was trying out some freshly baked Naan so we decided to try the Keema version (with seasoned ground lamb).  The lamb was good but the whole bread was hard to ea as it would fall apart and lamb would get everywhere.  After trying some of their “regular” Naan with our entrees, Alli and I came to the conclusion that less is more.  On its own (cooked with some olive oil) the bread tasted great and it doesn’t really need anything else (however we watched the table next to us devour their garlic Naan and it looked awesome).

When deciding what to order for our entrees, Alli just made a decision on the spot and I took my friends suggestion.  Alli ordered the Gosht Amba ($16, pictured in gallery), which is lamb in  a curry sauce that’s infused with mango.  She ordered hers medium yet the dish had almost zero heat or spice.  The mango gave the sauce a very sweet flavor but it wasn’t working for Alli, and the sauce really covered any flavor the lamb might have had on its own.  She was not impressed and didn’t even want to take her leftovers home.  I ordered the Murg TikkaMasala ($14, pictured above) and also asked for “medium”.  Mine was much hotter then Alli’s and had more flavor in general.  I liked the sauce more than the meat so I poured it all over our side of rice that came with the meal.  My biggest complaint about our entrees had to be the serving size, each of our entrees had only 5-6 small pieces of meat.  Luckily, you get to choose a couple sides that you can pour/dip into the remaining sauce but if you aren’t ordering appetizers, you might leave Tandoori’s still hungry.

The service had it’s ups and downs, our server did the disappearing act a couple times but other servers were constantly refilling our water and delivering our various courses.  I asked for a suggestion for an Indian beer to try and he recommend The Flying Horse.  It had an interesting “flower” like taste but didn’t overwhelm my palate and worked well with the food.  The after taste actually reminded me of champagne and I definitely didn’t mind that it came in a 22oz bottle.  When we had finished our meal our server did bring over water dishes to wash our hands and gave Alli a single rose, both of which were very nice touches.

For our first Indian meal we had mixed feelings, but we both left our meal interested in trying more.  Buffalo doesn’t have a lot of Indian options but from what I’ve read online it seems that the majority of people think Kabob and Curry is the superior restaurant (funny enough, it’s within sight of Tandoori’s).  Hopefully, this summer Alli and myself will try that place out and expand our knowledge of Indian cuisine.

Gallery: