I’ve speculated before on the likely growth of the Indian population in the South Twin Cities metro. In recent years there’s been an explosion of new home construction along the Cedar Avenue corridor extending from Apple Valley down to Lakeville; and this has been accompanied by an uptick of Indian restaurants and groceries in the general vicinity. Most of this has been concentrated in Eagan but now Apple Valley appears to be on the move as well. Kumar’s opened right before the pandemic in the massive strip mall at the north-west corner of the intersection of Cedar and 140th St (I think it might be called Times Square), as did Mantra Bazaar, the grocery run by the restaurant’s owners. Mantra Bazar has expanded quite a bit from its original store (which I reported on a while ago). This in itself is evidence of the growth of the desi population in the area that it feeds. Now, both Kumar’s and Mantra Bazar have competition in their immediate vicinity. Spice Village opened this summer on the other side of the strip, with a restaurant and grocery adjacent to each other. I finally made it there this past weekend and here is a look at both. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Indian Cuisine
Sangeetha (Delhi, July 2025)
This was my first trip to Delhi with the family on which we did not eat a single meal at Cafe Lota. This is not because there’s been a decline in quality at Cafe Lota since I ate there in March. It’s because parental complications on the day we met the friend I/we always eat lunch at Cafe Lota with meant that we had to be back home not too late in the afternoon. And so rather than drive all the way to Pragati Maidan from Gurgaon, we shaved 40-60 minutes off the round-trip by driving to Green Park. Our destination? The first Delhi outlet of Sangeetha, a Chennai-based South Indian chain with a very strong reputation. Continue reading
Inja (Delhi, July 2025)
This meal represents one of the worst choices I’ve made in recent trips to Delhi. Not, I hasten to clarify, on account of the meal itself. No, the terrible decision was to make plans that needed us to drive from Gurgaon to Friends Colony on a weeknight. No one who lives in the Delhi NCR will be surprised to hear this but it took us more than two hours to get from DLF Phase 1 to Friends Colony. Total distance? 16 km or 10 miles. After this ordeal the dinner, at Inja in the Manor Hotel, would have needed to have been very good to not be disappointing. I am happy to say that it was indeed very good. Almost as happy as I am to say that the return journey took only 45 minutes. Read on for the details (on the meal, not the return journey, which was uneventful). Continue reading
Mizo Diner 2 (Delhi, July 2025)
I ate at Mizo Diner for the first time in March 2024 and I had it on my list of my favourite meals of the year. I’d hoped to get back there during my solo trip to Delhi last December but it didn’t end up happening. And it didn’t happen on my solo trip this March either. But in July I finally made it back again. I don’t think it will end up on my list of best meals of 2025—there’s a bit too much competition in the casual/affordable category from our Japan trip—but it was a very good meal again. Back in 2024 the missus and I had met an old friend there. This time we took the boys along with us, being more confident a year and a half later that their palates had expanded enough for them to enjoy what for them are the more unfamiliar flavours of North East Indian food. It was a good bet: they loved it too. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Moti Mahal (Gurgaon, July 2025)
On Tuesday I posted a brief report on lunch at one of the Gurgaon outposts of the North Indian restaurant, Daryaganj. Most of the post was in fact taken up with their battle with the more established restaurant, Moti Mahal, specifically over the ownership of the claim to have originated butter chicken and dal makhani. You can (re)read that post to catch up on the saga but the key facts are these: Moti Mahal was founded in 1947 by three partners, one of whom, K.L Gujral was long-identified with the restaurant and credited as the inventor of butter chicken. The grandson of one of the other partners, K.L Jaggi, opened Daryaganj with a partner a year after his grandfather’s death (and 27 years after he’d exited Moti Mahal) with the marketing claim that it was in fact his grandfather who’d originated butter chicken and dal makhani, thus claiming that history for his new restaurant. A court case later both restaurants are now claiming to have done so. At the M3M IFC complex in Gurgaon they’re doing so within a few hundred feet of each other and 10 days after eating at that branch of Daryaganj we went back to M3M and ate at Moti Mahal. Revisionist/competing historical claims aside, which did we like better? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Daryaganj (Gurgaon, July 2025)
Revisionist history has been rife in Indian politics for some time now; and so it seems only fitting that it should now also be present in the restaurant world. I am referring not to the many lies Indian restaurants put on menus about village recipes and chefs’ grandmothers but to a very specific and high profile controversy between two Delhi restaurants: Moti Mahal and Daryaganj. The name Moti Mahal may be familiar to you if you have read up on the history of North Indian restaurant food. It was founded in Daryaganj in Old Delhi in 1947 by three friends who had left Peshawar for Delhi during Partition. This is the restaurant at which the previous night’s tandoori chicken was recycled into a rich tomato gravy, thus giving birth to butter chicken (they also lay claim to dal makhani). This has been accepted history for some time now. Well, until 2019 anyway. That’s when a new restaurant named Daryaganj opened, which also claims to be the inventor of butter chicken and dal makhani. Now, you may be wondering how a restaurant that opened in 2019 can lay claim to dishes that everyone agrees another had been making since 1947. That’s where things get spicy. Read on. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VIII (Delhi, March 2025)
In December I broke my streak of eating at Cafe Lota on every trip to Delhi in the last decade or so. I didn’t have so much time on that brief visit, which included a sojourn to Coonoor for a few days, to eat at all my favourite restaurants; and since we’d eaten at Cafe Lota as a family last March, I gave it a miss. But when I returned this March for two weeks I made it a priority to get back there. I met a friend for lunch there who I/we usually meet for lunch there. As it was just the two of us, we couldn’t do a whole lot of damage. But that’s not to say that we did not have much to eat. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Dosa Point (Menlo Park, June 2024)
Here is the last of my reports from our side-trip to Northern California in June. As you may recall, we drove up to San Francisco from Los Angeles. On the way up we spent two nights on the central coast (I had reports on Mexican meals in Santa Barbara and Morro Bay). After a few days in San Francisco (meal reports here, here, here, here, here and here), we drove down to Menlo Park for a couple of days. We stayed with old, dear friends from my college days in India. We mostly ate at home with the exception of one lunch eaten after a long hike among the redwoods in Wunderlich Park in Woodside. We were hungry and stopped on the way back at a South Indian place a hop, skip and jump from their place: Dosa Point. Here’s a quick report. Continue reading
Godavari, Summer 2024 (Eden Prairie, MN)
It appears that it has been more than a year since I last reported on an Indian or other South Asian restaurant meal in the Twin Cities. And that was a review of lunch at Pizza Karma in Apple Valley—not exactly the kind of thing most people think of when they think of Indian food. What can I say? We don’t go out to eat Indian food in the Twin Cities very much more than we go out to eat Korean food. Given how much I cook at home, it’s just not a priority, even though—as I have noted on many occasions in the past—the Indian food scene in the metro has improved dramatically in the last 5-6 years as more South Indian restaurants have opened to feed the new population of South Indian immigrants in the area. Anyway, let’s address my neglect of my people’s restaurants with a look at a couple of lunches eaten this summer at the place that has topped my previous rankings of Indian/South Asian restaurants in the Twin Cities metro: Godavari. Continue reading
Copra (San Francisco, June 2024)
Let’s keep the San Francisco meal reports moving. When last seen in the city, we were eating dim sum at Yank Sing in the Rincon Center—this after dinner the previous night at State Bird Provisions. I said in my write-up of said dinner at State Bird Provisions that we ate an even better meal the next day at a restaurant not too far away from it. That restaurant is Copra, from a chef with a long history of serving high-end Indian food in the Bay Area. Sri Gopinathan made his name at Taj Campton Place where he spent 15 years and earned two Michelin stars. He left that restaurant in 2020 and opened Copra on Fillmore St. in Japantown in early 2023—he also has another restaurant, Ettan in Palo Alto. I had wanted to eat at Campton Place in its heyday but a trip to San Francisco never materialized. And so it was a done deal that we would eat at Copra on this trip. And I am very glad we did. Halfway into the missus and I looked at each other and wondered when the let-down was going to arrive. It never did. This is, hands down, the best Indian restaurant we’ve eaten at in the United States. Here are the details. Continue reading
Pakvaan Desi Spice (Edison, New Jersey)
Here is my second restaurant report from my short trip to New Jersey/New York in mid-May. I ate four meals out with friends. Three of these were at Indian restaurants. I’ve already written up dinner at Bombay Bistro in the West Village. That was an old-school North Indian curry house meal. My two other Indian restaurant meals were eaten in New Jersey. Neither were North Indian and both were quite a bit cheaper than the Bombay Bistro dinner. The first of these was lunch at Pakvaan Desi Spice, a Gujarati restaurant in a strip mall in Edison. I met another old friend for lunch there. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Bombay Bistro (New York, May 2024)
I still have five or so reports from Seoul/Busan to come. But before I get to the next of those, here’s the first report from my recent short trip to New Jersey/New York in mid-May. I was there for just a few nights. I had a packed schedule but managed to see friends for meals on each day. The first of those was dinner in New York City a few hours after arrival. I met an old high school friend at an Indian restaurant in the West Village. I had wanted to try one of the city’s better Indian restaurants. We’d originally hoped to eat at Dhamaka but they seemed to be closed for a private event—at any rate not a single table was available all evening. As we batted around options, location and timing became the chief constraints. Which is how we ended up at Bombay Bistro on Cornelia St., a restaurant I’d never previously heard of and he’d never been to, and which, as far as I could tell from their website, was a regulation curry house—a genre of Indian restaurant in the US that I am usually not interested in. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Indian Accent IV (Delhi, March 2024)
Lunches at Indian Accent’s New Delhi mothership were highlights of my eating out in 2022 and 2023. I ate the express lunch tasting there with a friend in March 2022 and in January 2023 the missus and I ate the full tasting menu at lunch. Both of those meals were excellent. And so it was a foregone conclusion that we would return for another go at the lunch tasting when we were back in Delhi for a bit last month. And so it came to pass. Well, it was another very good meal but the streak was finally broken: taken as a whole, it was not at the level of the previous two meals. There were some very good dishes but the second, heavier half of the meal didn’t really do it for us for a number of reasons; and the meal as a whole felt more than a little disjointed. Here are the details. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VII (Delhi, March 2024)
Cafe Lota is the one restaurant in Delhi that we/I may have eaten at on every trip to Delhi in the last 10 years. It’s certainly the restaurant we’ve eaten at the most. This is partly because it’s convenient to many of the places we visit in central-ish Delhi and for meeting up with friends who live in parts north and east; but it’s largely because we remain big fans of their menu of pan-regional Indian food, presented in contemporary’ish forms but without ever losing sight of their traditional anchors. We loved our first meals there in January 2014, not too long after they first opened, and we’ve continued to enjoy every meal we’ve had there since, even as the original chef departed and the restaurant’s own layout and menu kept evolving. Inevitable changes aside, many through lines remain from its beginnings; and so it’s no surprise that we enjoyed this meal very much as well. Here’s a quick report. Continue reading
Anardana (Gurgaon, March 2024)
Back to Delhi. Well, I should say clarify here—many years after beginning to review Delhi restaurants—that I use “Delhi” somewhat loosely as a place-name in my restaurant reviews. When I say “Delhi” I mean restaurants in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon—in other words, in the NCR or National Capital Region. Today’s review, of the first meal we ate out on our recent short trip to Delhi, was eaten at a branch of Anardana. They do have branches in Delhi proper—and beyond—but we ate lunch with friends at the branch on the ground floor of the very shiny International Finance Center in Gurgaon. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Slink & Bardot (Bombay, February 2024)
Here, finally, is the long-promised last formal restaurant report from our time in Bombay. We were there from the middle of the first week of January to the middle of the second week of February. There was a lot of eating out, most of which has been chronicled already on the blog. Those who’ve been reading along know that the majority of those meals were in more or less traditional restaurants. The one exception in my reports so far was The Bombay Canteen, where I ate twice. The other was Slink & Bardot, a restaurant in Worli where I also ate dinner twice. This report is on the second meal. Continue reading
The Bombay Canteen (Bombay, January 2024)
Our eating out in Bombay was done mostly in places in the more traditional end of the culinary spectrum. Almost all the places we ate at prepare the foods of particular communities in ways that would be instantly recognizable to members of those communities who have never given much, if any, thought to food trends. There were two exceptions in this restaurant itinerary. I’ll post about the second next week. Here now is a very long report on two meals eaten at the first: The Bombay Canteen. We first ate there as a family and then a few weeks later I took the students whose birthdays fell in the Bombay portion of the program we’re on there for a celebratory meal. Both meals were good, on the whole, but one was far superior to the other. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Semma (New York, October 2023)
On our weekend jaunt to New York in mid-October, the missus and I ate sushi for early lunch on both days (at Gouie and Momokawa) and then ate rather excessive blowout dinners. The first of those dinners was at Foxface Natural on the Saturday evening, but that’s not the meal I’m reporting on today. On the Sunday evening we met friends at Semma, the South Indian restaurant that has taken New York by storm in the last year and a half, picking up a Michelin star in the process. One of our friends is a good friend of the house, which is how we managed to get a table on pretty short notice. As it turned out, this also meant that we were comped out the wazoo, with the chef sending out not only everything we’d ordered but also almost everything we had not ordered. I note this upfront so you can keep this special treatment in mind as you read my account of the food itself. On the whole, I thought it was a very good meal—better than my dinner at Adda in 2019—but not without some issues. Continue reading