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
Tag Archives: South Indian
Hotel Ramachandra (Coonoor, Dec 2024)
Here, finally, is my final meal report from my solo trip to India in December. I spent most of the two weeks I was there in Delhi, and all of my other reports have been from there. I did also take a three-day trip to Coonoor in Tamil Nadu on college business. I was staying with an old friend while there and ate almost all my meals at her house, courtesy her wonderful cook. The one exception was this lunch in the town of Coonoor (my friend lives 40 minutes away from the town) at the one restaurant she insisted I eat at: Hotel Ramachandra. It was a rather excessive meal but also a very good one. Here, very quickly, is a look at it. Continue reading
Carnatic Cafe III (Delhi, December 2024)
My first three meal reports from my recent solo trip to Delhi were of lunches at which I ate thalis: at Arunachali Sajolang, Bhansaghar and Zambar. There were, in fact, only two meals I ate out that did not involve thalis. One was my lunch at Dzükou, and the other was this lunch at Carnatic Cafe. This is my third report over the years of meals eaten at Carnatic Cafe. The first was from their original Friends Colony location (since closed); the second was from the Greater Kailash II location. This meal took me to yet another of their locations, this one in the Lodhi Colony market. I met a dear old friend for lunch here. Here’s a quick look at how it went. Continue reading
Zambar (Gurgaon, December 2024)
Another Delhi restaurant report, another thali-based meal. As I noted recently, I use the name “Delhi” a little loosely in my restaurant reports to refer to the NCR or National Capital Region, which includes Gurgaon and Noida, which are not just separate cities but are part of different states (Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, respectively). I bring this up because the meal I am reporting on today was eaten at a restaurant in Gurgaon: at Zambar in the Ambience Mall off of National Highway 48. Even by the gargantuan scale of modern Indian malls, Ambience is particularly massive and alienating. But there were some specific things I needed to shop for and some specific things I was interested in eating and that is how I ended up eating a thali at Zambar. 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
Dosa Grill (North Brunswick, New Jersey)
Alright, let’s get back to New Jersey. As you may recall, I made a quick trip to New Jersey and New York in mid-May. My meals out included three Indian meals and one that was not Indian. This is not a report on the non-Indian one; it’s a report on the last of the three Indian meals (see here for my report on dinner at Bombay Bistro in the West Village, and here for my report on lunch at Pakvaan Desi Spice in Edison). I ate it with a dear old friend and his family (and visiting relatives). The original plan had been to eat at a Pakistani restaurant. However, I was going to be cooking a big Bengali meal for them all that night—with mutton and fish on the menu—and so we decided to keep lunch vegetarian. Accordingly, we ended at a restaurant named Dosa Grill in North Brunswick. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Dosa Dosa (Dublin, Summer 2023)
My encounter with Indian food in Dublin on this trip did not get off to a good start. In the first week I visited an Indian grocery in the vicinity of Trinity College (where my classes were being held) that had a “street food” counter. The things I ate there ranged from marginal to execrable. I was subsequently warned online by various desis about the quality of Indian food in Dublin. Nonetheless, I decided to try Dosa Dosa, a counter at The Place, a fenced outdoor lot that is home to a number of stationary food trucks. The little I’d read about them had intrigued me and it was conveniently located (I didn’t have an office on campus or access to a microwave so needed to eat lunch out on most teaching days). If it was good, I’d be able to hit them up for lunch between classes and get a good brisk walk out of it. How did it go? Well, I am glad to say that I liked their food enough to come back two more times. Continue reading
The Weekday Lunch Thali at Godavari (Eden Prairie, MN)
On the weekend I posted the second of two reports of the lunch thali meals I ate in New Jersey towards the end of April. The first of these was at Kathiyawadi Kitchen and was really excellent. The second was at Samudhra, and while I didn’t like it nearly as much as I had Kathiyawadi Kitchen’s thali, resizing the photographs from that meal earlier last week put me in the mood for another thali lunch. My hands-down favourite thali in the Twin Cities metro—and indeed my pick for best lunch deal in the area—used to be the weekday thali at Kabob’s Indian Grill in Bloomington. Alas, as has been reported in the comments here on multiple occasions, Kabob’s no longer offers that thali. Nor, for that matter, does Kumar’s in Apple Valley still offer their weekday lunch thali—it’s been replaced by a buffet. Thankfully, Godavari in Eden Prairie—the restaurant that has topped all editions of my Twin Cities South Asian restaurant rankings—now offers a lunch thali. And so it was to Eden Prairie I went for lunch on the day after the last day of my term. Here is what I found. Continue reading
Kumar’s, April 2023 (Apple Valley, MN)
Here is a report on a recent, unplanned weeknight dinner at Kumar’s. I ended up here with a small group from work after we were thwarted in our attempts to have a decent sit-down dinner in our own town. This because the acceptable options were either closed (it was a Monday) or about to close (it was close to 8 pm by the time the event we were at ended). Rather than eat fast food we decided to drive 20 minutes to Apple Valley, to Kumar’s (which thankfully was still seating people when we got there a bit after 8.30). And so it was that I came to eat my first dine-in non-buffet meal at Kumar’s. Continue reading
Sagar Ratna, One Horizon Center (Gurgaon, January 2023)
I’d said my next Delhi meal report would be of a Kashmiri meal—two of them, in fact—but, yet again, I am a liar. Instead I have for you a report of a South Indian meal, an Udupi meal to be more exact. This was dinner on a day that had featured a blowout lunch at an aunt’s home . That was an excessive meal, and in true Bengali fashion, lunch was served close to 2 pm—and so we wanted to eat something relatively light for dinner. The friends we were meeting suggested an outpost of Sagar Ratna, located more or less halfway between them and us in Gurgaon, and that is where we went. Continue reading
Dosa (Bloomington, MN)
Dosa opened on Lyndale Avenue in Bloomington about five months ago and is one of the latest manifestations of the ongoing phenomenon of South Indian restaurant openings in the Twin Cities metro. I have not yet been able to confirm or quantify this with numbers from the latest census, but my observations indicate that the Indian population of the area continues to grow and that this growing population is not just largely South Indian but likely dominated by people from Andhra Pradesh/Telangana. Unlike many of the other relatively recently opened South Indian restaurants, however, Dosa is not—as far as I know—part of a franchise. At least, their website makes no note of any affiliation. So in this they are closer to Kabob’s Indian Grill (also in Bloomington) than to Kumar’s in Apple Valley or Godavari in Eden Prairie. We had a very nice meal there this past weekend with good friends and I am happy to be able to recommend them to anyone looking for good Indian food in the area. Continue reading
Carnatic Cafe II, Eight Years Later (Delhi, March 2022)
It has been eight years since our first meal at Carnatic Cafe—but that meal was not at this Carnatic Cafe exactly. Back in 2014 there was only one location of Carnatic Cafe, in the Friends Colony market. Now, as with almost every successful restaurant in Delhi, it has multiple locations all over the National Capital Region—including a new one at Terminal 3 in the international airport; indeed, I think that original location may no longer be in business, or may have moved into more upscale digs in some shiny new mall or the other. And it was at one of these newer, albeit not very shiny, locations—in Greater Kailash-II’s M block market—that I met up with a bunch of old friends for lunch a few days before returning to Minnesota last week. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Godavari, Finally in Person (Eden Prairie, MN)
I had Godavari at the top of my Twin Cities South Asian/Indian restaurant rankings in both 2020 and 2021. And that was based only on takeout meals brought home and reheated during the height of the pandemic. We’ve been looking forward to eating in there for a while and a week ago Saturday we finally managed it. It was just the four of us and one friend but we still managed to do quite a bit of damage. We mostly ordered things we hadn’t got from them before, including some things we hadn’t ordered because they hadn’t seemed like good bets to survive a long drive and reheating. I am pleased to say that if Indian Masala’s weekend buffet a week earlier had not impressed overmuch, this meal validated our already high opinion of Godavari. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Chennai Dosa Corner (Los Angeles, December 2021)
Yesterday I reported on a brief stop at Surati Farsan Mart in Artesia to eat paani puri and chaat. After that tasty start I made my second stop: at Chennai Dosa Corner for, well, a dosa.
Chennai Dosa Corner has been open for about eight years (so the gent at the counter told me). It is now one of several South Indian specialists open on and off Pioneer Boulevard. Back in the day if you wanted a good dosa in L.A County you had to go to Udupi Palace further up Pioneer Blvd. (Well, Paru’s in Hollywood was also quite good but didn’t have quite the same ambience for the immigrant nostalgist; nor did Sunset Blvd. have a branch of the State Bank of India right at the freeway exit.) My local informants tell me that Udupi Palace is still the gold standard in Artesia, and as an immigrant nostalgist of the old school it would have been my first choice except for one problem: yes, no outdoor seating. Thus Chennai Dosa Corner just a little bit up the road. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 47: Back to Godavari (Eden Prairie, MN)
Godavari opened in Eden Prairie last fall—the first and so far only Minnesota franchise of the broadly South Indian, more specifically Andhra chain that has locations outside major metros mostly on the east coast and increasingly in the midwest. I first reviewed a takeout meal from them last September. We really liked the food at that meal and when I posted my rankings of Indian restaurants in the Twin Cities metro later in the year I had them in the top tier (along with Indian Masala in Maplewood). We’ve been wanting to go back and try more of their capacious menu; and this past weekend we did just that. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 37: Back to Bawarchi (Plymouth, MN)
My ranking of Twin Cities metro area Indian restaurants is coming next week. Before finalizing it I wanted to get back to Bawarchi in Plymouth and we managed to do that last weekend. We were last there more than six years ago, back when I last tried to do a survey of local Indian restaurants, a survey that came to a grinding halt after a disastrous lunch at the now defunct Dosa King. We’d liked that lunch at Bawarchi quite a bit though. At the time I’d noted that while it was good it wasn’t quite good enough to justify the two hour round-trip drive for us. However, I was curious to see how they would stack up to the new(er) competition. And so we went back last Saturday to pick up a large order that we ate by ourselves first for lunch last Saturday and then over a few more meals in the ensuing days. Herewith a quick report. Continue reading