New India Buffet

Posted by Degan on June 12th, 2009

Note: this post was imported from EthnicEats.ca

My sense of smell has been betraying me lately. Last week I bought some nectarines that filled the grocery store -and then my kitchen – with the most amazingly tempting smell of ripe fruit and then dismayed me utterly by tasting like wet cardboard. Lunch today was a much greater offense, however. Walking down Broadway I caught a whiff of complex curry smells and tracked them into an Indian buffet in an office building. I was surprised to find myself in a forgotten restaurant that my mom and I used to frequent. It was an Irish restaurant, I was reminded, after seeing the still-present plaid carpet and high-backed wood booths.

I was excited by my find, and bolstered by both the $5 price tag and my recent Saravanaa-Bhavan buffet success, but the fare was incredibly mediocre. The dried-out naan was no match for the thin, runny sauces and rather than being complex and wonderful as the smell suggested, they were flat and flavourless punctuated with chilis. I tried the butter chicken, channa masala, dahl, mater paneer, and declared that for $5 they were at least all edible. Then I tried the soy chunks in curry that were too rubbery to count as food. I should have stopped there but they had kheer for dessert and kheer is on my list of things to try! I get very excited about trying new things, except I think – unless kheer is meany to be a slop of white gluey paste that explodes in your mouth like vineagar hitting baking soda and then sticks there – that I will have to leave it on the list to be tried again elsewhere

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New India Buffet
805 West Broadway, Vancouver