India House

There's nothing wrong with the dining world that an Indian lunch won't cure

239 Harvard Street (Coolidge Corner), Brookline; 739-9300
Hours: Open daily 11:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 11 p.m.
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

by Robert Nadeau

I collect old Boston restaurant guides, both for perspective and for the sake of curiosity. Here's a complaint about the fancy restaurants of 20 years ago:

If four of you are going to pay $75 for dinner, that is the equivalent of 30 motion picture tickets, almost 40 paperback books, a case of good wine, or a bus ticket to California. You ought to get the equivalent of those other entertainments.

Restaurant food has at least doubled in price since then, but it's much better on the average -- and has narrowed the gap vis-à-vis both pulp fiction and Pulp Fiction. Movie-ticket prices have more than tripled, and the popcorn is just as terrible as ever. Among figurative potboilers, a Robert Parker paperback now costs about triple what Robert Parker paid for his Raymond Chandler reprints in the days when he had Spenser gourmetizing at home. So if our dinner for four costs $150, we're now consuming the price of 23 movies or 25 paperbacks.

What if the author of that old whine, which happened to be me, were writing the same passage today? Would he still be demanding that a restaurant evening stack up to 20-odd of the other kind?

I think he would. I mean, yes I do. If your New American bistro isn't 20 times as much fun as reading about it in Danielle Steel, you'd better install movie screens. I haven't priced bus tickets to California in a while, but I still go into restaurants with a show-me attitude that starts with the fact that I could be having peanut-butter sandwiches and a whole film festival instead.

One of my basic arguments, then and now, was that you get a lot more tastebud fun for a lot less money at Asian restaurants. Those prices have doubled, too, but they were cheap to start with, and the quality and opportunities have really improved in 20 years. This week's subject, India House, is the second Indian restaurant in one suburban area: Coolidge Corner. In my old book, I noted that there were two Indian restaurants east of Worcester.

Now, does Coolidge Corner need an Indian place besides the excellent and somewhat innovative Bombay Bistro? The best argument India House makes is the lunch buffet. Whereas Chinese food dries and out and dies in a chafing dish, Indian food -- with so many stews and spices -- just gets better the longer it sits on the warming table. An Indian buffet lunch can be one of the great gourmet bargains.

A recent buffet at the Indian House ($5.95) started with mulligatawny soup, a chrome-yellow version with a flavor as bright as the color and a heavy aftertaste of cumin. On cut-up flatbreads and basmati rice (with cumin and cloves for extra aroma), I tried the usual bright-red tandoori chicken and garden salad, as well as a mild stir-fried cauliflower, and two moderately spicy curries. The standout was felafel-flavored fried bean balls in a thickened red curry, but it was nicely foiled by a slightly hotter stew of boneless chicken and potatoes in a thin yellow curry. Four chutneys were available, including a hot mint chutney of considerable interest, and a red-onion chutney. Dessert was a thin rice pudding.

At dinner the restaurant has the familiar North Indian menu. One item I haven't seen before is bhune alu ($5.95), a pleasant platter of oven-browned potatoes without spice. A "tandoori mix grill" ($10.95) was a generous sampling of red-stained chicken; hotter, spicier drumsticks sold separately as Tangari kebab ($8.95); a few clumps of spicy seekh kebab (lamb sausage); a single tandoori shrimp; and some sweet-sauced chunks of chicken tikka.

The restaurant also does well with fried appetizers, judging by the India House mixed platter ($6.95), whereon there are excellent gingery vegetable samosas (the tricorner pasties), along with fish, chicken, and vegetable pakoras (here breaded fritters). I was unmoved by the meat-and-peas samosa, but kids have to eat something bland and hamburgery each day, and here it was.

My favorite entree was a lamb biryani ($9.95). While many restaurants treat this pilaf as the catch-all equivalent of Chinese-American fried rice, India House gave us a biryani with coriander leaf and other aromatics in which the rice was tastier than the chunks of lamb.

But baingan bhartha ($9.95), the North Indian answer to eggplant caviar, had lost the taste of the main vegetable in a generic tomato sauce, and chicken tikka masala ($8.95), with a richer tomato sauce, also lacked identity. Dal ($6.95) comes in black, yellow, and mixed. We chose black, which made up an admirably creamy but oversalted bowl.

All the curries at Indian House are served in small saucepans, which makes for small portions. The prices justify some of the portions, but why stint on spices when you own a nearby grocery? "Medium" spicing was quite bland, especially by comparison with the lunch-buffet flavors. That extended to the amount of spice flavor in the masala tea ($1.25), a comforting concoction of boiled milk, tea, and spices, but more so at lunchtime.

The promise of India House is enhanced by its relationship with the excellent Kashmir Grocery across the street, but selection is everything. If the restaurant's mint chutney is in the freezer case of the grocery, I'll buy. If the dull mango chutney in the restaurant is on sale in the store, I'll be disappointed.

Indian desserts seldom please Anglos, and these were no exceptions. Even by Indian-restaurant standards, the kheer ($1.95) is a dull version of soupy cardamom rice pudding. The mango sweet ($2.50), a provocative combination of mango ice cream and mango pulp, has such inferior mango ice cream it would have been better as a mango melba with supermarket vanilla.

Probably all that is needed at India House is a little more confidence in the customers, or perhaps promoting the lunch chef to dinner duty (or, more radically, shortening the menu). It's a pretty and elegant couple of rooms, centered on the row of beaten-copper covered chafing dishes from which the buffet lunch is served. Looking at them at dinner, I wised they were in use all the time.