Houston Business Journal Reviews

April 5, 2002

HBJ Gourmet dishes out his/her favorite Houston restaurants  [excerpt]

The HBJ Gourmet   Special To Houston Business Journal

I am often asked the simple question "Where do you like to eat?" The answer to that isn't very simple. Because I am in the business of visiting untried restaurants, I don't often get the chance to revisit old favorites and confirm their places in my heart. And my list of favorites changes as Houston's restaurant scene changes. Eateries I have doted on disappear, while new stars appear in the culinary sky. Every year, theHouston Business Journal asks me to name my favorite restaurants along with readers, and it's always interesting to see how my taste buds compare to yours.

I chose Indika as the best new restaurant for its deliciously imaginative take on classic Indian food. Even people who aren't fans of Indian food, or have never even tasted it, have fallen under the spell of this refreshing west-side eatery.

------------------

Restaurant Indika: Special spin refreshes standard Indian food

by HBJ Gourmet    Special to Houston Business Journal

Week of September 5-10, 2001

Reviewing Indian restaurants can be as problematic as reporting on Tex-Mex places because so many of them serve exactly the same thing.

In the latter case, the menu always has nachos, enchiladas, tacos and combination plates that survey the most popular items. At most Indian eateries, it's samosas, curried this, tadooried that, and variety plates geared to large appetites (the Maharajah) and small (the Maharani).

That's what made Restaurant Indika such a refreshing pleasure. Its puts its own very special spin on traditional Indian food. The venerable words curry, samosa, and tandoori appear on the menu, but the dishes they are attached to have been ingeniously tweaked and polished into what Indika calls Modern Indian Cuisine. Whatever it's called it's astonishingly good.

Indika is located on Memorial near Beltway 8, behind a strip center that includes a bank and an Arthur Murray dance studio. A pottery studio and a beauty parlor in previous lives, its home is a white stucco building with a conical turret that makes it look like an English or French country house.

Inside, the space is intimate (capacity: 56). With a colorful cubist painting of Indian musicians on the far end, the dining room is a long, narrow space with a wall of mirrors facing a bay window that looks out into a yard. Small ceiling-fanned satellite rooms offer more-private dining away from the main room, which can be a little noisy when full (the handsome brown-tiled floor and lemon-yellow walls don't soak up any sound).

Owner Anita Jaisinghani is a microbiologist from Northern India who studied hotel and restaurant management at the University of Houston and worked as a pastry chef at Cafe Annie. She regularly wafts through the dining room, bathing customers in her easy-going charm. Most important, though, she serves food that is wonderfully imaginative, complex, and satisfying. The menu is short, but every single thing on it is so tempting that choosing what to eat is maddeningly difficult.

Tandoori chicken chaat salad, described as our rendition of an Indian street favorite, is a fine introduction to Indika's creative cuisine. Here, a bed of greens is transformed with slices of chicken roasted in a super-hot tandoori oven, chunks of potato and onions, black beans, a yogurt-cilantro dressing, croutons made of Indian flat bread, and a scatter of pomegranate seeds and dusting of cayenne pepper that lend color and crunch as well as flavor and zing.

That's my favorite salad, Jaisinghani confided as she glided by, and I'm not surprised.

Saag paneer, India's classic pureed spinach and cheese dish, is brighter than usual in both color and flavor and comes with big slabs of naan (Indian bread) that, perhaps in a nod to Southwestern cuisine, is made with cornmeal.

This version is just as addictive as the other kinds of naan that come with the entrees - unadorned, stuff with scallions, and sprinkled with melon and onion seeds.

Indika's culinary flair coupled with a fascination with tropical fruits produces a papaya-ginger chutney that really perks up the crabmeat samosas, which are pyramid-shaped rather than flat like empanadas and come bracingly alive with a dab of the thick, fruity, aromatic sauce. Cilantro chutney has a similarly invigorating effect on salmon tikkas (morsels of juicy salmon), which are accompanied by sweet-sour rings of pickled onion.

Grilled chicken breasts with a mango-chutney filling and a tomato-cream sauce reminiscent of Italy's crema rosa is a deluxe dish, but for flavor and originality duck tandoori with toasted almond curry is even better. The high heat in the tandoori oven made the skin nice and crisp, and the bird's meaty texture and rich flavor led my dinner companion to think the first bite was beef rather than duck. As Jaisinghani assured my guest, the curry's flavor was robust but not painfully fiery, and it complemented the bird as well as the ruddy glass of Gramernon Cotes-du-Rhone 2000.

That sturdy wine would also have been a perfect complement to my superb plate of lamb (slices from the leg and two chops) with cashew-cardamom curry, but the house-specialty Kashmir Royale cocktail, a glass of champagne kissed with lychee fruit and a slice of lime floating on top, made a refreshing substitute.

The one vegetarian dish I tried, half a roasted eggplant filled with paneer (Indian white cheese), cashews, and chopped eggplant and served with roasted potatoes and vegetables, was as hearty and rewarding as the other entrees. And the desserts are as delicious as they are simple. Saffron cream, slivers of mango, and toasted pistachios ennoble a dish of humble tapioca pudding, and a dollop of blackberry sauce, a mound of fluffy mango mousse, and one quartered fig enrich a feather-light wedge of Grand Marnier cake.

Open for only two months, Restaurant Indika has already hit its considerable stride and is operating with great assurance and panache. I just hope I get to try everything on the menu before Jaisinghani makes any improvements. Or should I say changes, because Indian food doesn't get much better than this.

RATING:   (Treat yourself.)

FOOD: Brilliantly redefined Indian.

ATMOSPHERE: Cool, pared-down elegance.

SERVICE: Pleasantly soft-spoken and efficient.