Palatial Estate
For a chance to rediscover ethnic dining, there's no better place than INDIA PALACE.
By Sara Roahen
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Indian food gets the royal treatment at INDIAPALACE.
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WHAT: India Palace
CUISINE: Indian
WHEN: Lunch Wednesday through Monday, dinner nightly
WHERE: 3322 N. Turnbull, Metairie, 899-2436
CARDS: Major
RESERVATIONS: Accepted but usually unnecessary
There is a new condiment in my fridge: mango achaar. It's a sultry jar of
pickled unripe green mango, chunky and fibrous, spicy hot and yellow with
turmeric.
Recently at the India Palace buffet line, a wide-eyed server
watched me heap a large spoonful onto a salad plate. He politely warned me
about the pickle's heat. He explained that he includes only tiny bites of the
pickle with mouthfuls of lentils and rice. I followed suit. It was like
discovering Tabasco after a year of Mondays with plain red beans and rice. The
pickle forged new access into a cuisine that had gone stale for me between too
many soggy samosas and gravy boats of cauliflower and potatoes. That little
bite of pickle represents why so many of us enjoy trying foods from other
cultures. It also sums up the stereotype breakdown that occurred during my
three revolutionary visits to India Palace. Gone are my days of mindlessly
eating boxes of take-out chana masala.
India Palace's royal qualities are less tangible than its large,
sparse space of green booths, lacquered tables and occasional wall hangings.
Its charisma is in smelling and tasting: the tandoor oven walls leave char
marks on barely leavened breads, curry leaves soak in pulsing chutneys, and
whole cardamom pods, cloves and cumin seeds perfume the dry, flyaway basmati
rice.
I only ordered what I knew during my initial dinner at India
Palace. Due to the mostly Indian staff and clientele, the desperate need to
revitalize my ideas about Indian cooking, and the food-stained wall next to me,
the experience was exotic. The aromatherapeutic wafts of whole herbs and spices
from cardamom in the unsweetened chai tea, garlic and cilantro in the creamed
spinach (saag paneer), and cumin and lemon in the Mulligatawny lentil soup
worked as a medicinal means of opening up my mouth and mind to rejuvenation. My
palate agreed.
It makes steamy date material, all of the sniffing and tasting and
feeding each other that goes on when a cuisine drives you to passionate
breakthroughs. All around us, couples drank from the same giant bottles of Taj
Mahal beer. Like us, they broke pappadum, wafer-thin crisps made with lentil
flour, to dip into field-green mint chutney and purplish fruity tamarind sauce.
They shared bowls of basmati rice, spooned stewed vegetable dishes and heavy
curries from common dishes, and bumped hands grabbing at various naans and
kulchas (breads) out of communal baskets.
The family-style feasting resumed the next evening, a Sunday, when
I returned with a group to sample from India Palace's biweekly south Indian
specials menu. The sitar twang was an audible undercurrent in the room of
fairly noiseless, resolute eaters. One of my guests, a Pakistani friend with a
lifetime's experiences eating Indian food, immediately ordered the nutty
chicken moghlai korma. When the pale gray curry made with ground almonds and
warm spices arrived and he reported it tasted just like his mother's, the rest
of us dove in. He remembered the savory-sour pancake and crepe-style south
Indian specialties as after-school snacks at a childhood friend's house. While
he dominated his favorite coconut chutney, the rest of us passed around pungent
ginger and sweet tomato chutneys, yogurt-swirled lentils with red beans, ground
lamb-stuffed bread spiced like ginger cookies, and a platter of mixed meats and
seafood hot from the tandoor oven.
The stories from his youth altered my take on Indian food forever.
It allowed me to experience the food through the taste memories that signified
home and comfort to him. We rarely are afforded such an experience with a
foreign cuisine without traveling. If you really want to know, take an
Indian to lunch. Or a Pakistani, or a German, or a Thai, or a New Orleanian ...
.
Even India's many vegetarian specialties are filling. Nuts, yogurt
and sauces layers deep with spice weigh down these slow-cooked dishes. At an
entree per person, we over-ordered, but didn't stop until we finished the
finale: cardamom-scented rice pudding (badamee kheer). A woman seated nearby
called it "that Indian tapioca something." Sprinkled on top with crushed
almonds, a big bowl of this pudding and the mango pickle were the high points
at the following day's lunch buffet. Priced at $7.95, the all-you-can-eat
chafing dish lineup beats many lunch deals in variety and price. But India
Palace's bulk lunches are limp, bland renditions of the evening meals. I left
still hungry. A thin yogurt drink (mango lassi) ordered to-go coated my throat
in consolation with tart mango nectar.
In the tradition of the Kama Sutra, there are hundreds of ways to
spice a curry (the yellow powdered stuff not included); there must be just as
many ways to rediscover Indian flavors inside that red-roofed palace tucked
just off Veterans Memorial Boulevard. I found three in three days. Between
poultry dinners and spritz cookies this month, revamp your bored impressions of
this truly foreign cuisine. You'll find more mystery than familiarity in the
tang of tamarind and mustard seeds, the heat of chili peppers and ginger, and
the warmth of cardamom and cumin. Just try a mango pickle and proceed.
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