 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||
Nirvana - A Complete Package Review by Amy Pataki Chef: Vishwanat Gord Hours: Lunch seven days, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dinner Sunday to Thursday, 5:30 to 10 p.m. Dinner Friday and Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. Reservations: Unnecessary Wheelchair access: Yes Price: Dinner for two with lassi, tax and tip: $100 The diaspora isn't always good to Indian food. Restaurants around the world claim to serve tandoori chicken and curried lentils. There is often little truth in advertising. Where South Asian communities flourish, chefs can access the necessary ingredients to create authentic dishes for an audience of peers and knowledgeable outsiders. We see this in Dubai, where domestic workers congregate for top-notch South Indian dosa, and in the influx of Indian hotel chefs in London, England. In most other places, the food is adulterated beyond recognition. Such is the case in Budapest, where I happened to be last week and where I happened to eat an Indian meal of such awfulness I thanked my stars for the deeply flavoured Punjabi dishes back home. Now, Budapest doesn't have a thriving Indian population, unlike the 500,000 South Asians living in the GTA. Indeed, the sole Indian I saw in a week exploring the 1.8-million strong Hungarian capital was the waiter of the restaurant in question, Salaam Bombay. Salaam Bombay is typical of the bad Indian restaurants I've encountered abroad. The chef, Parman Singh, pulled his punches with bland spicing, watery kheer and a kashmiri naan nonsensically stuffed with the same candied fruit mix normally used for Hungarian tea bread. In fact, all the food tasted like Hungarian food, or at least what a Hungarian housewife would make if she got hold of a subcontinental cookbook. (This isn't the only example of "foreign" food awkwardly localized. At a Chinese restaurant in Madrid, I was served fried noodles made with fideos, Spain's answer to dried spaghetti.) What Salaam Bombay has in its favour, though, is a coolly beautiful room. While I wouldn't trade even a pinch of fragrant chaat masala for one of Salaam Bombay's seashell-inlaid tables, it would be nice if our Indian restaurants made more of an effort to look pretty. The closest we have to the whole package - good looks plus authentic taste - is Nirvana: The Flavours of India. The Mississauga restaurant opened in 2004 as an experiment in Indian fine dining. The large space is richly decorated with oil paintings, brass chargers and heavy wooden chairs. The effect is similar to that of an old-school steakhouse, replete with courtly service. That is, until the food comes. Nirvana's best meals - meat, fish, vegetable or bread - come from the pair of blazing hot clay tandoor ovens. Watch through a glass partition as Nepali tandoor chef Shyam Dhungana reaches in to retrieve skewered chicken with bare hands. (He must have asbestos fingers, I find myself thinking.) "He's been trained for that and that's what he does," says owner Sukhi Ghumman. With the same ease, Dhungana slaps dough on to the blistering hot walls then peels it off with a hooked skewer. The resulting naan ($1.95) arrives at the table in a true teardrop shape, pleasingly marked with black blisters. The only thing better is the pillowy soft kashmiri naan ($3.95) sprinkled with chopped dried apricots and plump raisins. Nirvana's pride in its talents is apparent in the two pages of "tandoori shebaab" offerings. On my first visit, I order shrimp hariali from the list. Lobsters would weep with jealousy over the size and sweetness of these jumbo shrimp, their pop accentuated by fresh mint and smoke. At $17.95, it is a substantial dish, but not according to the waitress. "This is dry. Please choose something wet," she instructs. By wet, she means a dish with sauce. (I think.) I oblige her by ordering a ho-hum okra masala ($8.95) that pales beside two other dry dishes: A lamb biryani ($13.95) of profound peppery intensity and a sextet of deep-fried paneer balls ($8.95) that wrap delicate creamy curds in the thinnest, crispest, most greaseless breading. Who needs sauce? On a return visit, I stay the course. I order a laundry list of tandoor dishes, all served on sizzling hot iron tawas. (I wonder if executive chef Vishwanat Gord is contractually obligated to garnish every plate with shredded cabbage that caramelizes in the heat.) There's a skewer of Brobdingnagian mushroom caps ($10.95) marinated in yogurt before roasting. There's the two-tone wonder of noorani sheekh ($14.95), white minced chicken and red minced lamb formed around a skewer and cooked juicy; the cheddar sprinkled on top adds extra richness. The trifecta is complete with flaky whole pomfret ($18.95), its flat, red squareness like an illustration in a children's book of shapes. A change of place setting indicates the imminent arrival of the "wet" dishes. These vary wildly in quality, from the satisfying minerality of tender lamb in spinach ($13.95) to the disappointingly flaccid Manchurian chicken ($12.95). We are lucky to have the world's flavours at our feet in the GTA, and we are lucky to have Nirvana. apataki@thestar.ca
|
|
|||||
|
