Dinner @ Indian Grill

I caught up with a friend for dinner at Indian Grill in Greenway. It’s not on the main strip of restaurants but on the other side near Athllon Drive in its own mini business centre area. I didn’t think it was a great location, but then again, the Centrelink/Department of Human Services building is across the road so they may get a lot of passerby’s. The first thing I noticed was that the restaurant is right next door to an Indian grocery store. Convenient!

My friend is vegetarian so we ordered all vegetarian foods that night. For entrees we ordered the vegetable samosa ($6.90) and onion bhaji ($5.90). Each entree came with 2 pieces. The samosas were mild and filled with your usual peas and potato. The onion bhaji were surprisingly nice. I was expecting deep fried crispy bits of onion but these had a bit more flavour and density to it with herbs and spices.

Main number one was the dal makhani ($13.90) – black lentils cooked with tomato puree, ginger, garlic and cream. I love dal, such a great healthy dish to add to rice. This dal was still slightly hard and not the soft dal I prefer so that was disappointing. It was also very salty. The best black lentil dish I’ve had at an Indian restaurant in Canberra is the Daal Bollywood, or ‘heaven-in-a-bucket’ from Bollywood Masala in Dickson. So good!

The second main was the palak paneer ($15.90) – cottage cheese cooked with spinach in traditional spices. I’d never had paneer (cottage cheese) before as I thought it might be too tart and cheesy. However, paneer kind of has the consistency of hard tofu and doesn’t taste cheesy at all. It has a very light neutral flavour. I love spinach so I enjoyed this dish. We asked for the mild version so it was just right for me.

Can’t forget the naan bread to go with the curries. We ordered 2 plain naan each ($3 each). These looked great – puffy, but soft and lightly coated in butter. Tasted fresh and yummy. I could only manage to eat 1.5 naans, they’re pretty filling and were quite large.

For dessert, the rasmalai ($5.90) was chosen. The caption in the menu states its India’s most popular dessert. I forgot to ask what it actually was so I google-fu’d it. Yes I’m making that a word. Mad google+kung fu research skills. I digress. Rasmalai literally translates into juicy cream. There are slight variations but it generally consists of sugary pieces of paneer soaked in clotted cream or creamy milk and flavoured with cardamom. I rather liked it! It was also served in a cute stemmed bowl. There was only one piece of paneer. I had a few spoonfuls of the milk but stopped as it was a bit sweet (even for me) and I was so full.

I love the polished shiny wooden floorboards in the restaurant. Not sure about the random knife and fork art on the wall or the LED colour changing lights along the bottom of the walls.

Overall, I was satisfied with dinner here but didn’t like the black lentil dish. Not my first choice Indian restaurant – I’d still prefer to go elsewhere like Chalisa (also close by), Blu Ginger or Indian Affair.

Foodgasm 6.5/10