My first Indian meal in america at a restaurant – Amul India

We’ve now lived in the States for almost 10 months and we still hadn’t been out to an indian restaurant let alone a takeaway – after last night, that situation is rectified and we’ve found a great restaurant. I was actually looking on the internet for somewhere to get Fish and Chips from as a celebratory meal and one of the ads on googles map pages was for an indian restaurant – the amul India – with reviews on Columbus City Search. All of the reviews were extremely positive with comments like “the best indian food” so we decided to head to this place instead.
We were not disappointed – on a Friday night we were seated straight away, which seems to be almost impossible in american restaurants nowadays, and we were given plenty of time to read the menu. A lot of the other patrons were indian, which was a good sign, and the place had an atmosphere – a little bit of indian music in the background, but not too loud – and the chatter made us both feel comfortable and at home.
Ordering from a new indian restaurant is often a gamble as you have no idea how spicy their food is going to be and the spelling of every dish always seems to be different from any previous menu’s seen. I decided to have the Amul India special which consisted of “Aloo tikki and pakora, chicken tandoori, lamb curry, dai, mater paneer, nan, rice and dessert served on a silver platter” for the princely sum of $12.99, Kristen ordered the chicken curry, some papardam’s and mango chutney.
My starters arrived very quickly with Kristen’s papardams – which I’ve just read were described as crispy spicy lentil wafer’s – we’ve never had spicy, or lentil one’s before and they were pretty spicy- unfortunately too spicy for Kristen. The funny thing was that she thought it was one of the relishes so was eating more papardum to try and cool down but she had the opposite effect. The relishes were pretty spicy too – should have been a warning of things to come really 🙂
The main course arrived – Kristen’s curry had been ordered as Regular, and she loved it – she must have said how good it was about 20 times or more. My food was also excellent but a bit too spicy for me – I had ordered the medium, but it didn’t take long for my head to start sweating – I dread to think what the Medium hot, Hot or Extra Hot would taste like!
My dish was a reasonable sized sampling of 4 dishes and was delicious. A couple of the them were extra spicy, but mixing in the rice and nan cooled it off enough to eat.
The dessert was (I think) a Gulab Jamun – a fried cheese vall soaked in syrup which was really nice – it was a suprise when I bit into it as it was cold – I just thought it was part of the main course so I was expecting something hot!
Everything was reasonably priced (apart from the mango chutney which seems very expensive at $1.75 for about 2 tablespoons worth), food was great and the service was good too – Highly recommended and it deserves the 9 points it gets on citysearch.