India Palace is a reliable treasure trove of exotic flavors and spices
Restaurant favored by downtown diners
Santa Fe’s India Palace opened in 1990 and claims to be the oldest Indian restaurant in the state. In recent years, four other such establishments have opened in Santa Fe alone, a couple of them offering a more contemporary or upscale experience.
We can report that India Palace is still a favorite, not least because of its lengthy menu, including a long list of meats and seafood prepared in the ultra-hot tandoori oven.
Dropping in for lunch recently, we noted that India Palace still offers its lunchtime buffet, which remains popular with many of the downtown customers who nearly filled the place over the noon hour. We were interested in picking and choosing, however, so we ordered off the menu.
We started with vegetablestuffed samosa fritters ($3.95), served with two dipping sauces. They were very good: crisply fried and laden with potatoes and peas, and, of course, laced with ginger, onions, cumin and garam masala — the all-purpose Indian blend of spices more generally used in America in desserts.
Alongside were a chile and a cilantro sauce, both of them quite hot and each in its different way a piquant complement to the (relatively!) bland fritter. We also used the sauce on our other appetizer — flat, hot and deliciously fresh whole-wheat paratha bread ($2.95).
My guest, a devotee of spicy hot food, ordered lamb vindaloo ($15.95) and specified, when the waiter asked, that she wanted it very hot. It was: I tasted only a little and very carefully. She has eaten a lot of vindaloo and pronounced India Palace’s version very good.
It was a generous serving, too — easily enough, with rice, as lunch for two. There was plenty of chunky lamb, cooked very tender in a chile-and-spice-laden tomato-based sauce. Other flavors included onion, garlic and, of course, fresh ginger. My Indian cookbook tells me that vindaloo also demands cinnamon, coriander, cardamom and mustard seeds, plus fenugreek. And vinegar!
I opted for another standard Indian dish, and a much tamer one: chicken biryani ($12.95). A biryani is a rice casserole, so what arrived was a melange of rice, vegetables and spices with plenty of chicken cut in large chunks — again, enough for two.
Tamer, though, does not mean fewer spices or a less complex flavor. Many of the same “standard” Indian spices flavor this dish of rice cooked with raisins in saffron and yogurt, including the cardamom, cinnamon, coriander seed, garlic and ginger that also were in the vindaloo, though in different proportions. No turmeric here, though, and no chiles — but still exotically delicious.
In retrospect, given the serving size and the diversity of flavors, despite the many common ingredients, I should have rounded up a couple of other guests. We could have chosen a real gamut of entrees from the menu, including something from the tandoori list, and had a taste of each. Next time!
The dessert selection is small here, but we did sample kheer ($2.95), an Asian-style rice pudding, and the mango custard. Rice pudding is an old-fashioned dessert everywhere and, in the West, typically is flavored with cinnamon. At India Palace, the menu noted saffron and I thought maybe cardamom. Different, but just as good. The mango custard ($3.50) was different, also — the custard was very liquid, more like soup. The mango flavor shone and, again, I thought that next time I’d try the other fruitbased dessert on the list: mangoes with ice cream.
Service at India Palace was good, although we could have used a little more attention to removing the entree dishes before serving dessert. The decor and atmosphere is less starchily formal than it once was, but very nice all the same. We enjoyed the clutter of pictures, statuary, carved screens and other Bollywood bric-a-brac, and appreciated cloth napery and comfortable chairs.
And we’ve always loved the hard-to-find location: India Palace is tucked in a far corner of the Water Street municipal parking lot in a crumbling adobe-style building that also has a few tables on the porch and a hidden patio tucked in the back.