A good idea falls short
Tarka’s fast-casual Indian fare fails to deliver on staples
Tarka is such a useful idea that I really wanted to like it.
A fast-casual Indian restaurant with all prices below 10 bucks; a location in a part of the city underserved for subcontinental food; semi-service geared for no-fuss eat-in or quick takeout. All the elements seemed to be in place, right down to Indian owners who’ve had a hit with a fullservice restaurant plus five Tarka locations in and around Austin.
I hoped Tarka’s Heights edition, which opened last summer, would prove to be the kind of place I could pop into for some of my all-time favorite comfort food. Sag paneer, the subcontinental answer to creamed spinach perhaps, laced with soft, spongy hunks of pressed farmers’ cheese; or chicken tikka masala, that soothing curry in a buttery tomato bath. But it was not to be. Tarka looked promising when I pulled up to the storefront, a sleek glass box with a swooping, back-lit flange at
the roofline and a clean-lined interior that glowed persimmon and gold. Indian music filtered out onto a fenced-in patio beneath a tall tree clad in small white lights.
Inside, several cashiers took orders, which you make, in part, on a build-your-own basis: picking a curry sauce and a protein and a desired level of chile heat. (“Medium,” I was told, confers “just a spicy pop of flavor.”) You affix your plastic number card to tabletop holders, servers know where to bring your food. My order came quickly: first a very respectable mango lassi to sip while I waited, which throughout three visits remained the best thing I sampled.
Then came my first intimation of trouble: a snack of samosa chaat, the engagingly higgledy-piggledy street food, with its unappetizingly tan sauce slopped across its small plate. As I ate, I realized with mounting horror that instead of the invigorating ribbons of green chutney, russet tamarind chutney and snowy yogurt that traditionally animate the chopped-up samosa pastries that anchor the dish, it had been sloshed with a dun-colored amalgamation of all three.
Talk about bad ideas. Sure, blending mint and tamarind chutneys with yogurt saves prep time and dishware, whether for dine-in or takeout. But you lose the sharp delineation of flavors so crucial to enjoyment of these racy accompaniments: the tart, herbal twinge of mint; the deeper, sweet-sour tang of tamarind; the cool milky pop of yogurt. The whole is far less than the sum of its parts, and far less attractive, too.
“Well, it’s only $3.50,” I told myself as I fished through the stewed garbanzos and smushed-up samosa crags on my plate.
I took home my undemanding comfort staples of chicken tikka masala and sag paneer, which came with a cardboard boxful of rather clumpy, cumin-seeded rice. I regret very much to say that the chicken was mealy and shreddy enough beneath its pleasantenough tomato gravy that it seemed to have been simmered for many, many hours.
The medium-hot sag paneer held no magic for me either. The cubes of pressed white cheese themselves had a good texture, soft and faintly crumbly with just enough bounce. But the dark mesh of greens, ordered medium-spicy, turned out to be searingly hot, and I wondered why there was a red, tomatoey tint to what is usually a creamy dish. (There is an over-reliance on tomato at Tarka, I realized later.)
I ate several bites of the sag paneer and was not tempted to eat more.
That happened with more than a few dishes here. Aloo gobi, a tumble of cauliflower and potato and plenty of cumin seeds, quailed under an overload of salt. So did a lamb vindaloo in what might otherwise have been a likable hotand-sour, tomato-shot curry. The chunks of halal lamb were nice and rosy inside, but the powerful dose of salt quelled any lamb taste.
A mixed plate of chicken and lamb kabobs, too, got the salt treatment, which canceled out the fact that the meats were capably grilled. The chicken came out in much better shape than it did in that overcooked tikka masala, though.
I admired the swaggery sheep flavor in the lamb korma I ordered on another visit, but the korma itself — a creamy blend of pulverized cashew, almond and pistachio nuts — tasted off-puttingly sweet. So did malai kofta, a tomatoonion gravy over a small flock of vegetable dumplings that had a damp, mashed texture and a certain baby-food innocence I might have enjoyed had the sauce been more savory than sweet.
One of the things I’ve always liked about Indian food is that savory and sweet tend to stay in their lanes. But not here. Even the chicken tikka masala had more than a tinge of sweetness.
Yellow and red lentil tarka daal with onion, tomato, cumin and coriander was solid if unexceptional. So was a fat fried samosa, the triangular pastry enclosing an almosttoo-salty potato-and-green-pea filling threaded with lots of cumin seeds.
Take-out naan here flattens and grows lifeless as it travels and steams in aluminum foil. And one batch surprised me with a blackened, vulcanized underside. On-site, the flatbreads are somewhat better, a few gentle bubbles dotting the surfaces.
There is too much complex, beautifully modulated South Asian food in Houston for Tarka to get away with relentlessly mediocre fare, even if everything is priced below $10. The grim little list of airplanequality wines by the glass does not help matters, although the presence of an Indian beer might offer some small measure of consolation.
The company’s website makes a big deal out of freshness (its subpar biryani is “spiced to order,” for instance) and healthful vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free choices. That’s all to the good. But if the flavor isn’t there — and it’s not — why bother?