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The Great India Buffet Tour: India Garden in Oakland

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Last Sunday night marked the fifth stop on our Great India Buffet Tour of the Pittsburgh area, to take advantage of the Deluxe Dinner Buffet at India Garden on Atwood Street.

Indian Garden OaklandThis was by no means my first visit to the India Garden in Oakland (nor was it Sabrina’s or Nik’s), a venerable institution of cheap spicy eats for the college crowd that has been around since my own college days. I’ve been there before for the late night half priced special, as well as to the lunch buffet on a non-Great-India-Buffet-Tour-related trip.

The evening started with a modicum of confusion. Seeing from the website that the dinner buffet was offered on Sunday night, and that dinner was served until 11:00pm, we naturally assumed that an 8:00 start time for dinner was not a problem. But as we sat and chatted, the waiter confirmed that we were getting the buffet and informed us it would be closing at 9:00pm. Okay… certainly not fatal to our evening, but that would have been nice to know on the website so that we did not risk planning a prohibitively late dinner.

Taking in the buffet, we decided that on the scale of size, this buffet fell somewhere on the scale of smaller than Taj Mahal but larger than Coriander, effectively making it the second largest buffet we have visited so far. There was a wide selection of vegetable curries, including favorites such as Saag and Vegetable Korma. There was a potato and chickpea curry, a yellow dal, a vegetarian Sambar curry and a mattar paneer. There were two chicken curries, as well as a shrimp and a goat curry, making for an impressive non-vegetarian selection. In addition, there were some dry vegetables, and a salad bar with an array of chutney and pickle, but I didn’t avail myself of any of these, save for some hot red pepper sauce.

My favorite item on any India buffet is the Saag (aka the palak, depending on some difference of regional dialects of which I know nothing, or so I presume). That night the saag was served with mushrooms, which was a first in my experience, but certainly no less agreeable than any saag with chicken, paneer, lamb, chickpeas or potatoes (moreso, actually, than the potatoes) I’ve had in the past. It can hold its own against any saag in the city. The vegetable korma was tasty, and no objections were raised on the consistency, as they were at Coriander. The chickpea and potato curry and sambar curries were tasty enough, the yellow dal was nothing special, and the mattar paneer was better than average, as I am usually extremely underwhelmed by mattar paneer, and this one I found okay (though, didn’t encounter any paneer).

The highlight of the buffet was within the meat section. I didn’t try any of the shrimp curry, but Nik highly recommended it (I was too full by that point to go back just to try the shrimp). There was a goat curry offered, but I don’t recall that any of us tried it… mostly we were enamored of the Chicken Chettinad. I have had chettinad from a few Indian restaurants in the past, but it is not a terribly common Indian Restaurant menu item, and this is the first time I have seen it on a buffet. It is a flavorful and fragrant curry which relies on many of the brown spices, such as cinnamon, clove and black cardamom. It was, by far, mine and Sabrina’s favorite item on the buffet. The other chicken offering, the more predictable Tikka Masala, was enjoyable. It was a particular favorite of Nik’s.

The dessert selections were limited: a fruit salad and a rice pudding. I was the only one who availed herself of dessert, enjoying two small helpings of the refreshingly sweet and spiced rice pudding.

A table-wide assessment of the Buffet Tour thus far resulted in the India Garden dinner buffet ending up a solid third on the list. The quality was good, we found, enough to trump Taj and Taste, despite the enormity of the Taj buffet, but it still came in behind Coriander and Tamarind, which remains our leader several stops into the tour after pulling ahead as the early front runner.

The Great India Buffet Tour: Coriander India Grill

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After a long cold winter (well, January and February at least) of struggling to summon the ambition to venture out for any reason, let alone for India Buffet, we finally made a date to check out our next stop on the tour, Coriander India Grill in Squirrel Hill. It was a day only a Pittsburgher could love, 50’s and drizzling, it even inspired two guest critics to come along for the ride: Nik, an India Buffet aficionado and Millvillian, and Jay, an Asian food enthusiast and Squirrel Hill denizen.

Coriander India GrillCoriander Grill is exactly what you would expect, in terms of decor, and then some. The outside and inside plaster wall surfaces are smothered in a lime green color (perhaps “cilantro green” would be more appropriate), which is, perhaps, overkill, but the booths were clean and comfortable, and water served in heavy faux-cut crystal goblets. The lunch buffet at Coriander is offered every day, and a dinner buffet is served on Tuesday and Sunday evenings. The cost is reasonable, being $7.99 during the week, and jumping only to $8.55 on the weekends.

Taking in the scope of the buffet, it became apparent that Coriander’s offerings were more extensive than most, but not quite so gargantuan as the buffet at Taj Mahal. The salad/dessert bar section had a wide variety of chutneys and pickles, including the expected tamarind and mint, as well as the not terribly common coconut. Rice and naan provided the standard starches. Onion pakoras proved to be a crispy appetizer. The meat selections were just as standard as the starch: chicken curry, tandoori chicken, chicken tikka masala. The vegetarian selection, though, came as a pleasant surprise in its extensiveness. There was mattar paneer, chana saag, an inviting dal, vegetable korma, spiced mixed vegetables and cauliflower. The highlight of of the curry selection was a dish off to the side of red chili paste, very useful for raising the heat level on mild buffet offerings.

Coriander GrillAs we dove into our teeming plates of buffet gleanings, we quickly reached a consensus that the taste quality of coriander’s food was a cut above. There was something intriguing about the taste of each dish. Flavors bespoke fresh ingredients and well-tuned spice mixes. So often buffets rely on over-salting to lend taste to food that does not arrive immediately at the table, but in every dish at Coriander, the salt flavor was low and the spices rang at a good pitch. The pakoras were crispy, but the coconut chutney, while tasty, was uninspired. The saag was one of my favorites, as I am a particular fan of saag, and Nik agreed that it exceeded ordinary Indian restaurant saag. The spinach was still quite green, not too dark and overcooked. The chicken tikka masala was definitely a few flavor levels above typical, a danger that faces any buffet vat of tikka masala since it is practically a requirement. I was even impressed by the mattar paneer, which I didn’t get until my second trip, since mattar paneer is among of my least favorite curries. Sabrina detected a pleasantly sour whisper of vinegar in many dishes, and happily attributed it to the Goan influence that she has noticed on the regular menu, as she frequents Coriander for non-buffet dinner. The dal was a favorite among all the guests at our table, and everyone agreed its appeal lay in its likeness to an Indian-style chili.

Coriander SpecialtiesThe biggest controversy of the day came from the vegetable korma. I enjoyed the flavor of this dish and I was happy to taste a highlight spice—my guess was cardamom—which set it apart in good contrast to the other dishes. However, the korma did suffer one pitfall; it’s a common danger that plagues the preparation of korma, that because of the nut pastes used in its preparation the curry sauce dries out easily, and so water or milk must be added frequently as long as it stews over the fire. Sabrina and Jay agreed that the flavor of the korma sauce was not enough to outweigh their distaste at the pudding-like consistency.

After eating, the table discussed our selections; Sabrina and I compared the experience to our previous buffet stops and we solicited the input of our fellow lunchers that day. Coriander got points for variety, being larger than any other buffet we visited, save the Taj Mahal (what is the appeal of the buffet, after all, if not to sample a plethora of dishes), but it also got points for taste quality. We easily agreed that the flavor of Coriander’s food was second only to the buffet at Tamarind. In the end, we decided that taste trumps size, and so we placed Coriander second to Tamarind in the scheme of buffets we’ve visited so far.