Experience a Taste of India in This Exciting New Masala Kitchen Ed Square

On a hot summer day, the kitchen at Taste of India is way hotter. The air is heavy with exotic spice, the scent catching in your hair, on your clothes, teasing you with the promise of something delicious soon to come.

The tandoor, a deep clay oven in the back of the kitchen, radiates amazing heat, the better to turn out fragrant chickens and the crusty flatbreads that, slapped on the tandoor’s sides, bake in seconds. Not every Indian restaurant goes the extra mile of having a real tandoor in the kitchen, but for owners Sunil Yadav, 27, and Tiffany Clark, 23, going the extra mile is good business.

Even before they found a home for their new restaurant, the pair shopped painstakingly online to be sure they could afford topnotch equipment. By the time they signed a lease on the building that had formerly housed a 4th Street crêperie, they were well outfitted and ready to renovate the building. They did the work themselves, on the tight budget familiar to most first-time restaurant owners. Taste of India opened in July 2009, just two weeks

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Before the couple married. Today the restaurant is a Bloomington hotspot, its big open dining room and umbrella-shaded patio full of happy eaters, its outstanding lunch buffet packed, its carryout business booming.

The secret? It helps to have onsite parking, of course, a rare commodity on East 4th Street (or anywhere in downtown Bloomington, for that matter), but the real draw at Taste of India is the food. “Going out for a curry” might be shorthand for eating Indian food, but the cuisine is so much more complex and fascinating than the flavor often identified by Americans as “curry”—a bright yellow spice with a dull, powdery texture—would lead you to believe. “Curry” refers to dishes made with a variety of herb-and-spice blends—combinations of chilies, turmeric, cumin, fenugreek, coriander, cinnamon, and many, many more, depending on the traditional region of the dish. Yadav roasts, grinds, and mixes the restaurant’s spices himself; kitchen staff make their own yogurt and paneer (a fresh Indian cheese); and a chef from India is on duty bringing a level of authenticity that is unmistakable.

Unusually, Taste of India has not only the foods Americans are most used to finding in Indian restaurants—the tandoori dishes, the vindaloos, the tikka masalas (all excellent)—but also dosas from southern India. These lentil-and-rice crêpes are stuffed with tasty fillings and eaten with coconut chutney and sambhar (a spicy vegetable stew). Dosas are on the menu thanks to Clark, whose friends at the IU India studies program where she’s majoring had a yen for the student-friendly, affordable snack. Clark, a vegetarian, is also responsible for the restaurant’s terrific choice of meatless and vegan dishes (the latter marked on the menu with a tiny leaf), especially on the lunch buffet, which offers no less than five vegetarian choices.

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Taste of India is open seven days a week, a cause of exhaustion for its young owners, but a reason to smile for the rest of us. Find more information, and the delectable menu, at tasteofindiabtown.com.Indian restaurants are always a good choice for indulging in fried foods such as samosas and chicken and vegetable pakoras. (Photo by Jessamyn Tuttle)

If you have visited the Riverwalk Plaza in downtown Mount Vernon, perched just above (or, during flood season, slightly below) the Skagit River, you may have caught a wonderful smell of warm spices, rice and bread from a tiny restaurant at the corner of the plaza and Gates Street. That smell tells you everything you need to know about Taste of India, a labor of love by Puja and Kummar Sharma.

Taste of India has been in its current location on the Riverwalk since 2016, after a fire destroyed its previous building. When the City of Mount Vernon built the new plaza and flood wall, a small storefront was included, and the Sharmas applied for and got the space. While there is very little room for seating inside, in the summer they can roll up the garage door and set up tables out on the plaza, and there are plenty of picnic tables for takeout.

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The food is classic North Indian, with typical menu items like butter chicken, saag and biryani. Most of the entrees ($13.99–$14.99) are available with optional chicken, lamb, shrimp, vegetable or paneer (firm Indian cheese). You can request different spice levels as well, but take the higher heat levels seriously; they pack a punch.

Indian restaurants are always a good choice for indulging in fried food. Taste of India has adorable pyramid-shaped samosas ($4.99 for two), small enough to eat without destroying your appetite, crisp on the outside and filled with very creamy potatoes studded with peas. They come with a serving of tamarind mint chutney. Of the pakoras available, the chicken ($6.99) is good, basically a chicken nugget with chickpea breading, but my favorite is the vegetable pakora ($5.99), a generous hunk of deep-fried chickpea batter studded with mixed vegetables.

Of the curries, the butter chicken is a standout, with tender chicken chunks in a rich, creamy, fragrant sauce. Tikka masala is also good enough to make you want to lick out the takeout containers. The vindaloo is pleasant, but does not quite have the vinegary punch I’ve experienced in other versions. I was excited to try the kofta curry, advertised as vegetable and cheese dumplings in a spiced sauce, and was somewhat disappointed to find that, although it tasted great, the dumplings had almost completely dissolved into the sauce by the time we got the curry home. They might just be too delicate to hold up to takeout.

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 The food at Taste of India is classic North Indian, with typical menu items including butter chicken, saag and biryani. (Photo by Jessamyn Tuttle)    

Baingan bharta, a dish of fire-roasted eggplant with spices and peas, is a favorite of mine. Most versions I’ve had in the past have been pureed to complete smoothness, making it creamy and mild. Taste of India’s version is more rustic and chunky, with a strong smokiness that goes wonderfully with the eggplant, and makes a great contrast with other curry dishes. If you don’t like eggplant, you may not like this, but for the rest of us it’s a winner. Aloo gobi is milder, with the cauliflower and potatoes cooked until very tender so neither flavor dominates. Saag, a very smooth puree of spinach and spices, was a little flat-tasting the last time I had it.

I’ve always loved Taste of India’s channa dal, a spiced chickpea curry with tomatoes, since they used to serve it for lunch at the Mount Vernon Farmers Market in the early days before they had a brick-and-mortar restaurant. It’s still one of their standout dishes. Recently I also tried their dal makhani, a mixture of lentils and kidney beans with lots of onions in a dark broth. These have a very earthy flavor that, like the eggplant, complements other dishes.

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Portions are generous. One order of a meat curry, a vegetable and a dal lasted two of us for two dinners and a lunch, partly thanks to the enormous quantity of saffron-tinted basmati we received with the order. Sometimes the amount of meat or paneer seems a little scanty compared to the total amount of sauce, so you may end up quarreling with your dining partner for the last bits of lamb. The answer is to make sure to order plenty of naan, available in plain and garlic ($2.99), to soak up the sauces.

Drinks include wine, beer, soda, mango lemonade, lassi and of course hot chai. Several desserts are available, including rice pudding, gulab jamun, and (for some reason) baklava, but I have never yet eaten Indian food without being too happily full afterwards to even consider dessert.

Every town should have an Indian restaurant, and Mount Vernon is lucky to have Taste of India. I hope they will continue to make the Riverwalk smell wonderful for many years to come.Love of Food Magazine’s International series is designed to inspire you to travel, virtually that is, to some of the world’s most exotic countries. Join us as we discover the people, the culture, and most important the food. We are blessed to know so many wonderful chefs and food entrepreneurs right in our own backyard. Read on and watch as we uncover their inspiration and the secrets of their cooking techniques.

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I live near Research Triangle Park, an area in North Carolina known for being situated between three major universities. Duke, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State. In its recent report of MostEducatedCities in America, personal finance site WalletHub found that Durham-Chapel Hill was the 4th mosteducated areaout of the 150 largest U.S. metros, The technology companies that have a presence in the Raleigh-Durham area concentrate on the value of recruiting a highly-skilled workforce. Therefore we have a heavy concentration of well-educated Asian immigrants who came to the region to satisfy a demand for, technology positions.Cultural diversity is a huge benefit to the area, even outside of the walls

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