Tandoor Restaurant, Marietta GA

I’m still reeling from the closure of Moksha. I must be; there’s no other explanation for this grim lack of satisfaction in the unavailability of really good, reasonably-priced Indian food in the area. Now this obviously is the sort of thing that I could have rectified already, had I put my mind to it, and I did find Desi Spice, which is pretty good, but the honest fact is that my great enjoyment of a few Indian dishes has been consistently tempered with the persistent awfulness of the restaurants that serve them. I don’t wish to list a walk of shame, but I think you’ve all eaten at the kinds of places that turn my eyebrows. I’m talking about the ones that feature the cloth napkins and nice tablecloths under the clear plastic, with the ill-fitting tuxedos totally failing to turn a server’s disagreeable and bored demeanor into anything classy. If Atlanta’s got one too many of anything, it’s the Indian equivalents of those damn fool China-This and China-That places. I’ve really, really got to be in some more kind of mood for rogan josh to put up with that burning mediocrity of presentation.

Moksha was really nice, but it was genuinely upscale and not plastic, with gorgeous interiors brightly lit by huge windows letting in the light and a super staff of smiling and helpful servers. Heck, even the gents’ was classy. I wanted to know where the heck they bought that sink so I could install it in my own home.

There is nothing in Tandoor’s decor that I want in my home, but the experience is so many leagues preferable to the surly artificiality of the typical Indian restaurant in the region that it scores highly on my scale. The food’s all right. It’s just okay, really, but it’s priced very well and they don’t make any pretension about it. Why can’t more places be like this?

At any rate, the decor in this place is pretty darn downmarket, which is a very nice breath of fresh relief or something like that. It’s in a strip mall on Powers Ferry Road which looks like it should have been a good location once upon a time, but it’s struggling. Despite the high-end car dealer on one end, most of the spaces are vacant. In fact, the storefronts that sandwich Tandoor are both closed up.

Tandoor’s prices are very nice, but you have to navigate the menu in odd ways to make things work. They have some “combo meals” to save money and give guests a broader choice of flavors, but these come with some restrictions. The $8.99 combo comes with a vegetable dish, one curried meat, rice and naan. I found this a little restrictive, sorry to say. Based on Chloe Morris’s excellent review of this place (link dead, but where it was described, with some hyperbole, as “the best Indian/Pakistani food in the city”), I was looking forward to trying the chicken boti. Unfortunately, this dish does not qualify as one of the meats that you can get in this combo.

Hoping to maximize my dollar’s worth, I asked for the girl at the register to recommend another chicken entree. She suggested that I might enjoy the chicken karahi instead. Unfortunately (again), difficulty understanding each other meant that my request for “boneless” was not made clear. I’ve since learned that karahi is typically prepared bone-in, as this meal was. It was, indeed, quite tasty and in a very good, thick, spicy, brown sauce. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind is all.

I did get to try Chow Down’s suggestion of palak paneer, a dish that I may have only had once before. This was indeed very nice and creamy and a rich, natural green color, without any artificial additives. I won’t swear that I’d order it every time, but it was a good change from my usual routine.

It was not completely satisfying. There was far more rice than I could ever eat, at the expense of the other dishes. Yet everything was flavored so nicely that I didn’t mind much. The small, downmarket decor was not a problem, but I found myself focusing on patchy, broken paint on walls that needed a new coat. I suspect this is a popular destination for lunch; at two in the afternoon, it was still mostly full. I’m afraid I’ve still got a lot of work ahead of me trying to replace Moksha, but this wasn’t bad.

Desi Spice, Atlanta GA

It was with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to Roswell’s Moksha, which had been my favorite Indian restaurant in the Atlanta area. Well, now I’m on the lookout for something to claim its former crown, and that is going to mean eating as much Indian food as the wallet will allow. I’ll try and rise to the challenge.

Well, I exaggerate. I really don’t get out for Indian all that often, and still miss that wonderful vegetarian place in Decatur with the no-frills approach and styrofoam plates. But I’m certainly happy to keep my eyes open for something new and very tasty, and this past weekend, with Marie out of town again, I asked David whether he was free to find some grub for a Saturday lunch. The restaurant was his idea; left to me, we might have gone down to Jackson or over to Covington or someplace to fill up some of the list I’m trying to do. No matter; I am perfectly happy to stay in town and have some Indian food. There was only one obstacle: my daughter. It took this girl almost a decade to admit to liking Brunswick stew, so it’s evident that Indian cuisine is simply going to take a little longer.

I was mostly very pleased with my meal. They offer a nicely-priced lunch menu, even on Saturdays, which gets you a small appetizer, rice and dessert along with your main course. I had some mulligatawny soup with my lamb curry. I honestly won’t say that was the best lamb that I’ve ever tried, feeling a little stringier than I prefer, but the sauce was a delicious, medium hot concoction, and I liked that better than many other curries that I’ve had before. The mulligatawny had a delightful zing of ginger with its kick, but the color – a vibrant red – completely surprised me. I’ve always seen it as a yellowy orange.

Instead of soup, David had an onion pakura that he said was wonderful, and an order of chicken tikka which he shared. Much as I liked the curry, I got menu envy again, because this chicken was prepared just perfectly. It was tender and juicy and the light green sauce that came with it proved a nice, if unnecessary, accompaniment. Our desserts were the small bowl of wonderful rice pudding that I ordered, and a dish new to me, gulab jamun, a deep-fried cheese ball dipped in honey. As David felt that his blood sugar was already through the roof on Saturday, he passed that to me and darn if I haven’t found a dessert on Indian restaurant menus that I enjoy even more than rice pudding.

Well, Desi Spice is certainly very tasty indeed, and the girlchild definitely missed out by only agreeing to a stuffed paratha before decamping for the little Rita’s Italian Ice stand down below the restaurant, which was once a Bruster’s. It’s in the shopping center with the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and the Trader Joe’s. If there was only a nice trail connecting this strip mall on Monroe with the one behind it on Ponce with the Borders, then you could easily spend all afternoon here, shopping, reading, watching good movies and having a few good meals. There are a heck of a lot of decent restaurants in the neighborhood, plus a couple that I’ve been hoping to try.

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Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA (CLOSED)

“I found this amazing Indian restaurant,” Randy told me. I was skeptical. “They have an amazing lunch buffet,” he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I’ve found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an “under new management” banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don’t know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I’ve ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don’t know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I’ve tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That’s a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called “Calcutta” or “Bombay” and claim to serve “authentic north Indian cuisine,” and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called “Taj Mahal” or “Sitar” which claimed to serve “authentic eastern Indian cuisine.” The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I’m not claiming that any of it’s really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I’d still be wasting money at some “El Sombrero” place once a week.

And the buffet. Don’t get me started. It wasn’t just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.

Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner’s family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell’s many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it’s excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you’re just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don’t even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I’ll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce’s deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They’ve had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we’ve gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn’t overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren’t going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we’d spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn’t have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I’m sure we’ll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala’s creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don’t need.

Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.