Curry Shop; Applebee's

A friend of mine who lives in Park Slope said for years that when someone finally opened a decent Indian restaurant in the neighborhood, they'd clean up. Now someone has, and indeed they will. Curry Shop is even better and more potentially successful than my friend imagined.

It's an expansion of Chip Shop, the authentic British fish and chips (and sides and puddings) place that opened on Park Slope's 5th Ave. to universal acclaim early in 2000. Curry Shop is next door and connected. The new room is smaller, and it has a bar. Its walls are red while Chip Shop's are yellow. Even from the sidewalk across the street, though, there can be no doubt that the two restaurants comprise a duo. They share a takeout window around the corner and, presumably, a kitchen.

If you're wondering what fish and chips have to do with curry, you must have never been to England. Let me explain: You know how anywhere you find yourself in the United States you can go out for Chinese food or pizza, and you'll know, in either case, without looking at a menu, what's offered and what it will look like, pretty much? That is the end of the explanation.

The fish and chips at Chip Shop is as much what it's supposed to be as a pie from your favorite New York pizza joint. They proved what can be done an ocean away. British expatriates note that the dishes cost a few dollars more than they would over there, but that simply doesn't matter when playing to an audience who grew up under the impression that Friendly's "Fishamajig" represented the state of the art.

With curry, you'd think it'd be a whole different story. Because we have good curry here. Indian restaurants aren't strange or exotic anymore. But that's exactly why Curry Shop is going to be a smash hit. It's the competition that still offers Indian food as if it were strange and exotic. Curry Shop is the first New York Indian (or Pakistani) restaurant that presumes a measure of experience. The assumption is not that you're an expert on the cuisine, but that you already know what you like about it.

They make five curry sauces, listed on the menu in order of spiciness. You choose one and a meat (or vegetables only), and either bread or rice (the server never tries to sell you both, as is custom at every other casual Indian restaurant in the city). The food arrives in the familiar metal pots, which provided the name for this a la carte dining style in Britain: balti. That we in America got the little covered buckets but not the phrase "balti style" suggests that our Indian restaurants had a slightly different template, and this might explain why Curry Shop's owner thinks New York's doing curry all wrong. Or it could be that we're simply behind. That would make sense, considering that English colonials and subjects invented most of the sauces we know today as "Indian"?usually, legend has it, by applying ancient regional spice strategies to Heinz products.

Curry Shop's masala is a thick and herbacious tomato soup, really too rich to be termed "mild," though it's toward that end of the restaurant's five-sauce spectrum. Taste it with the restaurant's tender chicken tikka and you might come to believe that the E. 6th St. sort of Indian restaurant is on its way to extinction. Even if those East Village places chilled out on the overwrought decor, cloying music and insincerely solicitous waiters, it'd only make it easier to perceive that the cooks are more or less betting that their customers never tasted a cube of meat that was well-marinated and carefully baked.

Going meatless at Curry Shop gets you a medley of broccoli, potato, peas, carrots and unusually tasty cauliflower in the sauce of your choice. We tried it with the medium one, Madras. It seemed to be a kitchen-sink concoction (in India, Madras is not a sauce but a region where many spices are grown), with some peppery heat, cooling dashes of clove and cinnamon and a nice fruity tang. A little generic, but balanced enough to satisfy. The sauces at Curry Shop are oily, but they lack typical low-end curries' buttery greasiness?an authentic subcontinental texture that doesn't translate well at all.

If you can withstand above-medium spiciness, definitely choose Curry Shop's hottest sauce, their vindaloo. It's got a lively sizzle that doesn't interfere at all with powerful notes of tomato and onion. Instead of crazy burn, expect gradually mounting pseudo-pain that allows you to eventually taste with your entire body. And of course it makes a frothy pint even more pleasurable than normal. I tried the vindaloo with regular chicken, which was fine though it underscored via counterexample the expertise behind the tikka.

Curry Shop's second-hottest sauce is just called balti, and it was the brownest and most heavily spiced of the lot. I think it needs a tweak. Trying it with beef, I couldn't help but imagine I was eating English potato and onion stew dressed up in Eastern garb. It definitely didn't help that the beef was from a tasteless, stringy rump cut. If Curry Shop's owner were to ask me, I'd first praise him for breaking stride with New York's other curry restaurants, then suggest that in this case he conform to the local (usually Hindu-run, hence no beef) norm and offer lamb.

He should look toward Little India for one other reason as well: Curry Shop's nan bread sucks. It's completely tasteless, and too flat to work well as a sponge for sauce, which is odd because traditional balti-style service doesn't involve utensils or rice?just bread. Until theirs improves (Curry Shop should buy nan in bulk from some Indian bakery in Jackson Heights if they can't bake it much better), opt for Curry Shop's yellow basmati rice, which is long-grained and nutty but not too dry.

For appetizers, it's funny to get both the coronation chicken and tandoori shrimp salads, because what shows up echoes the dual restaurant scheme perfectly. The coronation features chunks of chicken breast coated in bright yellow sauce; the shrimps are scarlet like the curry side of the room. Both come in good counts on beds of fresh baby greens, with a very light creamy dressing. Coronation sauce is apparently a thickened mixture of mustard and mayo, blended with lovable British enthusiasm and respect for what works. The tandoori shrimps, meanwhile, are spicy enough that with any more chili the appetizer would have to be listed as not for everybody. Another starter gringo-bellies should shy away from is Curry Shop's excellent samosas?even the veggie ones induce a sweat.

Curry dishes are $8-$11. Those two huge salads are $5-6 each. For dessert there's a decent mango lassi (shake), and Chip Shop's array of bizarre British sweets (notably spotted dick; almost as notably the deep-fried Mars bar) can also be ordered from beyond the yellow room. In fact, anything off either menu can be enjoyed on either side of the Curry Shop/Chip Shop dividing wall. If you were making a mint serving calzones and lo mein in Liverpool, you'd probably do it the same way.

Curry Shop, 383 5th Ave. (6th St.), Brooklyn, 718-832-7701.

Applebee's: Far From the Tree

T o become the greatest new-restaurant success in the borough, Curry Shop would have to surpass Downtown Brooklyn's Applebee's. The franchise opened a few months ago at the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush Aves., in the space formerly occupied by an unclean-looking diner called For Goodness Steak. Immediately, the new "family style" joint asserted itself as serious competition to one-of-a-kind neighbor Junior's, a generations-old Jewish diner with a loyal African-American clientele. The Applebee's crowd is also majority-black by a landslide. For some reason, middle-class urban black people love family chain restaurants. The new Applebee's is packed to the gills every evening with office workers drinking enormous rainbow-bright cocktails. On weekends, families and teenagers wait up to an hour for a table.

You might think, judging from the restaurant's instant popularity, that someone in Applebee's corporate office is very much in tune with the taste of Brooklyn's community of color. But you only might think that if you're deaf. See, the "festive" atmosphere of Applebee's is introduced via music amplified from a speaker above the front door, blasting out onto the sidewalk. The program for the first couple of weeks after the grand opening was K-Rock lite all the way?exclusively modern rock of the Creed/Third Eye Blind/Matchbox Twenty variety. (Applebee's is headquartered out of Kansas.) For a while they switched to Nelly/Justin Timberlake pop, as if someone had caught on, but soon Applebee's reverted.

And now it's getting worse. Recently, a particularly big after-work crowd was squeezed into Applebee's, enjoying cheap and fruity drink specials as usual. Very near everyone in the place was on the young end of middle age and black. There were colorful posters up, advertising that this was a special night?obviously something meticulously planned in a Kansas boardroom: "Retro Night." Tonight's theme? The 80s. The music blasting out from the place? "Broken Wings."

A friend of mine has an infant son who plays this educational CD-ROM. You match the sound you hear to one of the pictures you see. I'd love a chance to show an Applebee's executive that night's scene at Flatbush and DeKalb?of 100 black Brooklynites getting their drink on to Mr. Mister. It was like watching a duck meow.

Applebee's, 395 Flatbush Ave. (DeKalb Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-834-0800.