Tamarind
Avtar Walia sent an appetizing plate of vegetable fritters to my table when he saw me in his restaurant. The owner of Tamarind is a charmer. He originally met me not as a restaurant reviewer but as a neighbor. Specifically, I was a neighbor who spoke at a community board meeting against his proposed plan for a sidewalk expansion. His request was denied, over the objection of one board member who suggested that Mr. Walia deserved what he was asking for because he seemed classy. The appetizer move seemed classy too. Ursine and white-haired, with a mustache that appears friendly and a fragrance of quality musk cologne, the restaurateur has a vague air of royalty.
Part of Tamarind's mission is to elevate the typical solicitousness of Indian restaurants to the point where it feels genuinely aristocratic. That explains why the owner is always in the dining room, scanning the crowd, smiling at diners and taking special care of whoever might require it. His grand display of manners is so classic it's practically a novelty act. To eat at Tamarind without taking a moment to be charmed by Mr. Walia practically constitutes ordering against the restaurant's strengths.
Our gratis fritters were luckhnow ki bhajia ($5.75), which are spinach, banana and homemade cheese, battered and fried. The sauce was tomato-based, a marinara with Indian spices. The light coatings were golden and crisp. Still, these were common bar snacks and they didn't exactly cast a spell.
The dark side of Tamarind's magisterial personality is a certain imperiousness. I'm not the type to speak out against businesses, especially restaurants, at community board meetings. Trying to negotiate with Mr. Walia is what drove me to it. Starting from the day after Tamarind's very positive Times review, the restaurant drew crowds. Most nights, they spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the building we shared, and caused nuisances that simple and routine actions by the owner would have managed. He refused to take them. I assumed he thought the crowds were good for his restaurant's image.
They probably were. Tamarind sets its sights on young, moneyed diners. Upon being seated, our party was presented with one of those lounge-style cocktail lists comprised exclusively of absurd concoctions for people with no taste. The little menu omits prices, a practice that borders on predatory, given that no one on a date would want to inquire before ordering. The wine list is long but uninspired. Tamarind's room hits the same sour note. The space used to house the rear end of a Woolworth's, and though serenely decorated and skylit, it still feels a bit like a warehouse. The raised booths along the side are private, but the view from there only makes the layout of the floor resemble a corporate cafeteria even more than it actually does. New-age Eastern music again whines "fancy" without being so.
Our other appetizers gave us hope that Tamarind's chef might provide the promised sophistication. Raj kachori ($5.75) was a delicious cold chickpea salad with tamarind sauce. The flavorful beans came in a puffed fried bread, a sort of poori. Oddly, Tamarind's menu describes the dish as "Chickpea-filled flour patties," mentioning neither poori nor coldness. But our kachori was so good we only shrugged at the misinformation.
She-crab soup ($7.50) with sweet spices, ginger juice and saffron didn't taste as complex as all that, but it imparted a pleasingly powerful crab flavor that hung 10 on every yellow spoonful, at once sparking demand for another and another. The problem with the soup was its aftertaste. It rode out the same way hefty saffron sauces in cheap Indian restaurants tend to?lingering as if the back of the tongue had just absorbed a hit of steroidal butter.
The reason Tamarind did not get its sidewalk cafe, as I saw it, was not its neighbors so much as its ambitions of grandeur. One community board member was a local bar owner. He was there to protect businesses from chronic complainers?to keep them from always being the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. He raised an eyebrow at Mr. Walia's blueprints, surprised that a proprietor would ask for dominion over such a large portion of a contested public space. Other than that, Tamarind's owner?who had experience in the business as a partner in midtown's Dawat?had the board charmed.
I remember being angry with Mr. Walia that day. But a year passed, I'd moved and now I looked forward to being on the winning side of what I took to be Tamarind's sense of service. Obviously, a host who perceives his guests as too privileged to be asked to show courtesy to his neighbors is deeply concerned about those guests' comfort. When I planned to eat at Tamarind, I expected that any lingering animosity on my part would be overwhelmed by Mr. Walia's front-of-the-room expertise, and any desire to be unduly tough on Tamarind would be offset by his knowledge that he was serving a critic.
Our first entree to arrive was the whole tandoori fish of the day ($21). It was an orata. Those have been turning up everywhere lately, with good reason. The Mediterranean fish is perfectly meal-sized, with broadly flaking white flesh that holds a lot of oil yet stays firm. In Italy they bake it with tomatoes and olive oil. At Tamarind they apparently baked it with nothing. The beautiful whole fish brought absolutely no evidence of tandoor technique besides a skin stained yellow. Even that didn't taste as if it had absorbed yogurt and spices in an 800-degree grill/oven hybrid. Something had been botched. That the plain roasted fish was still enjoyable is more of a credit to Tamarind's fish supplier, Sea Breeze?and to the orata itself?than to the restaurant.
Another tandoori selection, chicken tikka saag ($16.50), supplied the clay-oven flavor the fish lacked. Now the meat's consistency was the problem. This was a shame, because the dish's spinach and sauce were superb. The vegetable had been creamed not quite so much as to lose its leafiness, so a green fibrousness animated the redolent tomato-herb sauce. This was the complication of Indian cuisine, alive, so like nature in its bubbling surprises, with variations around every corner and all of it shapelessly fitting together, quite possibly because similar patterns spiral inside you and me. The combination of technical knowledge and spiritual wisdom in classical Indian culture is always a knockout. One must sift through thousands of imitative forgeries in order to find it
In the very same sauce, lumps of white meat chicken were more worthy of an autopsy than a entree. They'd been desiccated. The gray interiors of these nuggets molded to the molars and could only be swallowed after they'd gone to powder. I wouldn't be surprised if a chemist were to find it wasn't only a matter of taste?that misuse of the tandoori oven had somehow brought the meat's chemical composition closer to that of clay than any known fowl.
Lamb kali mirch ($17.50) was our best overall dish. The deboned lamb itself was not particularly flavorful, but at least the flesh was moist. Kali mirch is a dark brown curry with ground black pepper in the starring role. It feels slow-cooked, liable to move a diner like a sturdy old bicycle across baking Punjabi plains. By the time it's too hot, you're way out in the middle of the dish, with no choice but to press on. When my friend who'd ordered the kali mirch got to that point, he jokingly asked our busboy to douse it with his pitcher of ice water. The young man soon returned with a bowl of Tamarind's homemade yogurt. It was richly herbal, exquisitely cooling. It allowed us to merge with the busy kali merch sauce anew. And unlike our equally necessary plate of rice ($4.50), it was free.
A feature of Tamarind's menu is that its designer, Memphis chef/restaurateur Raji Jallepalli-Reiss, arranged it to favor no particular region of the country. So to balance our spicy northern entrees I ordered shrimp moiley ($22), a specialty of Madras. The menu description read "?coconut based sauce with cumin, ginger and curry leaves." Those few words are enough to indicate that Jallepalli-Reiss was on about a tropical blend that simmers into seafood and washes over the senses like a breeze. Only in Southern India exists the science of making such dramatic flavors lie down and ripple. What I was served at Tamarind was emperor's new clothes: the bland masquerading as the wondrously subtle. Why not just go heavy on the coconut and ginger, make the sauce snap up Malaysian style? It seems that whoever Mr. Walia installed in his kitchen for Tamarind's auto-pilot phase (it'd be astonishing to learn that the current crew cooked for the Times reviewer) has even himself fooled. The near-saving grace of my humdrum yellow moiley was that the fresh little shrimp in it were prime?credit again due Sea Breeze.
A dessert of kulfi pistachio ($5) was yet another example of faulty engineering. Icy sweetness, strong nuts and a dash of cardamom make for a difficult juggling act, but kulfi is a centuries-old tradition. Indians love ice cream as much as Americans do. Surely there are recipes that can be followed to ensure that kulfi doesn't come out chalky, tasting more like some ground seed-pod medicine than a treat.
I expected my visit to Tamarind to be completely unlike living above it. In fact, the restaurant does a lot to succeed but little to please. Any comfort to be found there stems from being lulled by overconfidence, and its food will rate highest with diners impressed with how highly the restaurant rates itself. It's a decent strategy for attracting the active and anxious. The royal atmosphere of true Indian fanciness, meanwhile, banishes those very distractions. Stick to the appetizers at Tamarind. The place in the Flatiron district for a festive, upscale Indian dinner is Danny Meyer's Tabla.
Tamarind, 41-43 E. 22nd St. (betw. B'way & Park Ave. S.), 674-7400.