Delhi Indian Cuisine

FOOD

Delhi describes the lunch buffet as a rotating spread, which is the right way to approach it. The dependable structure is more important than any single day’s tray list: several curries, basmati rice and biryani, tandoori chicken, hot naan, vegetarian and vegan choices, salad, chutneys, raita and dessert. The current restaurant menu helps explain the vocabulary behind that rotation, while familiar anchors appear, such as chicken tikka masala, biryani, samosas and meat curry. The point is variety within a recognizable framework, not a permanently fixed checklist.

At the opening end of the meal, a vegetable samosa is the easiest reference point: a crisp, triangular pastry shell filled with seasoned potato and peas. Pakora takes a different route, coating vegetables – and on the broader menu, sometimes paneer, chicken or fish – in a chickpea-flour batter before frying. Both make sense with chutneys. Mint chutney supplies a cool herbal bite; tamarind chutney is darker, fruitier and sweet-sour. Raita is simpler still: cool yogurt, often lightly seasoned, used to soften heat and add moisture beside rice and curry.

Chicken tikka masala is one of the buffet’s most approachable curries because its construction is easy to understand. The chicken is first cooked in the tandoor, the high-heat clay oven, and then folded into a creamy tomato-based sauce. That produces two things at once: roasted flavor from the chicken and a rich gravy that wants rice or naan. Tandoori chicken itself removes the sauce from the equation. It is yogurt-and-spice-marinated chicken roasted in the clay oven, so the result is firmer, drier and more charred than the curries sitting nearby.

A meat curry such as lamb changes the plate again. Instead of the creamy tomato profile of tikka masala, the meat is cooked into an onion, tomato and spice gravy with a deeper savory character. Goat curry has also appeared in Delhi’s broader buffet history and remains part of the restaurant’s regular cooking, though the daily rotation should not be assumed. These are the dishes where plain basmati rice becomes especially useful: it absorbs the gravy without adding another competing layer of seasoning.

The vegetarian side of the line is where a little translation pays off most. Paneer tikka masala uses paneer – a mild Indian fresh cheese that stays firm when heated – in the same general family of creamy tomato sauce associated with tikka masala. Palak paneer moves those cubes into a spinach-based curry instead, turning the dish greener, earthier and less tomato-forward. Chana masala is chickpeas cooked with onion, tomato and spices: substantial enough to eat like an entree, but also useful as a small spoonful beside rice.

Dal is simply the broad word for lentils, but different dal dishes do not all eat alike. Yellow dal tadka uses cooked lentils finished with a hot tempering of aromatics and spices – Delhi’s menu describes cumin, onion, tomato and chile – which gives an otherwise soft, mild base a more fragrant top note. Dal makhani is the richer cousin: dark lentils cooked slowly and traditionally finished with butter or cream. If both appear in a rotation, they are not duplicates; one is brighter and lighter, the other darker and more velvety.

Other vegetable curries can make the buffet feel far broader than the familiar orange and red gravies suggest. Aloo gobi means potato and cauliflower cooked with spices, usually as a drier vegetable preparation rather than a pool of sauce. Biryani is already a composed dish, with basmati cooked or layered with spices and vegetables or meat so the rice has flavor throughout. Delhi specifically advertises hot naan from the tandoor as part of the buffet, and it is at its best before it cools: soft, blistered flatbread with enough chew to hold together when torn through sauce.

Dessert is usually a smaller section, but the restaurant’s recurring sweets make the finish easy to decode. Gulab jamun are soft fried milk-dough sweets soaked in syrup – small, very sweet and best taken one at a time. Rice pudding, or kheer, is the gentler alternative: rice slowly cooked in milk until creamy, often perfumed with cardamom and sometimes finished with nuts. After a plate built from spice, smoke, tomato, lentils and chutney, the buffet ends not with another savory variation but with a distinctly different texture and temperature.