In the US, at least, it seems almost every Indian restaurant, other than the top top $$$$$ fancy pancy ones which are rare, has their lunch buffet special.
Why is this? Is this for the US market? In Old Delhi, is it only menu ordering? Do Americans just demand an unlimited supply of Tandoor made food?
The restaurants usually have their menu active during lunch as well, but I never see anyone order from it. Is the buffet a sucker play to get American slobs to ignore the better menu? Should we be menuing it instead of going rogue at the buffet line?
I don’t know why, but I prefer buffet. Indian food is meant to be an amalgam, a little of this, a little of that, and when you take out you usually just get one or two dishes. This way I can get dahl-roti-subzi-raita and then kheer.
It just seems to make sense that Indian meals are communal. The other night my wife and a friend of ours went to an Indian restaurant, and we each had our own meals. It felt so…wrong. A buffet feels more communal, I suppose.
A good Indian meal should have a few choices of chutneys, pickles, garnishes, etc. A buffet lets you choose those without having to get a waiter to bring huge dabba trays to your table so that you could get a spoonful of lime pickle or a few onions to sprinkle on your curry.
And as Anaamika says, there are so many good things on offer at most restaurants, you want a little of each.
If you go to a typical restaurant it takes little time to prepare say, a sandwich, a burger, pizza, french fries, chicken wings, and on and on. But the time and effort to make a dish of buttered chicken, or Tandoori Chicken, or, Chicken Tikka Masala is substantial, and you’re not going to just make individual dishes to order; you’re going to make it by the pot. So why not just put it all out as a buffet?
Just marinate them for a few hours in yoghurt and a tandoori masala, then place the dopers on skewers in your tandoori oven.
And yes, the best Indian meals are those where you have a small serving of a variety of foods, so I’d prefer a buffet rather than ordering two or three dishes from the menu.
Also, it holds up well to a serving dish*. Chinese food, even though buffet service is common, isn’t at its best when it’s out of the wok longer than 5-10 minutes. At least the deep fried things, which is a whole lot.
*Except the tandoori chicken legs always look dry. Bummer
Except my sense is that the quality of the food served in the buffet is not as good as the a la carte dinner menu. And the Indian restaurants I’ve been to charge a lot for those buffets. Ten or eleven dollars per person is typical for a lunch buffet (plus more for a soda). Meanwhile, I can go to a Chinese restaurant, order off their lunch menu and be served a spring roll, hot-and-sour soup and then an entree with steamed or fried rice for seven or eight dollars.
This is definitely true for the Indian places where I live. The buffet is okay, and being able to try several things is nice, but ordering from the menu gets you food that’s not even in the same ballpark as the buffet. Possibly a different time zone.
As Leaffan noted, many Indian dishes are made in large batches; as Annie noted, these dishes hold up well over time (though some elements may dry out); as Dewey Finn noted, the quality isn’t that great and the price is high.
All of this together equals: the lunch buffet is (mostly) comprised of the previous evenings’ leftovers. It’s just efficient restaurant management; keep waste to a minimum by charging a premium price for food you’ve already prepared under the guise of “all-you-can-eat-buffet.” All they have to do is set it out on chafing dishes and take money. If people want to order individual dishes from the menu they can, but the vast majority of patrons will show up to take advantage of the buffet. It’s a total win-win.
Indian is still a pretty exotic food to most people. Going to a buffet lowers the opportunity cost of ordering the wrong dish to near zero. If I don’t have much experience with Indian food I can not feel confident that I will order a dish I like. If I get the buffet and I take something I don’t like I can put it aside and go back for more of the stuff I do like. Thus noobs can feel safe going to an Indian restaraunt and seasoned diners can still order off the menu.
There’s an Indian restaurant near my parents’ house that lets you take whatever you want from the buffet for take-out, for ten bucks. So my mother will get some chicken tikka masala and some vegetable dish and she and my father get at least two meals each out of the single ten-dollar take-out order. What I do is to order take-out from an Indian restaurant for dinner, and, while it costs more than that (about $25-30 for two dishes), it will come with enough of the curry meat dish for two meals, enough of the vegetable dish for two meals, good rice, dal, and some raita. So easily four meals for me.
Yep, I ordered some chicken saag, rice and naan last time. I split everything in half, got stuffed for lunch then had the rest for dinner and was stuffed again. It cost under $20 even after tipping them generously.
This. My poor SO has the worst time with this when we eat Indian food w/ my family because people are eating his food. But you’re meant to have like 6 different things on your plate at any given time. I always saw the buffet as the most reasonable way to do it if you’re just with a couple people (especially white people). If you eat out with your family, then you can each order your own dishes and share around the table.
Like Annie said, most but not all things are good on a buffet. Chicken Makhani = good. Mutter Paneer = good. Tandoor chicken = dry, somewhat off.
But buffet quality won’t be as good as fresh, but at a reputable establishment (aka not India Hut) it’ll be 85% as good, IMO. Some places cough Pittsburgh India Garden cough dumb down their lunch buffet due to the high number of white people that frequent it. By “dumb it down” I mean add more grease, oil, butter, and hardly use as much spice as they should.
As with any ethnic eatery, the more people of that ethnicity eating there, the better it’ll be.
Quite true. Plus a 4th reason: for many people, their time for lunch is much more limited than at suppertime. A buffet is faster; the food is already there when you arrive. So you can eat out and head back to work without being late.
Are any modern tandooris electric? If so, some must be digitally controlled. They have a processor and some memory? Surely it’s just a question of time before one of them developes consciousness and starts posting here?