Vancouver offered many tasty meals to us last week. We had been talking about having fancy Indian food, and many people had recommended Vij's to us, so our first night in Vancouver, we grabbed a cab and headed out for a late dinner...
We'd been warned that at Vij's you had to wait for a table. What we were surprised about was that they brought around food the entire time. Delicious food. (And one thing that I think may have had crickets in it, but I am trying not to think about that too much...) So we snacked on cassava fries, chappati's, etc., and had a drink and chit-chatted. Very pleasant.
We also perused the menu. And G of course honed in on two things, shrimp and lamb. I ixnayed the shrimpay but said HELLO to the lamb. So we pretty much narrowed down the menu to a few (maybe too many) choice things and waited patiently. Snacking the whole time.
We were seated after about 20 minutes, which was certainly not interminable by any stretch of the imagination. The restaurant is really modern, with a pretty casual feel despite the (much-deserved, we would discover) hype and hoo-ha.
Our waitress immediately brought us water, and G whipped out the camera and had to take a shot of it...
Ahhh... it was icy cold and wonderful!And then we ordered. We started with some amazing appetizers (which came with naan).
First up was paneer, eggplant and green bean in a tamarind curry. The paneer was so amazing. Really soft but firm, and just filled with the curry flavour...
It came with some really lovely chappati's that had green onion or something in them. They were grilled and had a really nice, slightly charred taste.We moved from there to the local mushrooms in creamy potato curry, which was served on a bed of brown rice. Wowie.
I love the bowl, and the curry. I absolutely love curry, love mushrooms, love rice, and loved every mouthful of this dish. It was subtle in it's spice, but really tremendous.G ordered one spoon of the dungeness crab in coconut and cilantro with candied beets. She said it was amazing, but the beets were HOT! The first bite was very sweet, and then the hot just hit you in the mouth on the finish. Really tasty...
Phew. You can see, we had already fallen in love with the place.
Then came the mains... first up was a chicken dish... Specialty chicken breast in clove, garlic and tomato curry with red bell peppers and shallots in yogurt masala. This was really amazing. The chicken breast was grilled and spiced, and lying on top of the dish, and the curry had pieces of chicken thigh that was amazingly tender and flavourful...
It was so wonderful... I really enjoyed the lightness of the curry, and the grilled chicken was just amazing...It also came with naan...
And you can see the basmati peeking in the corner of that photo...
We also ordered the house specialty, the Wine marinated lamb popsicles in fenugreek cream curry on turmeric spinach potatoes.
Oh. My. G-d. This is a must eat dish. It's beyond amazing. I bought the Vij's Cookbook JUST so that I can make this recipe at home. It's just unlike anything I have ever tasted...
I mean, honestly. Wow. The sauce is just so rich and light and creamy, with the potatoes (which you can't really see, but trust me, they're in there) were tender and flavourful. The grilled lamb was absolutely perfectly cooked with hardly any game-y flavour. I hope when I try this out at home, it turns out a tenth as good as this... I will let you know.
In addition to all the grub above, I had a beer and G had a ginger lemon drink. Our bill came out to around $75, which was a steal for the amazingness of the whole dinner. I couldn't get over how amazing it was... we raved about it everywhere we went.
But it was just the first of many great dinners. Stay tuned....
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