India Grill hits it mark in Laramie

How is it possible that Laramie now boasts two Indian restaurant? In this, a town of 28,000 people, around 20,000 of whom regularly wear cowboy hats and Tony Llamas (I really do say this with affection), what were the odds? As you know from my previous entry, I am not entirely in love with Passage to India , but India Grill, which has taken over the restaurant of Howard Johnson’s on 1561 Snowy Range Road, is really worth visiting.

The menu was a heavy, hard-cover book of choices, which can inspire skepticism. How large does a kitchen have to be to excel in six pages of dishes? With dinner prices ranging from $9.85 to $15.95 per dish, I hoped it was large enough.

My dining companion and I were waited on by an owner or the restaurant, and he was certainly attentive and sociable. He was also very confident and proud of his food, but honestly, he deserved to be. After declining chai (too heavy for my taste), we were entreated to complimentary cups, anyway. Not wanting to be rude, I tried it, though I will admit I was a bit put off to be handed something I had just said I did not want. To my surprise, it was really pleasant: milky and a bit rich, but more spiced than sweet, this chai did not interfere with the rest of my meal. It might be the best compliment to a meal of any chai I have tried.

The obligatory flatbreads and sauces were nothing special. There was a green sauce, which had a nice, bright zing to it but was heavily salted, and a brown sauce which, I am guessing, was sweet, but I could not detect much flavor from it. If something had to be dull, this was the most excusable problem.

My friend and I ordered chicken korma, saag paneer, and a dish called Bombay alu, a red curried sauce with boiled potatoes. We also ordered a side of plain naan, which was pleasantly chewy and blackened, but too thick and doughy for my taste. The korma sauce was a heavily creamed yellow sauce; cashew flavor did not seem the least bit present, but there was a strong curry powder flavor to it. The sauce was fine, and the chicken was extremely tender thigh meat, but it was not like the korma I expected.

The rest of my meal, however, was truly incredible. The saag paneer was wonderful: well-seasoned, flavorful spinach sauce with generous amounts of golden brown cheese cubes. The entire dish was lightly browned on top, like it had been run through the broiler at the end of the cooking time, and it was divine. And the Bombay alu was really terrific. The potatoes were tender and buttery, and the red curry sauce was extremely flavorful. We ordered all of our dishes “medium hot”, and the spice level was definitely present, though not overwhelming. It was just right.

I will admit that I found the fact that this Indian restaurant had taken over Foster’s Corner Country restaurant, without changing the décor, rather charming. How often does a diner get to enjoy the cowboy logo in all of its stained glass splendor while sipping chai and munching naan? And although I was not really looking for a conversation with my mouth full of food, the care and pride the owner showed in his business was heartwarming. Most importantly, this food is good, and though the restaurant is a little off the beaten path in Laramie, it was well worth the trip.

No, Laramie does not yet have a sushi restaurant

(A less snarky, more corporate-friendly version of this review can also be found here, at one of my day jobs.)

Since opening on January 13, 2010, Mizu Sushi has created a buzz as Laramie’s newest food offering and, let’s face it, the only sushi place from here to Fort Collins. Students and professionals breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of having fresh Japanese right here in town, but sushi is only a treat when it’s good, and this is where things get complicated.

Owned by an interior decorator and his family, the unfinished cement floors, striking wall colors, and ambient lighting win Mizu plenty of cool points. The sleek white table settings are attractive, too, but the leaf-shaped dipping dishes are too narrow to accommodate some of the larger sushi roll pieces, making it impossible to season your bites. The sleek soy sauce bottle is equally pleasing to the eye, but ours leaked every time we poured. Aesthetics, 1; functionality, 0.

The hot tea, called a jasmine, was certainly like no jasmine I’ve ever had; brown and nutty, with a slight vegetal taste, it grew on me. The miso was familiar and comforting. Nigiri sushi was really where Mizu shined: my table ordered tuna, albacore, salmon, and snapper. All seemed fresh, with tender, buttery textures, and distinctive, mild flavors. The seaweed salad was also incredibly fresh and light, with a bright flavor contributed by the brilliantly balanced sesame dressing. The julienned diakon and carrot underneath the seaweed was a nice touch.

Unfortunately, the sushi rolls all suffered from uneven, off flavors and were so loosely rolled that they fell apart while we struggled to fit them into our too-small dipping dishes. The spicy tuna had black pepper as its spice base; like the jasmine tea, this was surprising, but not terrible. But the salmon skin roll, besides being cut into huge pieces, sported some very rubbery, fishy salmon skin. It was not fried or crisped in any way. And the veggie roll, also enormous, was dominated by pickled carrot and pickled diakon, completely obliterating the milder tofu skin, lettuce, celery, cucumber, and seaweed. The effect was a very strong cabbage flavor. The baked mussels tasted like pizza: lots of cheese with a spicy red sauce on top.

If my list of dishes seems out of order, it reflects the service. The service was friendly and prompt upon arrival. I had so many waiters, I didn’t know who to summon when I needed someone. And things were so prompt that the food came out too quickly and out of order. While we were still eating our salad and soup, the spicy tuna roll came, all by its lonesome. Then a while later came the veggie roll, followed five minutes later by our mussels appetizer, and finally the salmon skin roll. That was the end of the attention for quite some time. Upon finishing the meal, we waited 20 minutes for checks. No tea refills, no water. They were done.

I was done, too. I can suggest Mizu Sushi for the simple, unadorned items on their menu—the nigiri and the seaweed salad would have made my night if I had stopped there. But the more complicated dishes are not quite ready for public yet. And with rolls running $8 to $16, you want to wait until they get it right.

Passage to India satiates…I guess

As a sometimes resident of Laramie...a review of the latest offering.

I had been out of town for a week and the most amazing thing had apparently occurred in my absence: Laramie got an Indian restaurant. Had hell frozen over? Had the entire town of Fort Collins disappeared, requiring us to recreate it here? Finally, I could walk to my very own plate of saag paneer without the treacherous drive over a mountain pass to Colorado! Apparently everyone else felt the same way; what had originally caught my attention as I entered town was the line that wrapped around the front of the restaurant and trickled off the sidewalk into the gravel pit next door. So, obviously it was time to investigate.

Let me just say that I love, love, love Indian food. I really did make that trip to Fort Collins too often to recount in service of my hankering for oily naan and special egg curry. I wanted to believe that this place would be amazing—I was practically reciting a cheer for them as I approached the building. They certainly had the down-home Laramie thing figured out. In the four days they had been open, they had already gotten to know my friends and colleagues by name and were anticipating their drink orders. Smart move. When you feel like an insider, you are more likely to forgive minor indiscretions; at least, my friends did.

We were cheerfully seated and our drink orders were taken immediately. Good. Brittney Spears or some such crap was playing loudly in the foreground. Bad. Is it odd that I want to hear music from the home country when I visit an ethnic restaurant? I am learning about an important aspect of your culture by eating your food—give me more! Teach me about music, traditional table settings, and methods of eating! I don’t think that anyone, even in Laramie, who is interested in sampling Indian food would be averse to hearing something exotic while they chew.

The chai was heavily spiced, very rich, and very sweet. This is what I have come to expect from Indian restaurants in America, so it was familiar, at least. Just for the record, I’d love to enjoy a little more of the tea flavor some day, and run less risk of filling up on my beverage before the food even comes, but my friends capitalized on the free refills all night. Give the people what they want. Next came some cracked breads with various chutneys: the green was medium hot and very tangy (my favorite), the red was blazingly hot (no one had seconds of that one), and the plum-based sauce was thick like molasses and quite sweet. It was fine.

Food took a while to come out, but in less than a week of work, I don’t expect that they entirely have their rhythm down yet. We waited 40 minutes, which would have been perfectly fine if the music had been better. We ordered naan, aloo saag, shrimp curry, chicken tandoori, and paneer korma. The naan was lovely, pillowy and oily with just the right amount of black bits on it to taste a bit of the griddle. And the korma sauce might be the best I have ever had. It was rich and creamy, with just the right balance of sweet and salty, perfectly blended to obliterate any evidence of cashews in texture. I greatly appreciated the generous number of paneer cubes; too often, paneer dishes are mostly sauce with very little cheese. There was enough in this that the paneer really could stand in for a meat. It was pure bliss.

This, however, is where my happiness ended. Nothing was horrible, but nothing else was worth the effort of putting on shoes and paying between $12 and $15 per dish, either. The tandoori contraption was reminiscent of those sizzling fajita plates in Tex-Mex places—much more style than substance. But when the sizzling died down (and after my friend smoked her finger on the edge of the plate), what we were left with was tender but bland chicken, a huge pile of raw white onion, and some lemon slices. This dish should be cleaner and more focused on technique, I realize, but a little attention to seasoning would have helped. The shrimp curry had a similar effect: we ordered “medium” spice level, but I had difficulty tasting much of anything from the sauce, spicy or not. What I did taste was shrimp, and it was an overwhelming flavor of fishiness that made me wonder just how old these babies were. They were also like rubber, a common mistake in a busy kitchen—shrimp just don’t stand up to long cooking times. It is possible that the curry sauce had more flavor than I could detect around the shrimp, but this particular meat choice made for a rather unbalanced dish.

The biggest disappointment of the evening for me was the aloo saag. I love a good saag sauce, but spinach does seem to require attentiveness in seasoning—use too little too early in the process, and every bit of flavor is just absorbed into the greens and it disappears. What we ended up with was a mouthful of heavy (the cook was generous with the cream), bland, and watery spinach. And it really tasted like nothing except spinach. I fished around for quite some time to find a piece of potato, and it, too, was entirely lacking in seasoning. So, the dish which, to my mind, requires the most salt, and which benefits the most from layers of spices, seemed to get the least of anything. And then the kicker: a brilliant blue rubber band, discovered by my friend, buried in a mound of spinach glop. Everyone was very gracious about it—soon after reporting the problem to our waiter, the manager came over and apologized, removed the dish from our ticket, and brought us more naan (hurray!). The chef came following on the manager’s heels to personally apologize. He reported that he had just fired the sous chef who was the last to handle our saag, which is really a little much for my taste, but their concern for our happiness was certainly a good approach.

Passage to India is a welcome new flavor in Laramie’s local cuisine, but in a more urban area it wouldn’t stand for long. If our new neighbors want to survive our fickle and easily bored population, they’ll have to make sure the food itself is more compelling than the mere idea of the Indian restaurant. We are, after all, still accustomed to driving to Fort Collins on weekends.