FOOD

How to Choose a Good Indian Restaurant

My system will better your odds of bagging a good Indian meal in an unfamiliar town

Sandeep Sreedharan
Digital Global Traveler
5 min readAug 10, 2024

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Frontage of Mumbai Magic restaurant under a residential building with a apartment above the signage. There is a small patch of greenery and a man standing on the curb.
Mumbai Masti restaurant in Dubai. Photo by Sandeep Sreedharan

I grew up in India and had the good fortune to sample the culinary delights from several of her cuisines. I have also had Indian food in various countries, including Mexico, Spain, Singapore, Nigeria and of course the US. Some have been good, a few have been awful, and a couple have been great.

Given the limited mealtimes we have in this life, one would want to go only to the good Indian places to dine.

Distilling my experiences with a drizzle of some beliefs/notions, I have now devised a system to know the good from the meh, or worse, the blech. It is not foolproof. There are exceptions to each of the rules. But it does help tilt the odds in my favor.

This is what I do to try and get to a decent Indian restaurant when I travel to an unknown city and feel a hankering for familiar flavors.

The Name

Steer clear of anything too obvious. Bombay Palace. Taj Mahal. India Palace. Delhi Spice. Karma. Namaste. Curry. Spice.

If they invoke Gandhi, run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction. Especially if they have a non-vegetarian menu — the Mahatma was a strict

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Digital Global Traveler
Digital Global Traveler

Published in Digital Global Traveler

This publication is dedicated to learning about the world around us. The topics covered here range from travel and geography to languages and cultures.

Sandeep Sreedharan
Sandeep Sreedharan

Written by Sandeep Sreedharan

Travel. Food. Expat. Immigrant. 5 countries. 3.5 continents. Curious.

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