I had a terrible Sunday buffet at Maharajah in Harvard Square yesterday. Yes, the buffet is large in size (well over twenty covered covered dishes) but small in variety and entirely lacking in taste. Where to begin?
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The station where they once offered freshly made dosas is gone, replaced by a covered dish of limp mini-dosas.
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There’s still a chaat station, but the three things I sampled there were all lacking. The pani puri lacked the intense burst of different flavors and textures you expect from well composed ones, and the dahi-wada were dense little half-balls sitting in a yoghurt sauce that had clearly been ladled on at some late stage, with no time afforded for the wadas to absorb the yoghurt and soften. The bhel-puri was reasonably tasty, but skewed unidimensionally toward hot spice, with very little of the interplay of sweet and sour flavors you expect from good versions. And these were the highlights.
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Both the tandoori chicken and the onion chutney were dyed so deeply red that I was afraid that I’d be sweating and peeing red for days after. I do not understand why Indian restaurants in the US feel that their patrons must see red. Tandoori chicken, even at ordinary places in India, is not stained this way. In any case, I could forgive the intense color if it was matched by intense taste, but here it was a substitute. It was the worst tandoori chicken I’ve had in years – and given the level of Indian food in the U.S., that’s a big achievement.
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The dal, the chole and the vegetables all valiantly competed for last place in tastelessness. It was hard to pick a loser.
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The goat in the goat curry was uniformly tough. (Serving tough meat seems so easy to avoid that it always astonishes me how restaurants achieve this.)
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The naan was edible when hot, but thin and tasteless otherwise, more roti than naan.
I could go on, but why bother? Adding financial injury to the insult of the food is that the price of the buffet is now $18.80. At least that will make it easy from now on to just say no.
