Siddhartha - Little India

Siddhartha

1450 Gerrard Street East

Toronto, ON

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4/10

The smell of curry engulfs the area of Gerrard Street East called Little India. Set adrift amid the smells of cumin and mustardseed, cardamom and mango powder I floated into Siddharta's All-You-Can-Eat Dinner Buffet dreaming of naan and chutney.

Alas...

Tandoori Chicken and Chicken Fried Rice

I hope you are as skeptical as I am of an Indian restaurant serving chicken fried rice. It's not as though Indian food does not have it's equivalent (if not it's better) in chicken biryani, and yet, at Siddharta there is no biryani to be found. Instead, there is this.

This is not a Pan-Asian restaurant. In the form of a gastronomic pep talk: have some self-respect and stick to what you know you can do best! How can anyone love you until you love yourself. Be proud of what is inherently 'you'. Leave China out of it. Focus on cumin, cloves, coriander, ginger and yogurt.

Good work. The tandoori chicken was okay. Not too dry for having been sitting in a chafing dish for too long. It must have been a fresh batch.

Curry Chicken

Oh how I love curry chicken. A friend once told me she had never met a chocolate she didn't like. She then proceeded to eat a chocolate and was shocked to discover that she had just made her first inanimate enemy. Fortunately this horrible disappointment did not befall me upon eating this curry chicken. I always wondered how non-vegetarian Indian buffets could possibly make a profit, as meat is so expensive. It turns out that most skimp on the meat and over-do it with the sauce. The sauce, being mostly oil and spices, is very heavy, limiting how much you can eat...well, that or how unwell you will feel later. I guarantee, however, that at the time it will seem like it's worth it.

Top: Cauliflower and Carrot Masala; Cabbage; Eggplant and Potato

Bottom: Basmati Rice; Vegetable Jalfrezzi; Chicken Curry

Call me crazy but the cauliflower and carrot masala was one of my favourite dishes. It was the only dish where I couldn't taste the oil. The masala spice blend had lots of flavour that soaked perfectly into the vegetables. The cabbage on the other hand was not a good vehicle for it's sauce. Cooked in way too much ghee, it was slimey all the way down. Despite being ridiculously rich, the vegetable jalfrezzi was my other favourite (remember my love of chicken curry), and even beat out the curry for best flavour of a sauce. If only there had been less potato and more 'anything else'. Eggplant and potato disappointed. It was kind of like overcooked mush in bland oil. Perhaps I'm just upset because there was no baigan bharta, which in my opinion would have been a much better use of overcooked eggplant.

Buffet tricks:

1) Drain excess sauce to ensure ample portions of meat and vegetables. Yes, you will want a little sauce for rice and naan but with 20 dishes you'll be eating a lot of rice if you load your plate with every dish's sauce.

2) Never, ever, ever forget the naan.

3) Start with very small portions of almost everything (the salad bar at an Indian buffet seems a little unnecessary. Who goes out for Indian to eat raw iceberg lettuce, cucumber and tomato?). Once you become a regular at the restaurant you are allowed to eat only your favourite dishes so you can have more of them, but without trying all the dishes how will you possibly know what the best ones are? All Indian buffets are not created equal and something you don't like or only sort of like at one restaurant may be completely amazing at another. You also do not want to take a large portion of something you think you'll like only to discover that this restaurant's version is awful.

So please remember the reviewer's code: NOT ALL FOOD IS CREATED EQUAL.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. If I admit to insanity, does it make it okay to go back to try dinner à-la-carte which, I've heard tell, is much better than the buffet? Or is that asking for punishment?