Restaurant review: Spice Bistro delivers Indian flavor with steakhouse style
Restaurant review: Spice Bistro delivers Indian flavor with steakhouse style
Review » Holladay/Salt Lake City restaurant Spice Bistro Indian Restaurant wins with a dual menu.
| For The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published May 12 2012 06:47 pm • Last Updated May 12 2012 06:47 pm
Holladay • To the best of my knowledge, Spice Bistro is a one of a kind restaurant in Utah. Imagine the scenario: You and your companion are ready to dine out. Both of you are hungry and ready to leave the house — you crave Indian food, your partner doesn’t.
At this point fisticuffs are one option to settle the debate, but Spice Bistro offers a more amicable solution with a menu of more than 100 items mixing both Indian and American cuisine.
To deliver on that menu, Spice Bistro runs two completely separate kitchens, with as many as four chefs per kitchen on busier weekend nights, and your dish may pass through both kitchens. In the case of a dish such as Steak Curry ($15.95), the dish starts over on the American side of operations before being completed in the adjoining Indian kitchen.
The expansive kitchen setup is understandable when you survey the large and open dining space, which used to be home to Yorgio’s. On arrival, diners are greeted by a host in the lobby area before being led to the main dining room — a large, dimly lit room, neutrally decorated, that appears more like a steakhouse than Indian restaurant. On the left, there’s a full bar, while the whole room is framed by large windows looking out to the exterior courtyard for al fresco dining and outdoor events.
Eager to test the chops of the Indian chefs, I began with an order of two vegetable samosas ($4.95). I was happy to discover these were well executed, as good as any I’ve had around town — perfectly crisp fried pastry shells packed with mildly seasoned potato. Chicken pakora ($5.50) were a surprising revelation. These battered and fried morsels of chicken can be mushy, greasy or heavy, but here they were exquisitely light and moist, perhaps the best in town.
The creamy delights of a lamb kurma ($15.95) didn’t disappoint, thanks to a rich orange sauce with a generous serving of mostly well-butchered tender lamb. The only downside was that in order to mop up that delicious sauce with fluffy Naan bread, you have to pay an extra $2.25 per side of bread (rice is included as standard).
A vegetarian biryani ($11.95) was the most lackluster dish I sampled. What can be a fragrant, textural treat was actually an underwhelming bowl of mushy rice and equally mushy vegetables. Instead, I found much more luck with the some of my favorite vegetarian curry dishes.
Saag paneer ($11.95) packed some of the freshest Indian paneer cheese I’ve tasted into a lush creamy sauce tempered by bitter spinach. Bhindi aloo ($10.95), a curry composed of okra, potatoes, onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes, hit the spot, and at Spice Bistro, the designation of hot does mean hot. A dessert of kulfi ($4.95), pistachio and cardamom-inflected Indian ice cream, was the perfect way to cool off at the end of the meal.
Of course, you can also cool off from the full bar, too, featuring wine, beer and signature cocktails. In addition to the usual domestic and Indian beers such as Kingfisher ($5) or Taj Mahal ($8), you can choose from several house cocktails, such as the crisp Mojimlet ($7.00, rum, lime, coriander, nectar and sprigs of cilantro) or tart Desert Hound ($6.00, fresh grapefruit, vodka, grapefruit bitters). For non-drinkers, there are sodas, juices ($2.50), Creamy Chai ($2.95) and Lassi ($3.95).
On the American side of the menu, the approach is confusingly scatter shot. Options include an array of steaks, pasta dishes, meat and fish, even fish tacos and sliders. The selection feels clumsy, attempting to satiate as many possible dining desires as possible, rather than paring down to a core of steakhouse selections. Indeed, the filet mignon ($32.95) I ordered on one visit was not only cooked precisely to temperature, but was tasty, only partially let down by a side of limp tempura green beans and a bland melange of corn, green beans and peas.
