From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published June 13, 2007 Nirvana 2$ Uptown:4308 Magazine. 894-9797 Lunch and dinner Tues.-Sun. AE DC DS MC V http://www.insidenirvana.com Indian. The late Har Keswani opened the first Indian restaurant in New Orleans back in the early 1980s. Five restaurants later, his son Anjay finds himself in the same market position his dad did. Nirvana and his much smaller Taj Mahal in Metairie are the sum total of Indian cookery in our midst. Nirvana came back from the storm less good than before. That was a common phenomenon, of course, but it seemed more pronounced here. For many months, even the bare-bones menu they offered wasn't up to snuff. Things have changed, however, and not only is the menu at pre-storm extensiveness, but many new dishes have been added. The restaurant occupies a spacious room in the old commercial strip on Magazine near Napoleon--right across from the police station. The place is comfortable and distinctly Indian in design and furnishing, while still somehow keeping a New Orleans feeling. When the weather is tolerable, some people dine on the small patio in front. The kitchen has at it heart a tandoor--the claypot oven that gets fired up to an extremely high temperature, the better to roast long skewers of meats, poultry, and seafood. Nobody has ever done better tandoori chicken than the Keswanis. The chicken is somehow both tight in texture and moist, and the flavor is terrific. One of the best new appetizers comes from the tandoor. The paneer shashlik sounds unlikely: it amounts to a cheese shish kebab. The sauce slathered on the homemade cheese, onions, and bell peppers is spicy and good, however, and the cheese doesn't melt but gets darkly browned at the outside. Anjay told me he's thinking of taking it off, but I hope he doesn't. Also good as a tandoori appetizer is seenk kebab, which is similar to what the Middle Eastern restaurants call a kafta: a crude lamb sausage on a shsih, rendered custy in the tandoor and served on a sizzling plate. Unless you're a fan of Indian cooking, it's likely that you have the wrong idea of curry, the most famous form of Indian cookery. A curry is not so much a flavor or set of ingredients as a form. It's chunks of almost any kind of food cooked in almost any kind of sauce, emerging with a stew-like consistency. Nirvana makes so many variations on curry that the curry section of its menu is a chart, six rows by five columns. That's thirty variations on curry--see what I mean? The sauces range from the familiar ruddy, tomato-and-onion kind with the heavy use of custom-blended spices (no self-respecting Indian restaurant uses curry powder) to the intensely spicy vindaloos to the sweet, mild, Chinese-style katha metha teeka curry. You can get any of this with chicken, fish, shrimp, lamb, or vegetables. My own favorites are lamb rogan josh, a rather hot concoction made with rendered lamb fat in the sauce; the chicken or lamb saagwala, whose sauce has a base of creamed spinach and butter; and the shrimp Manchurian, with a sauce heavily imbued with garlic.   The most popular dishes here involve chicken. The tandoori chicken is constantly emerging frm the chicken, of course. Two other good ones are the foil chicken, a rich flavor of the tenderst chicken you may ever eat, with a sauce of butter and tomatoes. They make a range of biryani dishes, explaining them as Indian jambalaya. They're mostly basmati rice, flavored with cardamom and deeply-browned onions, plus chicken, lamb, shrimp, or vegetables (or a mix). They sound too simple to make good entrees, but they do. Indian restaurants, for obvious cultural reasons, offer the widest selection of vegetarian dishes found anywhere. About two dozen are available here, made with many different vegetables and sauces, mild to very spicy. I'm slowly going through these, and find them generally good, although some congeal to a thickness bordering on disagreeable. I love Indian bread, particularly the variations on naan. That's a pizza-like dough baked on the inside walls of the tandoor, which browns it to done with amazing speed. It comes out flaky and light--if all goes well. One night, however, the tandoor must not have been hot enough, and the naan was unchewable. More evidence that Nirvana hasn't returned to its pre-storm consistency yet. It's almost universal for Indian restaurants the world over to offer a buffet at lunch, and they do here, too. That format is so popular that on Thursday and Sunday evenings, the buffet returns. It is appealing enough, but I stay away from it for two reasons. First, the food is never as hot or fresh-tasting as it would be if made especially for you. (Exception: many of the vegetarian dishes, notably the beans, must be prepared in advance anyway.) Second, the pile of food that seems appropriate for on to take from the buffet will, in fact, probably be far too much food. Although we think of India as a poor country, in fact their food can really fatten up a person. It's unexpectedly filling, and much of it contains a great deal of butter. I let the kitchen restrict my portions. The desserts are small and simple--rice pudding, milk pudding, fruit. The drink of choice (especially if you lean to the spicier fare) is beer; they have several brands of Indian beer for you. Service is better than I remember. And Anjay Keswani is usually on the premises, orchestrating everything with enthusiasm. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.