RESTAURANT REVIEW : New Delhi Palace Serves Indian Feast

There’s a bit of a trick to finding the New Delhi Palace in Pasadena: It’s upstairs in a shopping complex, with the parking lot around back, down a one-way street. The good news is, the parking is actually easy, and free, and close--a rarity in Pasadena.

The Palace had been recommended to me by maybe a dozen people--my hairdresser, an old family friend, a college prof--all of whom said just about the same thing about the place and the food: “It’s pretty good and really inexpensive.” After several visits, I can’t say it any better.

The New Delhi Palace has the unexpected sumptuousness of mini-mall Indian restaurants: tablecloths, maroon cloth napkins, pleasantly dim lighting. We sit perched by the windows overlooking Colorado Boulevard, with a great view of people trying to parallel park at the curb below.

The Palace’s service is faintly formal, tinged with a charming politesse. “Chicken tandoori, please,” says our server as he sets down our dishes. “Shrimp masala, please. Naan, please.”

There’s the temptation here, as in most Indian restaurants, to fill up before the main meal comes. Don’t. I’ll admit the complimentary papadums are fresh, crisp, addictive. And mango lassi, a creamy drink of mango and yogurt as thick as a milkshake, is hard to resist, although served tepid.

Luckily, the samosas are modest in size; any larger and these deep-fried purses of spicy mashed potatoes would put a serious dent in the most robust appetite. The vegetable pakoras are amorphous clumps of deep-fried vegetables--spinach and onion and squash breaded in chickpea flour and all tangled up together in the frying--but they’re crisp and delicious, spattered alternately with the good, hot, gingery cilantro chutney and thick tamarind sauce.

Vegetable soup is a thin, opaque turmeric-yellow liquid that’s flecked with vegetables and seems quite mild at first. But the level of spicy heat increases with each mouthful, until suddenly, you’re emptying every beverage in sight. Fortunately, there’s a waiter or waitress making continuous rounds with a pitcher of ice water.

The food here can be ordered mild, medium, or spicy. We always order medium--a compromise between the tender- and iron-mouthed people at the table. Still, medium seems very tame to me--with the exception of that sneaky soup and a perniciously hot vegetable biryani.

If you want an Indian meal with all the essential components--curries plus dal, naan, raita, pickles, chutney, dessert--there are three complete dinner options: vegetarian, non-vegetarian and tandoori. With a larger group, however, it’s fun to compose a feast of one’s own.

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Vegetarian dishes are the restaurant’s strongest suit. Chicken dishes also seem consistently delicious. Except for the chicken tandoori, which is moist and flavorful, I didn’t enjoy other meat from the tandoori. Chunks of marinated lamb are well-spiced, but dry and dense as wood. Tandoori fish is equally dry, and bland.

A plate of chicken curry, in a cumin-rich, honey-brown curry sauce, is scraped clean, but no such interest is shown toward a sticky, fluorescent-orange masala with over-cooked shrimp. Seafood, in general, is not handled well here; it tends to be cooked to death.

But the garbanzo beans with ginger and tomato in a curry gravy are hauntingly good. And so is the rich, velvety palak paneer, spinach stewed with cream and chunks of fresh Indian cheese. Bengan bhartha, a chopped eggplant stew, has the dish’s characteristic smokiness. I love it topped with a spoonful of cooling, fresh raita. I have had better dal than these lentils and mung beans that come swimming in ghee. In fact, my only criticism of these vegetable dishes is that they tend to be overly rich. They taste great, but a few bites and it’s over. You’re sated.

And I want to keep going, loading bite after bite on pieces of the naan, big, beautiful bubbly tongues of yeasted bread fresh from the tandoori oven.

All you want to eat here and all you actually can eat seem to be two different quantities. Perhaps this is why the New Delhi offers a daily all-you-can-eat lunch buffet for a reasonable $6.95.

* New Delhi Palace, 950 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 205, Pasadena. (818) 405-0666. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. Beer and wine served. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $18-$35.