Swagat Indian Cuisine has arrived, and swagat, "welcome" in Hindi, is indeed an appropriate choice for the name of this appealing new restaurant.
Though hard to spot from the northbound lanes on Rainbow Boulevard, this new Indian restaurant might be thought of as a middle-class version of Jaipur's famed Pink Palace: a palatial, free standing structure with an interior fitted with twirling fans, silk plants and rose-colored fixtures.
The restaurant is the first in Nevada for this regional chain. Unlike most Vegas Indian restaurants, which are overwhelmingly North Indian, Swagat offers the option of South Indian, cooked by chefs from both ends of the subcontinent, toiling away in the kitchen.
When you enter, you are almost overwhelmed by the sheer cubic volume of the place, high ceilings and large, empty spaces between tables. The menu is large, too, stocked with North and South appetizers, a full mughlai (or North Indian) menu, and a page devoted to Southern specialties. The back of the menu has a glossary of Indian cooking terms and spice descriptions.
This being Vegas, there is, of course, a lunch buffet, a bountiful one and a good introduction to the cuisine. The day I stopped in, the buffet was mostly Northern, with one Southern dish, the thin, tart, lentil tamarind soup sambar, a dish eaten obsessively on the Indian peninsula by anyone south of Goa.
Sambar is normally eaten with Frisbee-shaped steamed, fermented rice cakes called idlis, but those have to be ordered separately. If you wish to eat other Southern dishes, the kitchen will probably tell you the dishes won't be ready until dinner.
I enjoyed the buffet, which had chicken makhni, white meat chunks in a tomato-cream sauce; dal (lentils); basmati rice; vegetable curry; an interesting cabbage and garbanzo bean dish; vegetable fritters known as pakoras; and several other choices. The only negative was undercooked tandoori chicken in a strange sauce, minus the spice rub, sizzle and flavor. It is, on balance, a good deal though, and at $6.95, who's complaining?
Dinner is impressive. When I ordered two Southern appetizers, methi vada and uttappam, they came with a trio of delicious, finely pureed chutneys: a pale pink tomato, ivory white coconut and moss green cilantro. Think of methi vada as an Indian version of a Krispy Kreme donut, with burning spice replacing sugar and lentil flour standing in for wheat.
Uttappam looks like a fat pancake, a semolina griddle cake laced with onions and chili. Both these appetizers are substantial, filling and exotic, and like most Southern dishes, completely vegetarian.
After that, I decided on a meat fest, and wasn't a bit sorry. From the tandoor, I ordered a whole Cornish game hen, with a complement of broiled onions. A tandoor is a cylindrical clay oven that cooks meat at extreme temperatures, up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, so that the outer surface forms a crust and the inside is moist and juicy. Breads like naan, a tasty flat bread, are also cooked in this oven, and are a must.
Then boti kabob, chunks of lamb marinated in yogurt and spices also cooked in the tandoor, came, as did seekh kabob, long cylinders of ground, spiced lamb. To offset this carnivorous bacchanal, I had the waiter bring an order of hariyali fish curry: mahi-mahi stewed in a green curry sauce, enriched with coconut milk, and delicious when spooned over mounds of fragrant basmati rice.
Vegetarians can order the Southern masala dosa, a crisp pancake made from lentil and fermented rice flour, then stuffed with curried potato, cashews and green peas. The Northern vegetable I always come back to is bhindi, aka okra, dry sautéed with onions, tomatoes and spices.
For dessert, try gulab jamub, sweet cheese balls eaten warm in sweet syrup; or kheer, a rice pudding shot though with cinnamon, raisins and nuts. I'm also fond of mango lassi, a thick, milk-shake-like drink that looks like an Orange Julius gone tropical.
Curry? I never touch the stuff. Which is a good thing, because at Swagat, you won't have to.