Restaurant Review: Bombay

One question I like to ask to folks from India is to tell me the difference between biryani and pullao. These are two common rice dishes in India. Typically, biryani has meat and is a more substantive dish, while pullao is vegetarian, and somewhat lighter.

Some places are known for their biryani. Hyderabad, a city in Andhra Pradesh, in the mid-south of India, is known for its biryani.

I've been working my way through restaurants in this year's Cheap Eats, which is the Washingtonian's special issue on the best "cheap" restaurants. To be fair, these are hardly cheap restaurants. Prices at restaurants, in the US, typically don't vary by orders of magnitude.

You might get a Happy Meal for several dollars, but to get food that's better than McDonald's typically requires you to spend about 7-8 dollars a person, on the main dish. Thus, Cheap Eats focuses on places where the main entree is about twenty dollars or less. Twenty dollars is quite expensive, for most tastes, and really, most restaurants charge 7-14 dollars.

Again, this is simply the entree.

Bombay is a restaurant in White Oak, which is on New Hampshire Avenue. White Oak a strip mall, and not exactly a trendy place. Even so, it appears to have a mix of restaurants, to accompany a Giant food store, and a Sears, a place I used to drop by to make my Discover card payments, back before you could handle it on the Web.

Bombay doesn't look like much on the inside nor the outside. When I went in, the clientele was mostly white. Several people dropped by for take-outs. It just seemed just one step above the Chinese restaurants who, while having places to sit down, do primarily take-out business.

Nevertheless, Cheap Eats liked the place, and makes their picks not always on the decor, but on the food itself (though I'm sure decor doesn't hurt). They suggested biryani, and having had it before, I thought I'd give it a try.

The prices were a bit steep for a restaurant in a run-down strip mall. Dishes were in the low teens, though this is not uncommon for an Indian place. Soups were around three dollars, as were the breads. Lassis and beers around four dollars. I've become more wary of places serving beer at four dollars and more, though it's terribly common.

The rule of thumb for many restaurants appears to be: beers at 3.50 to 4.50 unless you get a large size, wines at 5-6 dollars. Mixed drinks, if there are any, at 7 dollars or more. It's not that any of these drinks should be that expensive. Indeed, there's no particular reason mixed drinks should be that pricey. The alcohol should be cheap because it's used in small quantities. The rest of it is paying for a supply of juices, ginger ale, limes, etc. I suppose you're buying labor and knowledge with mixed drinks.

I decided not to get the alcohol, as that's practically like ordering another small meal or appetizer.

The biryani came out in a karahi, the Indian equivalent of a wok, except, unlike a wok, it tends to be made of copper, and it has rings for handles on the outside, and it's smaller than a wok. Quite frankly, after having some Indian meals where the quantity is somewhat small (though deceptively so, because often after you eat it, you're quite full), the biryani was huge, which offset the fact that it cost about 14 dollars. Indeed, you could eat for two with biryani.

It was a bit wetter than I expected. Perhaps that's because the biryani I've had lately have been at buffets where there's a heat lamp drying stuff out. But, even compared to the biryani I had at a hotel in India, it was wet. Even so, it was pretty tasty, and had lots of chicken.

I had also ordered naan. That was OK, nothing special. It came out a bit after biryani. I suppose ordering naan and biryani together isn't so common, as naan seems like something you use to sop up curries, and biryanis hold up well on their own. But something about ordering naans at Indian restaurants compelled me to get some.

My feeling is that I'd come here to pick up biryani to go in the future, and it would be enough food for two meals.

So my opinion? The chicken biryani was pretty tasty, if a bit wet, and priced a bit high (alas, somewhat typical though). There was plenty of biryani, however, which compensated for the price.