Full disclosure: I've only eaten here during the weekend buffet that they do (I think that this is…read moreactually Friday-Sunday, either out of a misunderstanding of the concept of a weekend or as part of a conscious effort to defy it) because home is the southerly parts of Pinellas and, given the existence of thirty-some miles of miscellaneous urban nonsense between where I am and where they are (I need to take three interstates to get here, each more stultifying than the last), it might as well be in one of the Dakotas, or else some forbidding slope in Kamchatka, where the wolves howl and the night does not end. Thus, I've never been here for a normal meal and ordered a normal item off the menu like a normal person. But I've been to the buffet many times, since the place is right across the street (or *almost* just across the street) from Lettuce Lake Park, a lovely place to wander and gawp at the alligators and weird birds for the princely sum of $2.
Utterly full disclosure: If I have any tiny trace of blood from the Indian subcontinent, it's been so diluted and diffused by generation upon generation of angry people who make angry-looking buildings that it probably now couldn't fill a grasshopper's coffee mug, and I'm pretty sure that I've never been within three thousand miles of Delhi. So I have no claim to judge what constitutes authentic Indian food of any stripe, and anyone who does should feel free to snort contemptuously and consign this review to whatever part of their brain they use to store voicemails about extending their car warranty or the phone books that regularly land in their yards and absorb rain and reclaimed water until they're a soupy mess.
But, even given the above caveats, this very well might be the best Indian restaurant I've ever visited. I've had a long and checkered career of visiting Indian restaurants, from the dismal downtown buffet where you eat too much chicken tikka for no discernible reason (it does not spark joy or create satisfaction, but still you keep eating it) and enter a state of such profound drowsiness that you immediately understand that you will never get anything important done for the rest of the day, to the smalltown restaurant putting on airs with white tablecloths and silver where the most complex item on the menu is saag paneer, to the grotesque and misbegotten Midwestern late-Fifties steadily-collapsing concrete-and-sheet-metal monstrosity where beef vindaloo (???) is on the menu and the servers mispronounce the names of dishes with the insouciant confidence of the utterly damned. So, whatever mitigating factors might be in place, I stand by my pronouncement.
The buffet, and the menu in general (which, again, I haven't sampled at length, but have browsed) seem to make reluctant concessions to American taste, offering some of the usual suspects (butter chicken, tikka masala, whatever vindaloo), but seem to be mostly interested in going beyond that. The weekend buffet reliably has goat curry, which is wonderful (and spicy!) and not something that is regularly included in the genre, and the chili chicken (which is usually interpreted as some soupy, sticky variant on Chinese food, as per its origins) is a sort of dry, fried, spice-encrusted dish, gloriously addictive. And many dishes whose names are unfamiliar to me--a sort of rice pudding, but not the kheer that is easily found at every five-and-dime buffet across the nation, instead a complex, spicy concoction with caraway and green chile, or a set of fritters (labeled "baby corn," though I'm not at all sure that's what they were) that become transcendent when dipped in one of the array of lovely sauces that they provide. And it's actually spicy, or, rather, many dishes are (the butter chicken is still, predictably, bland and inoffensive), which is damn near impossible to find in an Indian restaurant around these parts--even some of the buffet items have a decent bite. And the little (free!) cups of chai that they provide--strong, but not too sweet, not like the milky sugared-up lattes that you get at Starbucks. And this, and that, and more. Yes, it's slightly spendy (currently around $15 for the buffet), but you don't eat here every day and, perhaps, like me, you've driven for a while to be here, in a weird abandoned parking lot adjacent to a Holiday Inn Express adjacent to a huge tech park... so it's probably worth it.
But if you've just skipped to the end, here, in hopes of discovering whether this restaurant is good and whether you should eat here, the answer is, definitely, yes and yes. If you are even remotely intrigued by Indian food, and if you do not shrink from the notion of capsaicin-laced food as if it were the machinations of the devil himself, you owe it to yourself to visit this place. Yes, it's in the parking lot of a hotel, and it's tiny, and you don't know where you are or what's what (welcome to Florida). Just go in and eat the goat curry, you weirdo.