The cultural lineage of this place is certainly interesting, since from what I understand, this is…read morethe only Canadian location of an Indian restaurant from Japan. The restaurant is beautiful with both Indian and Japanese design sensibilities. They have a table service restaurant with both high tea and an extensive a la carte menu, and it looks like you can also buy mithai in bulk. The food isn't really Japanese-Indian fusion as you might expect, but more like Japanese impression of Indian food, if that makes sense? There's a few hints of Japanese and Asian influence, but the menu is mostly modern Indian. All vegetarian. There's no vegan or gluten free options for afternoon tea, but the a la carte menu includes many clearly labeled vegan and GF dishes.
I wanted to try the afternoon tea set to get a wide sampling of their offerings. The set included: corn spinach puff, paneer tikka slider, cream cheese cucumber sandwich, samosa, chutneys for dipping, manchurian skewers, orange cranberry scone with whipped cream, rose rasmalai cake, dodha crunch, motichoor cheesecake parfait, and the choice between masala chai, coffee, or hot/iced caffe latte. It's $32/person for the set, which is a great price. I also appreciated that it was possible to order the set for just one person since it seems like many teahouses will only do it for 2+ people.
I thought all of the items in the set were pretty good, and there was a balance between the sweet and savoury items. The only things that really left anything to be desired were that the scone was a bit dry and crumbly, and I thought the tandoori paneer could have been more flavourful. In general the flavours of the savoury items were a bit more subtle than in typical authentic Indian food, but for the most part it didn't come across as bland to me, just a different take on it. The standouts in the set were: the paneer slider - even if the paneer itself didn't impress, I loved the almost flaky texture of the pav - the manchurian, and the rose rasmalai cake. Also, the cream cheese cucumber sandwich had cilantro or chutney or something in the cream cheese which made it much more interesting than the plain version of this sandwich. The masala chai (my chosen drink) was also very good. It was served in a pot that contained 2 small servings.
My waiter was very friendly and stopped by a few times to check in. When I was done eating and wanted my bill, it was easy to get his attention. I visited at what seemed like a quiet time so I didn't have much competition for attention. One thing that I thought was odd was when he gave me the machine to pay, there was no tip option - it would be cool if they had a no-tip policy, but I never saw any mention of it, so I wonder if he accidentally bypassed the tip when putting in my charge.
It was an interesting and very pleasant experience. I was so curious about this place that I made a trip out from Vancouver just to try it (and couldn't get anyone willing to go to Surrey for afternoon tea with me, hence the afternoon tea order for one), and it was worth the trip!
