We Review India Palace Restaurant & Bar

Almost every time we let my son, Oliver, pick where our family dines out for dinner, he chooses an Indian restaurant. He’s a sucker for spicy food (Check!). He doesn’t eat meat. (Check! Indian menus offer lots of veggie-centric options). And his favorite fruit is mango. (Check! Get that boy a mango lassi.)

That’s why when India Palace Restaurant & Bar opened in the Plaza Shopping Center in Springfield, I knew we had to go try it out as a family. Bonus: It’s owned by the same folks who own Springfield’s beloved Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant.

We started with a visually striking appetizer: panipuri. Crispy little spherical shells are filled with potatoes and served with masala water that you pour into a hole in the top. At India Palace, they up the presentation by serving the shells atop little shot glasses that hold the masala water in three colorful flavors: mint, tamarind and mango. These one-bite snacks are a flavor and texture explosion and are so fun to eat.

Another new-to-us dish was the chennai paneer tikka dosa. A huge crispy crepe (huge as in well over a foot in diameter, I’d say, although I didn’t bring a ruler to the dinner table to check) is folded around a filling of spiced, but not spicy, paneer. It’s served with a bowl of soup that’s excellent for dipping the dosa. Like the panipuri, the dosa was an interactive hands-on dish that brought a little whimsy and a lot of new flavors to the table.

As we ate these starters, my kids both sipped on glasses of mango lassi. The cool drink is a blend of yogurt, mango and cardamom that’s delightfully fruity but not too sweet—although it does still feel like a decadent indulgence.

Next, we got a couple of entrees to share: the kadai lamb and the mushroom masala. Neither dish disappointed. The lamb kadai brought layers of delightfully complex flavors. There was tomato for brightness, a mix of fresh veggies for crisp bites, melt-in-your-mouth tender lamb and an array of spices that created an intoxicating aroma.

The mushroom masala, though, was our meal’s sleeper hit. We ordered it mostly for our mushroom-loving son because Eli and I haven’t been huge fans of mushroom masala in the past. This version, however, was a big step up. The mushrooms were fresher and roughly cut into big pieces, lending a more satisfying bite to the dish’s texture. And the sauce had us all scraping our plates with naan to sop up every last tasty drop.

For dessert, we ordered the rasmalai. Eli and I are longtime fans of this dessert, featuring little rounds of chhena cheese in a creamy, sweet, rose-and-cardamom sauce dotted with chopped pistachios. The kids weren’t sure about this new sweet treat at first, but after one bite they were hooked too—two new rabid rasmalai fans.