Cheap Eats - The bloom is on

Chamblee’s Rose of India

It took me three visits to Rose of India before I realized the walls were painted pink. Not that it would have mattered. This is a place where the endearingly faulty design scheme is made much less noticeable by the food on the table. I did notice immediately the shabby booths with seats that lose their resolve the second you sit on them. But blistered naan and spicy curries have this curious way of alleviating minor annoyances.

Spice House: The restaurant’s Punjabi menu offers nothing the city hasn’t seen before. But there are so few kitchen missteps that it’s easily bound for go-to status. There are no oil-laden dishes that threaten a digestive crisis, or any one-curry-fits-all spicing. Eggplant bharta is hauntingly complex, with a delicacy that manages to supersede the chili; chana masala is earthy and subtly pungent; bindi bhaji (okra in a tomato-onion sauce) is nothing extraordinary, but one of the most fragrant ways to eat this equally loved and loathed vegetable. The sag dal — shredded spinach thickened and bound by a creamy, starchy mess of yellow split peas — is sufficiently substantial that you might lose sight of the meat offerings altogether. But beef, lamb, chicken and shrimp, all available with recognizable preparations in vindaloo, rogan josh, sag and tangy, yogurt-based pasanda, are so competently executed they’re difficult to ignore. You have to appreciate a kitchen that turns out boneless chunks of white-meat chicken and lamb so tender a fork is the only requisite utensil.

Fiery Furnace: Anyone who has ever successfully botched an attempt at baking naan at home (think dry, tough and tasteless) knows that often, that iconic bread/staple is best found in a restaurant. Nothing can create those chewy, bubbled, beautifully blistered breads so well as a clay tandoor oven, and Rose of India’s naan are nearly perfect. You can order them with herbs, onion, garlic, or split and slathered with a ground lamb stuffing, but the additions, as tasty as they are, almost detract from the bread’s appealing simplicity. Naan shares the oven with cast-iron platters of grilled meats, carried to the table sizzling in a coat of orangey-red spice. The meats all share the same smoky-spicy notes at the outset, but they are each rich with their respective character: Lamb tikka is cooked to a rosy pink, sweetly musky and not even a slight on the chewy side; chicken tikka, so often parched and flat, is almost shockingly juicy, even more so than the chicken tandoori, whose bone-in thigh and drumstick meat is full-flavored but lacking all of the tenderness I would expect.

Lunch Rush: None of this food is especially pricey, but the real cheap eats are on the lunch menu. In lieu of the ubiquitous Indian lunch buffet (there’s not a single steam table in the place), the $6 lunch special includes a bowl of mulligatawny, an entree, rice or naan and spiced tea.

By the time I noticed the decor, the food had won me over. This is a kitchen whose warm, gracious spices and alternating textures of chewy, creamy and crisp implore you to thoroughly immerse yourself in eating, forgetting the oddball clash of landscape watercolors, tiger family portraits and tapestries that trim those pink walls. The vibrant, redolent platters on the table are far more attention-worthy, along with the oversized goblet of toasted fennel seeds on the foyer desk that promise to mercifully relieve some of the ill effects of overindulgence. And at Rose of India, self-restraint is a tall order.