Title: Dec 10, 2012
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Vegan Tikka Masala
3814 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, CA
http://www.vegantikkamasalaoakland.com/
Review date: December 2012

The House of Curries, an inexpensive kebab/curry chain, used to have this location, taking it over from a Jamaican restaurant. But when Old Place Seafood closed down on Grand Avenue nearby, HC jumped at the chance to take over a larger location with much better walk-in traffic and parking. 

This location, opened in partnership with the House of Curries management, is now owned entirely by the partner, and HC has relinquished the name (although the doormat still reads "House of Curries" at the front). 

It isn't the best place for a restaurant. It's small and long, with chopped up rooms, in an old, slightly-greasy-around-the-edges building. The signs – there are two wooden ones hanging out front – are unnecessarily confusing. The top one says "Patio". The bottom one says "Vegan" on the first line, and "Chicken Tikka Masala" on the second line.

We came for lunch, which was a buffet. There were two stations, one with the rice and curries; the other with fruit, salads and sides. Although a little hand-written sign claimed "Gulab Jamun", one of Carlos' favorite desserts, the stainless dish was empty and remained so the entire time we were there.

The curry station had a fair amount of dishes. There was an almost-raw sliced cabbage that packed a fair amount of heat. Potatoes and frozen peas in a yellow curry. Yellow lentils. Chicken tikka masala. Lamb in red curry sauce (rogan josh). Chicken legs and thighs tandoori style. There was a dish of spaghetti pasta cooked with some chicken and vegetables in a dry-fry, the sauce based on Heinz ketchup, enlivened with a bit of garam masala and a lot of hot pureed chiles. 

Carlos seized upon this last, having two helpings of it. He says that all over Asia, every country makes a variant of this dish as their version of Italian spaghetti. Having grown up on it, he can only find it in these cheap restaurants. The most well-known version is the Thai dish pad thai, if you took the current recipes and cut the amount of sugar in half. 

The heat in the cabbage was welcome, but the other veggie dishes were blandly innocuous, just starch for filler. The chicken and lamb were grossly overcooked, so dry they were almost powdery as you chewed. The tandoori was burnt on one side, making half of it inedible. 

When I went back – the gravy for the tikka masala was fine over the rice – they had put out some vegetable pakora. It was different than the usual batter-heavy balls, more like a tempura in random clumps. Not great, but better than the other choices.

It was nice to be able to spoon out as much yoghurt raita and cilantro sauce as we wanted. There was also tamarind chutney and another chunky fruit chutney. But even that couldn't compensate for the poor quality of the food overall.

We can say that they are better than Mehak Indian's buffet/Albany, reviewed June 2011. But otherwise they don't even come up to House of Curries' basic level. Vegan Tikka Masala is super-cheap and you can fill up for very little money. But it's their only virtue.

Two people, buffet lunch: $21.