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Type: Indian
Hours: Sun.-Thurs., 7 a.m.-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 7 a.m.-midnight.
Good Choices: Masala dosa, pav bhaji, poori, tandoori chicken, murg tikka masala.
Credit Cards: Visa, Mastercard, American Express.
Access: No steps at front entrance, but access to lower-floor restroom requires a trip outside to a ramp.
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BUKHARA
701 Centre St., Jamaica Plain
(617) 522-2195
Restaurant reviewed 02/04/99 by Joe Yonan
On one side of the room, men brandish swords and women balance water jugs in a wall hanging that sparkles with tradition and gentle beauty. On the other, huge orange geometric shapes scream for attention, and can't help but get it.
At Bukhara, the decor can be jarring (depending on which wall you face), but the food certainly isn't. This brand-new Jamaica Plain restaurant manages to serve up clean, subtle flavors of India, while nodding to American tastes along the way.
If you're a purist, be forewarned: The menu includes such stateside approaches as mild, medium, and hot versions of any dish. But the rest of us don't mind. Bukhara's treatments intrigue and delight, even when they step outside tradition.
Indian restaurants in the area have been evolving beyond the preoccupation with northern food, and that was welcome on our table, where the star was from the south. A huge crepe made with a fermented batter of ground lentils and rice, the masala dosa ($6.50) was porous, crisp, and tart. With a kick of sambar, a lentil sauce, on top and potatoes and onions steaming inside, this dish sang in three-part harmony.
Less imposing, but just as satisfying, was the pav bhaji ($6.95), an east Indian appetizer of mixed vegetables and bread. Using naan - that fermented, tandoori-cooked flatbread - the pav bhaji did what an appetizer should: It tantalized.
So did the aloo papri ($4.95), a cold appetizer that in India is served from street carts, often in bowls of dried leaves. Ours arrived, stunningly, in a copper pedestal bowl, with the fried wheat wafers surrounding a salad of potato, tomato, and cucumber topped by a tamarind yogurt sauce. The fresh, cool flavors could have used more salt, but were nicely punctuated by a chili that crept up slowly before leaping into prominence.
Bukhara does the standard dishes well, too. The tandoori chicken ($9.95 for half a bird), marinated in seasoned yogurt and cooked in the pitcher-shaped tandoor oven, hinted of smoke and was as smooth as velvet. And the sauce coating the chicken in the murg tikka masala ($10.95) was refreshingly light, with the tomato's tang lifting the focus from the cream.
Another high point was the poori ($2.95), a deep-fried puff bread with such flaky layers you'd never guess it was made with whole-wheat flour. In Indian homes, poori is taken out of the kitchen still puffed up, but that treat requires such precise timing that few restaurants, including this one, attempt it. The garlic naan ($3.50) was nicely understated, with the extra flavor dancing on the top of the bread rather than overwhelming its soft center.
There were a few disappointments, but none so critical as to take the shine off the meal. In the beef biryani ($11.50), the almonds should have provided the only crunch, but some underdone vegetables stole the nuts' thunder, and saffron in the rice was neither seen nor tasted. The badami kulfi ($2.95), an ice cream of made with saffron and almonds, was lackluster and more crystallized than creamy, as if it had melted and been refrozen. And at a Saturday all-you-can-eat buffet ($8.95), the tandoori chicken was on the edge of dry - surely a consequence of sitting out on a warming tray too long.
The service was a bit scattered - to be excused for a restaurant only a few weeks old - but always gracious. When we tested out the weekend closing time by ordering our ice cream at 11:55 p.m., the staff took the order and delivered the dish with a smile, even while beginning to sweep up around us.
Now if they would just do something about those screaming orange wall hangings.
Tips & hits
