Jaipur Palace

One of the challenges of going out to eat these last few weeks is that my usual dining companion fasts. There are only so many seafood tavernas you can go to before they all start to seem the same. But Indian is different. Just the variety of spices and unusual ingredients in every dish, and the wealth of rice, vegetables and seafood dishes, make Indian cuisine attractive both during Lent and during the whole year. The trouble is that until fairly recently it was almost impossible to find decent Indian food in Athens.

Jaipur Palace was one of the first Indian restaurants, but when it opened several years ago, I recall not liking the food very much. Back then it seemed both too grecophied and too “prefab.” That is definitely no longer the case. We had a really good meal here last week.

The kitchen, which you pass upon entering the trinket-filled, colorful dining room, was abuzz with guys obviously from somewhere on the subcontinent chopping, frying, cooking, and searing on the inside of a tandoori oven. That oven provided two of the most memorable dishes we had: a deliciously succulent chicken tandoori, pleasantly natural in color (most tandoori chicken in Indian restaurants from here to L.A. are literally dyed red with anato, a natural coloring agent. It makes the food look scary.) The chunks were spiced beautifully, lean, and tender. I loved the large shrimp tandoori, too, which were also deliciously spiced.

A roasted eggplant dish provided us with something sort of familiar—a kind of Moghul melitzanosalata, seasoned differently and very good. The array of breads, onion-filled nans, garlic-filled nans, buttery chapatti and more helped sop up at least one fiery sauce, my shrimp vindaloo, which I ordered extra spicy and which those subcontinent cooks obligingly prepared. Pilafs aromatic and gold with saffron, spinach paneer (cheese), mimosa filled with spiced chick peas, and other Indian specialties made us all yearn for a trip to Delhi.

Jaipur Palace is a vast improvement over what it was just a few years ago. A meal here isn’t Central-Market cheap: Those shrimps in the tandoori were a 35 – euro entrée, that’s about 5 euro per shrimp! Ouch.

Cuisine: Indian fare
Athens Area: northern suburbs
Decor-Atmosphere: Colorful with all sorts of trinkets, furniture, etc. from India

Service: Good
Wine List: Good Prices: 35-50 euro per person
Address: Ag. Konstantinou str. & 73, Themidos str., Maroussi, tel. 2108052762-3