Sizzling India

Having peered in the window of Sizzling India on Main Street in Peoria and seen the mustard yellow walls and basket-woven dining chairs topped with cushions, atop which sat many diners during the lunch hour, I wanted to check the place out.
I know next to nothing about Indian food, and was a little concerned the menu would not have descriptions of the items. We stopped in during a weekday lunch hour, and no menu was presented, maybe due to there being a lunch buffet.
I figured a buffet would be a good way to sample many different items, so since someone had given us water and no server had stopped by our table, we headed to the buffet to select some dishes.
The dishes were labeled with Indian names, which didn't help us figure out what they were, so I took a wide array of samples.
After our first trip to the buffet, we noticed that several tables had a basket of some sort of flatbread. The other thing we noticed was that everyone was drinking water. That's when it occurred to us that we were not offered anything else to drink, and wondered if there were other drink options available.
The first thing I chose from the buffet, adai looked like an orangish pancake. It was different.
Next, I tried some fried cauliflower, which was OK. I also tried a tomato rice and a white rice dish, both of which were fine.
Once I got to the butter chicken, I decided this dish was a winner. The tandoori chicken was pretty good, too.
I also sampled a green bean dish in an orange colored sauce. It was a little like having a spicier green bean casserole, minus the fried onion topping.
StfRon tried a few dishes, too, but ended up mostly eating the butter chicken as well.
The dishes all had a variety of Indian spices to them, some much spicier than others. The lunch certainly cleared out my sinuses a bit, which is not a bad thing.
A server brought us by a basket of flatbread, which is called naan. This bread was soft, warm and very good. The servers also kept our water glasses well-filled until almost the end of the meal, however they kept to themselves very much, and didn't really have much interaction with the customers.
For dessert, we each took a small bowl of the rice pudding. I was surprised to find it had a sort of lemony flavor to it, probably from cardamom, but after the initial surprise, I found it to be kind of tasty. There were also nuts mixed in.
We were not presented with a bill, so we went to the register to pay for our buffets, $8.25 each. While at the register, we saw a bar area and the menu, which featured many more Indian dishes, Indian Chinese selections and beverages.

October 2009 — Sizzling India has closed