spring 2006

Vindalho Newsletter :: Spice Route Cuisine

Our new Vindalho website is up and running at vindalho.com

First, Daren, Julie and I would like to thank our loyal friends from Lauro Kitchen and our new friends at Vindalho for their encouragement and support during the opening of Vindalho. We survived the construction process thanks to Joe Vondrack and his crew from Pacific Crest Construction. We were initially challenged with the new cuisine, recipes and equipment but we have met this challenge head on and I believe that our menu and food are now consistently excellent.

The bloggers came and went (a very odd culinary sub-culture) and their sites were all Vindalho, all the time, for about a week. All the local newspapers have now completed their reviews, and after some early disappointments we finished this nerve-racking process on an up note with a stellar review in The Oregonian. We are now entering our fifth month in business and would like to invite you in to try our modern interpretation of the foods of India that we call "spice route cuisine." More about that later.

If you have heard that Vindalho has a long wait for tables and is crazy busy every night, don't believe it. We specifically built Vindalho to accommodate more patrons than Lauro can. Our bar area is twice as big as Lauro and although we seem to fill up most nights, there is usually no wait on weeknights and only a short one on weekends. Lastly, we can now accept large parties of up to 14 (bigger with prior arrangements) as walk-ins.

How great is that?

Please visit vindalho.com for more information.

Menu & Nightly Specials

The menu features our modern interpretation of classic Indian dishes — we unleash our professional talents and training on heirloom recipes of the rich, diverse and complex food traditions of the massive Indian subcontinent.

Every night we seek adventure on the spice route — especially with vegetarian and fish dishes. Our menu is dominated by what is in season and available locally. Our Specials Board always features a vegetarian soup and inventive bread choices, as well as delicious fish options marinated and seared in our 800° tandoor oven.

Experience the surprising, delicious flavors of thousands of years of struggle, trade, assimilation and evolution that comprise Indian food. We invite you to join us on our ambitious culinary journey to India and beyond.

At the Bar

Holding court at the long Vindalho bar, Donald Kotler is ready and willing to pour your favorite drink or to offer you one of our eight retro cocktails that pay homage to the "tikki genre" of the past.

Donald carefully selects craft and micro brews that are all locally produced and seasonally focused. Currently on tap is Roots Red Ale, a unique offering from Oregon's only 100% organic brewery. From Amnesia brewing, Desolation IPA, a floral, hoppy beer with a traditional IPA flavor that is great with food, soft and easy to drink. Tsunami Stout from Pelican Brewery in Pacific City is a smoky, dark beer. Bitburger Pilsner is a classic German pilsner, great with spicy food, refreshing and palate cleansing. Five more beers are available in bottles including Kingfisher — the most popular beer found in Indian restaurants in the US, UK and India.

We offer an inventive, tightly focused wine list selected to complement the hot and spicy flavors we serve.

Music

Our friends at Willie Week enjoyed our food but chided us on our selection of background music. So, we rushed right out to Portland DJ legend Anjali. Tops in spinning at local clubs like The Fez, she custom built a 4 CD set for Vindalho of Bollywood, Electronica, and Bhangra adding the sounds of life to our environs. WW — where should we send your bonus CD set?

What's on Your Bookshelf?

We strongly recommend two fascinating volumes on the history, geopolitics and recipes of the subcontinent. Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent by Alford and Duguid is a beautiful coffee table book of photographs, recipes and stories comprising three decades of travel, exploration and cooking by these well known authors.

Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors by Lizzie Collington is an authoritative history of Indian food. She traces how chiles from South America came to India, introduced there by Portuguese explorers. She explains how "curry" is a British invention and why almost all Indian restaurants in Britain and the US are Bangladeshi. These books encourage you to reconsider what is "authentic" and to understand that every nation's cuisine is constantly being reinvented and assimilated.

Press

Vindalho received a nice write-up in the April Issue of Wine & Spirits magazine. We are proud to be included in their profiles of the best new Indian restaurants in major cities across America, including Boston, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In Destinations 2006, they highlight restaurants that "capture the vivid, complex flavors of the cuisines of the subcontinent with wines to match." Read about Vindalho at Destinations.