Smells (and tastes) much better than Teen Spirit

New Haven's Asian food portfolio, we must admit, needs to be diversified. There's no worthwhile Chinese, no Vietnamese, but all kinds of Thai, plenty of Japanese, and now, even more Indian. The opening of Nirvana, nestled in an odd rock formation next to the Chapel-York parking garage, might seem like a redundancy. But Nirvana is not the same old Indian food. Nirvana is heaven.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH Delicious Indian food or screeching angsty lyrics? The choice is yours.

The restaurant is divided into three levels, the first being the sunken bar area. Up two short flights of stairs is the main dining floor, which is topped by a somewhat secluded balcony. The main floor has both larger tables and some more intimate settings. It could be an excellent date restaurant, though your evening would probably end up in the hand-holding, beach-walking, talking-about-God category rather than the hot-monkey lovin' group.

We ordered from gilt-covered, velvet-lined menus, quite in keeping with the rest of the décor. The walls are covered in white stucco with hundreds of tiny embedded mirrors and adorned with paintings, jewelry, a larger mirror, and golden light sconces. Let me confirm your suspicion: they do not take flex dollars. Better bring your trust fund.

Fortunately, the entrée prices stay within the ATM-range, and anyway, they're crazy good. Nirvana's multi-page menu offers a huge range of tasties, including all the stuff you see at other Indian joints, like samosas, chicken tikka masala, and naan, but also extends to cuisine from usually neglected regions—for example, the Goan fish dish. Its appearance on the menu impressed the bejesus out of my Goan dining companion. There's also a selection of South Indian dishes, a lentil group, all kinds of veggie options, and plenty of meat.

Serving sizes varied. While everyone's main course seemes to satisfy, we found the appetizer sampler platters a bit sparse. Still, the potato and lamb samosas were both amazing, with uncomomonly flaky, fork-friendly pastry. The other starters were the usual suspects, deep-fried delights, with one startling exception: buffalo wings. Uh, okay. They were a bit yellower than we're accustomed to and do not come in servings of 100 with buckets of ranch, but they were tender and fatty—thus all right. Not quite as acceptable was the paneer pakaro, the infamous home-made cheese fried in chickpea batter. "Bland" said the taste-tester, and ladled on the green sauce.

Dinner was a long time coming. This was explained to us as a technical glitch; the computer system had just gone online that day. Our food had accidentally been prepared to go, meaning that we sat around for a good half-hour with nothing to do but to comment on the décor. Still, it seems like lateness is not inherent in the system, since everyone who ordered before and after us was served promptly.

When ours did arrive, we shut up fast. I had the vegetable seekh kabob, a Tandoor dish (meaning they cooked it in a clay oven, not that they contracted out the cooking). This was the least tasty of our table's selection, though I wouldn't call it bad. It was just a tad bland, like the aforementioned appetizer. But it did come out of the kitchen sizzling on an iron platter. I can't really be upset with any food that makes noise.

Everything else was shoutin' good. My eggplant-craze suitemate pronounced the bhaigan bharta a new all-time best, smooth and roundly-flavored. The other frequently eaten dishes were also head and shoulders above their usual quality: not too oily, with a good sauce-to-chunk ratio, an spiced exactly as we had requested. Worthy of special mention are chicken tikka, another tasty Tandoorism, and adal makhani, a lentil dish we had never encountered before.

If I had to sum up the oral experience of Nirvana in one word, and believe me, I've been asked to do stranger things, I would say "tender". The chicken, whether on the wing, batter-dipped, or fresh off the kebab, proudly scorned my knife. The rice was soft and warm, and the naan was infused with the best kind of butter—lending flavor and palatability from within, not forming puddles on the surface.

We boldly ordered poori as well, an oft-neglected bread in my experience. We were smart to do so. Poori at this restaurant is two huge, puffy balls of dough, lightly fried and tasting exactly like a funnel cake. The poor man's dessert if you will, also ideal for wiping extra sauce out of serving dishes.

Big sigh of contentment. After a couple of hours ensconced in the bright whiteness of those marvelous walls, being ministered to by the talkative and pleasant wait staff, and eating celestial curry, I was sold on Nirvana.

Sorry, Mom, guess I'm not coming home for Passover.

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