Madras Cafe
9484 Black Mountain Rd
San Diego, CA 92126
(858) 695-6229
After I visited Ashoka the Great, a few people recommended that I try out Madras Cafe, which features Southern Indian vegetarian food, and is in the same plaza as Ashoka. As a result, Madras Cafe has been on my list of places to try for quite a while. You can read a great post on Madras from Kirk at mmm-yoso. Getting Boyfriend to go try it with me was a bit tricky. Boyfriend is very big on meat and is not a fan of vegetables.
I waited for a day he was in a pretty good mood and was distracted to casually announce that I wanted to try out Madras Cafe, a vegetarian Indian place that had gotten good recommendations from quite a few people. I don't know if he was actually listening, but he didn't protest. So off we went to Madras Cafe.
We opted to try the buffet so we could sample a bunch of different dishes. The buffet has these metal trays and little individual bowls you can put in your trays, so that the dishes don't mix.
I don't know the name of many of the dishes, so I'll just show pictures. (I forgot my camera unfortunately so I had to rely on my camera phone)
A lot of the dishes were spicy, which I liked. I particularly liked the rice and the potato dishes. There was also a good eggplant curry.
Shortly after we were seated, we were given fresh hot dosas. Dosas are like a crepe. The inside was filled with a potato curry. I liked the dosa. It was crispy on the outside and I liked the curry filling.
We also got hot Idlis, a type of rice cake. I didn't really like this.
There were two desserts. One was this orange colored dish. The waiter said it was cream of wheat. I didn't really like the texture of it. There was also this tapioca pudding with coconut flakes. I enjoyed this one more.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty good vegetarian place. But I did leave kind of missing meat. Also, I thought it was slightly pricey for a vegetarian buffet. I believe it was around $9 a person.
