King's Indian Restaurant

King's Indian resturant describes itself as providng fine dining Indian cuisine. Now, I love eating Indian food but I tend to steer clear from fancy Indian places cause my experiences of it are that you often get stingy amounts of food for some exorbitant price that you could normally get at some family run Indian restaurant -you know, the kind of place that other Indians go to- that's how you know the food is authentic :) for a fraction of the price!
But Ouffer.com (group discount website) was offering the following: $35 for 2 entrees, 2 mains, 2 orders of rice, 2 naan breads and 2 glasses of wine (usually $110). Not bad... so I bought the deal a couple of months ago and realising that it was gonna expire soon, made a booking with hubby to check this place out.

However, I was a bit worried about dining in this restaurant and what my experience would be like since I had read on eatability.com.au some people's experiences were far from pleasant. For example, reviewers talked about being treated like second class citizens when they presented their vouchers and management/staff being rude. After reading these reviews, I pretty much sat through the entire evening anticipating that something bad was going to happen but alas, the service, food and the overall experience was quite lovely. Phew! (Maybe they took some tips from the customers/reviewers at eatability.com.au and learnt from them????)

Upon arrival at the restaurant, hubby and I were greeted by a smiling waiter and seated by the window. It was a Tuesday night and the restaurant wasn't completely packed- there were probably just 2 or 3 other tables with people dining.

The menu showed lots of good variety of Indian dishes- there were vegetarian, meat and seafood dishes as well as banquet options.

Angari Prawns $20.90

Since we were not limited with our choice of entree, we decided to opt for something more expensive on their entree menu- seafood options were more pricey than their vegetarian counterparts so we ordered the Angari prawns- marinated in yoghurt and cooked in a Tandoor oven. These prawns tasted absolutely delicious! They were well seasoned and pefectly cooked with a nice smoky bbq flavour from the Tandoor. Also really liked the spice powder that was sprinkled over the top. Not sure what it was though...

Machi Fry $19.90

The other entree we tried was the Machi Fry which were crispy fried flathead fillets marinated with Kishmiri chillies, ginger, garlic and battered with chickpea and cornflour.

One bite into the fish and immediately what struck me was how light and crispy the batter was with hardly any oil to be seen! I'd never had anything quite like it (it tasted even lighter than tempura batter). I was so surprised. The crispyness of the batter was a good contrast to the soft fish inside. Yum! This dish was so moreish!

Butter Chicken $18.90 & Lamb Korma $17.90

Unsure of how the food was going to measure up at the time of ordering, hubby and I decided to stick to some more common dishes for mains- butter chicken and lamb rogan josh.

Out of the two dishes I preferred the butter chicken dish as the chicken was moist and succulent whilst the sauce was really flavoursome with just the right hint of spicyness- great for dipping our naan bread! The lamb rogan josh was also enjoyable to eat as the lamb was quite tender and the sauce packed full of flavour. Both mains were generous serving sizes and provided lots of meat pieces- something that I wasn't expecting since I normally have to fish out the meat pieces in a pool of sauce at other Indian places.

Rice was also really nice with cumin seeds mixed through and garnished with some crispy shallots.

Garlic Naan $4.00

And finally, the garlic naan had good amounts of garlic as well as being nice and soft and not too oily.

Overall, the food at King's Indian restaurant is very good and the portions generous (hubby and I left the restaurant having to pick our bellies up from the floor cause we stuffed ourselves silly). Service was polite and the waiter we had was helpful when we were making our menu selection. The voucher made it all very great value for money however even without the voucher, the cost isn't considered over the top for "fine dining Indian". Our voucher included 2 glasses of wine but since hubby and I didn't want to drink wine we asked if we could swap it for some lassi but we couldn't so we opted for plain water instead. Funny that, I would've thought lassi would be less expense than wine... Ambience of the restaurant is nice- although I'm not sure about the hanging tv wall units that were playing bollywood music video clips. Plus I had some fingerprint marks on my plate- almost a fine dining experience... Would I go back? Maybe...