Kelly Green
Mild vegetable palak offers balance to many of the spicier dishes on the lunch buffet.
Madison has plenty of Indian restaurants, but it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart. Nawabi Hyderabad House Biryani Place distinguishes itself in a couple of ways. Unlike other area Indian spots, which are usually locally owned, Hyderabad House (for short) is part of a small chain with franchises across the U.S. and Canada.
And it specializes in biryani. There are 23 different kinds of biryani on the menu, with more on the weekend. The large menu also features Indo-Chinese dishes, tandoori and dosa.
While many Indian restaurants make their noon buffets less spicy to appeal to a broad range of diners, most of the dishes I had were quite spicy. There were two types of biryani on the buffet the day I visited: chicken and vegetable. I tried them both, and while I enjoyed the flavors, I couldn’t get past the heat. Milder dishes like butter chicken, paneer noorjahani (cheese cubes in a creamy sauce made from ginger, chiles, garlic and cashew paste) and the wildly delicious vegetable palak provided a sweeter balance to the rest of the offerings.
There were more gems on the buffet that I have to call out by name. The lemon rice: so zingy! So lemony! But, beware: also spicy! The yogurt rice: like a smooth rice pudding, neither entirely sweet, nor salty, but tangy. Hope for the appearance of pongal, a rice dish seldom found on area menus. It’s like mashed potatoes, pancakes, and porridge together into a bowl — all the comfort foods in the world combined.
The papad: cute, colorful, crunchy little crackers shaped like stars. They reminded me of fried pig skins, but tasted healthier. Even the tomatoes and yellow peppers in the raw vegetable salad had been prepped with care, topped with a light dusting of chili-heavy spice blend.
For dessert, the karachi halwa tasted of cardamom and sugar, always a fantastic combination. This is another dish seldom found on Indian menus in Madison. It’s like a thick, pasty Jell-O — made of cornstarch and ghee. On the other hand, the second featured dessert was an Oreo chocolate pudding.
A lovely touch was the carafe of warm masala chai, milky and quite good.
At dinner, service was prompt. Cashew chicken ordered at medium was quite spicy; next time, I’ll order it mild. A mango lassi, bright and tart and lightly sweet, was crucial in cutting the heat.
Plain naan was fine; a garlic naan was sublime. There were tiny pools of melted butter floating on top and a smattering of chopped raw garlic. The vegetables in the chicken tikka masala were barely cooked, an unusual preparation for Indian cooking, but they added a nice, raw crunch to the sweet, creamy base and the well-cooked chicken. Gutthi vankaya, or stuffed eggplant, featured three tiny baby eggplants in a salty, spicy, smoky sauce — firm on the outside, soft inside, without being mushy. I was unable to detect any kind of stuffing in the eggplant, though.
Hyderabad House is in a somewhat hard to notice spot on the frontage road along East Washington Avenue, just off I-39-90-94. Two other Indian restaurants, Fast Biryani and Chutney’s, have tried unsuccessfully to make a go of it there since 2015, which causes some concern. But Hyderabad House is worth finding for its great variety of dishes. Just be careful with the spice levels.
Nawabi Hyderabad House Biryani Place
4738 E. Washington Ave.; 608-709-1151; hhmadisoneast.com
11:30 am-2:30 pm and 5:30-10 pm Mon.-Thurs., 11:30 am-10:30 pm Fri.-Sat.
11:30 am-9:30 pm Sun.
$5-$16; lunch buffet $11 weekdays, $14 weekends; $50 dinner for two.
