It’s a Tuesday, and Nalini Srinivasan has some time to talk. “I found out working seven days a week was really tough,” says the ex-retiree. Why Tuesday? Strategy. “Because most places are closed on Mondays, we typically have very good business that day.”
Her restaurant, The Curry Queen in Old Saybrook, has scarcely been open two months when we speak in August, and people would be there every day if she let them. Srinivasan says she noticed not only a gap in the availability of Indian food in the area, but in its substance. “I wanted to bring more homestyle Indian cooking, an alternative for people so they can be introduced to new things.”
Srinivasan had briefly been in the restaurant industry shortly after graduating from Johns Hopkins, when she opened The Boston Brahmin in New Haven in 1985. That was her only previous restaurant experience before opening The Curry Queen in 2023. Her reasoning for going back to the industry after retiring as a budget analyst for Customs and Border Protection? “I didn’t want to do gardening.”
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Srinivasan learned cooking generationally, from her mother and grandmother, and it informs her concept. “Home style primarily means — and this may surprise you — we use less spices than more places,” she begins. “Most herbs and spices we use are fresh: real garlic, real ginger, real masala. Food isn’t just the ingredients, it’s how you prepare it. My chef and I always tussle, because he wants to do production, and I say no, no, everything to order.”
Your chef at The Curry Queen is Navin Mishra, who learned from three-star Michelin chefs Alain Passard and Georges Blanc during his time at The Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, and came to the U.S. to work at The Omni Homestead Resort in Virginia.
A classically French-trained Indian chef working in America is a bit of a microcosm of the food itself. The menu continues the travel theme with the Chicken ‘65, a hot-and-spicy option from Chennai in south India which was invented in 1965 at the Buhari Hotel. Other regional variations are also given a vintage, ‘80 here, ‘87 there. The south Indian style chicken korma is made with coconut milk because of local availability, but the lamb korma you’ll see on the menu is northern style, braised in yakhni, a spiced bone broth.
Srinivasan believes Anglo-Indian cuisine, the food of the British Raj, is under-represented in the local culture of Indian food in the U.S., and plans to add it, perhaps as a special order-ahead-only menu. She cites Railway Chicken, a dish from the tradition of incorporating English techniques with Indian and Persian spices, invented by local chefs on the new British-built railroads which still serve India today. “Because there was no refrigeration, the spicing was very important,” she explains. “They tend to emphasize cloves, star anise, cinnamon and gravies which are more like stews.”
“Vindaloo is like that,” she says of the curry dish, catching me off guard. I ask how.
“Because vindaloo has been made very simple now, but it is actually Portuguese.”
The train of knowledge is rolling, I’m just along for the ride at this point. “It was originally made with balsamic vinegar, red wine, jaggery [a kind of unprocessed cane sugar], and was originally stewed with bone-in pork chunks for a long time. Portuguese meals tend to be spicy, but we Indianized it by making it really spicy.”
One starter catches my eye above all the rest as I sit in Curry Queen’s modest new dining room, the Gobi Manchurian: fried cauliflowerettes with a curious name.
“We had a lot of Tibetan and Nepali refugees come to India when China took over,” Srinivasan explains when we speak several days later. “They brought this sweet-and-sour effect from their Nepali and Chinese influence, and it became very popular in India because it’s vegetarian.”
The Gobi at Curry Queen is made with a chickpea flour dredge and quickly fried before being tossed in a fragrant sauce. You may feel a slight thunk as your brain’s tooth falls into a well-worn gear. Oh, it tells you, beholding glossy, red nuggets, I know this. No, your mouth answers, we do not. Delicate, spiky heat soaks the tongue, hits of acid and sweetness before a satisfying chewy crunch from a batter which hasn’t lost its crispness in the oil. Sparks fly.
The Gobi is easily accessible, but enough of a twist on the familiar to be eye opening. It’s an excellent starting dish or snack for anyone unfamiliar with and suspicious of all the new words, and yet a level of consciousness above buffalo or General Tso’s cauliflower.
Take your seat in the dining room at Curry Queen, and within a few minutes lentil chips served with spicy mint chutney, tamarind sauce, and raita (a mix of yogurt and vegetables) will appear. The herbed chips are flavorful and crisp, and the mint chutney is particularly attention-getting, with its sweet-hot-and-sweet-again roller-coaster ride. Looking forward to spice, but wanting to keep an extinguisher on hand, I scan the drink menu. No dice, and no liquor license. (We hear an application is in the works.)
A one-minute walk takes me across a Stop & Shop parking lot to a package store, a quick selection of biscuity Hills Pils from Connecticut’s Hanging Hills brewery perfect for the mission, and back to my seat. You may wish to plan ahead.
I return to a steaming pot of lamb korma, another Persian-influenced Indian dish, containing poppy seeds, cashews and other ingredients which have become nativized to Indian food. It’s made with an eye on spices adding flavor, rather than heat. There’s cream in this northern version, in place of the coconut-milk base in the south.
Mild at first, a depth of spice — bay leaves and anise over the savory lamb — reveals itself. The almost buttery gravy soaks into basmati rice, offset by a good crunch from slices of green onion in this soft and comforting dish. The crispy Hills Pils is an outstanding refresher between bites.
Badam kheer is the final dish. Almonds are ground with milk and thickened into a more solid khoyawith heat, then cooled. Heavy cream and cardamom are added, before the dish is topped with deeply red, intensely flavorful, delicate filaments of saffron. The dish is a sweet, cool, crunchy ending; aromatic spices seem to appear like a sudden burst of birds through the bushes. The cool crunch is almost a release from the intense ups and downs which can wind through an Indian meal.
Diners continually come and go from the attached take-out space, and Srinivasan credits her prices (lunches run from $12–$15, dinners average about $20), and location — close to the Old Saybrook train station, I-95 and the Post Road — with the instant success of her to-go business, along with a hungry English ex-pat crowd from nearby Old Lyme.
“You’re not just clients and customers here,” she says. “You can stay here as long as you like, order a little or a lot of food ... like you are guests in my dining room. That’s how I want people to feel.”
The Curry Queen
93 Elm St., Old Saybrook
The food: The Curry Queen is a homestyle experience. There is no buffet, and dishes are rich with hand-prepared ingredients. The menu includes both familiar and fun meat and vegetarian options, and provides a taste tour of multicultural India.
The vibe: The atmosphere is sparse, but new, and bathed in quiet sitar and tabla music. The dining room and take-out areas are separate, and a package store is nearby. Seating is indoor only.
$$
Open for lunch and dinner Wed.–Mon.
860-510-9803, thecurryqueen-os.com
Wheelchair accessible
860.777.1027
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