At the casual, cheaper offshoot of posh (and very good) Indian restaurant Rang Mahal, the food—mostly vegetarian—certainly doesn’t disappoint. The chaats might just be the high point of your meal here. Order them all! Highlights include Bombay pani puri (semolina puffs with chutney, $7) and dahi papdi chaat (flour crackers with yogurt, $7). These little flavor-delivery vehicles are incredibly fun to assemble and burst in your mouth in a gleeful riot, all savory, cumin-y, tangy, sweet and crunchy at once. (If Frito-Lay went into Indian snacks, they would make a killing.) For mains, there are plenty of curried veggies to choose from, like bhindi masala (okra and wild onion, $19), choley (chickpeas, $16) and gobi mattar (cauliflower, peas, young ginger, $16), which are all tasty and noticeably light, showing admirable restraint with the ghee. The butter chicken ($22) is more decadent, but it has a delicate creaminess rather than dense greasiness. Not everything is great, though: avoid the flat, tasteless naan ($5) and oversalted tandoori prawns ($22). It’s usually hard to handle a full-on dessert after an Indian meal, so go for the Table’s pop ($12), a virtuous chia-raspberry-coconut popsicle that wouldn’t be out of place in the yoga studio. The let-downs here are the setting and the service. Though there’s a nice view of charming, ramshackle little Seah Street, it’s difficult to settle in and enjoy a meal, especially since the restaurant doubles up as the hotel’s lobby lounge. Waiters are scarce and barely distinguishable from hotel staff, so you can find yourself waiting for quite a bit for someone to appear, while idle employees flounce around in caped uniforms in front of you.
