Kirkland, WA

Using my favorite Indian restaurant, India Cafe, as my litmus test, Raga Cuisine of Indiais not so great. My boyfriend still complains about the service and the price. I still complain about the chicken.

We visited this restaurant on a snowy Sunday. We went there desperately trying to find a decent open restaurant. Raga is decent and it is clean. It isn’t horrible but if you’re a seasoned Indian foodie, you’re not going to appreciate this place as much as you could.

The food: Indian food is not a spur of the moment type food. Indian food takes preparation–soaking meats and paneer in their respective spicy yogurt marinades. I ordered Chicken Tikka, a marinaded white meat kabob cooked in the Tandoori oven. If done right, the spice, a bright orange, would be soaked through several millimeters of the chicken. Unfortunately, Raga didn’t give the right length of marinade time on the chicken. I actually don’t think they marinaded the chicken at all. If I’m going to pay over 10 dollars for marinaded Tandoori chicken, it better be marinaded.

I don’t know if our pale skin made us look like spice wimps or if Raga doesn’t spice much, but our food was very very mild. All of us in our party are seasoned Indian foodies and can handle heat. We even mentioned we wanted our food on the hotter side. It didn’t happen. Mikel wasn’t too happy.

And then there’s the service. Our waiter couldn’t speak up. We all had a hard time listening. He didn’t write down our orders and even got them wrong. My friend, Rob, was given lamb when he ordered chicken. We were one of the only people in this restaurant and our glasses were empty more than they were full. Also, when our waiter brought out the wrong dish, the owner/manager, yelled at the waiter in Hindi. We thought that was terribly unprofessional and uncomfortable. We ended up taking pity on the waiter.

I would be happy to visit this place again should there be improvement. At this time, unless they work on their food and their service, there are far better restaurants (Royal India) that are close to Raga, in the area that I would recommend.

EDIT: Mikel would like me to mention that the stuffed naan we had was delicious. Indeed it was.