THIS RESTAURANT IS CLOSED.

Cardamom Hill is one of the other places that kept appearing, over and over, on the Best of Atlanta lists.  After such a great experience at Bhojanic (we’ve been back since our first visit with another couple), we figured we might actually like Indian food and we were on a roll… 

People probably think, “Dang! How do you get everyone out of the way for your photos?”  It’s really simple – we dine like we’re seventy.  When you go to dinner at 5:45 on Friday night, there really isn’t much of a crowd to get in the pictures.

We started with the pork vindaloo.  I didn’t realize the Portuguese influence in East Indian food until I was googling to find out what exactly a vindaloo was.  Vindalloo appears to be derived from a Portugese dish (Carne de Vinha d’Alhos), but substituting vinegar for the wine and adding red Kashmiri chilis and other spices.  When it came to the table,

it was served with these heavenly appams (rice-coconut crepes) that were sweet and chewy and wonderful.  The pork was topped with a mix of pan fried and thinly sliced green beans, peppers and scallions, and fairly fiery.  A bite of the vindaloo atop an appam was an excellent start.

Jo went with the red snapper fish special of the day, which looked nothing like we expected.

The red snapper was covered with a mild masala paste, baked in a banana leaf and finished with a coconut-milk curry, then served with bismati rice and cardamom sweet potatoes.  It was sweet and very fishy.  An okay dish, but likely not to be re-ordered.

After reading the write up in Southern Living about the awesomeness of the international take on fried chicken,

I had planned to order it when I walked in the door.  The chicken (which was boneless) was served over a rice pilau (think rice pilaf with even more vegetables – I even found a butter bean in mine) and topped with a mango sauce with chili and garlic.  The chicken was moist and the skin was crispy.  The sauce was, at best, okay.  I didn’t care much for the pilau, but Jo shared her bismati with me and it ended up being like an odd Indian version of the Chinese carry-out staple, sweet-and-sour chicken.

The waiter said that I had to try spicy green beans since I was ordering the chicken, so I did.

They were nothing near what I expected.  I interpreted spicy = hot. They apparently just meant spicy = full of spice.  There was, oddly, very little green bean taste to it. 

All in all, it was an okay meal, but we spent about twice what we had on either visit to Bhojanic and didn’t enjoy the food half as much.  I may be monogamous when it comes to Indian restaurants.