Mughlai Fine Indian Cuisine

Mughlai Fine Indian Cuisine is a happy scene on a Friday evening, its airy, expansive dining room bustling with Indian families. It’s always a good sign when a restaurant is popular with the people who know a cuisine, and so it is at Mughlai, a 4-month-old place near the Galleria. They come here for reliable Mughal-style cooking (think Persian-inflected kebabs, biryanis and heavily spiced, creamy curries), with many of the Indian subcontinent’s other greatest hits thrown in for good measure. Most of the food is well-prepared and authentic, which makes Mughlai a standout in a city where good Indian food is unaccountably hard to find.
The appetizers include an old standby known in my family since time immemorial as “fried whatnots”: mixed vegetable pakoras, crisp, lightly spiced fritters of things like potatoes, cauliflower and onion in chickpea batter. Vegetable samosas were less successful: The pyramids of pastry filled with mashed potato and peas were stodgy and dull. But another appetizer, the seekh-e-sik (Full review)