Kammadhenu, Newtown (7th January 2012)

Having cooked dinner most days in the past 2 weeks (I worked from home during the Christmas and New Year period so had more time to cook), I suggested to Jono that we should take a break from cooking and headed out for dinner instead. It has been awhile since we last had Indian and browsing through our handy Entertainment Book, we found an Indian curry place called Kammadhenu located in Newtown. I think I know where we're going to tonight ;)

There are actually two Kammadhenu restaurants on King St though the one nearer to our apartment always looked closed (we've seen the place whenever we go to the gym or supermarket in Newtown and have never seen any life inside). We left home around 6pm and took a leisurely 20-minute walk to the other restaurant at 171 King St - I didn't mind the walk as the weather was quite nice plus the walking would help work up an appetite :) Given it's a Saturday, I called up the restaurant earlier to book us a table but they didn't take bookings for parties of two and suggested we walk in and try our luck. Fortunately for us, the place was  quite empty when we arrived and we got ourselves a table by the glass windows so we could watch passersby while we dined.

Kammadhenu prides themselves as the best curry place in town serving Sri Lankan, South Indian and Malaysian cuisine. Jono and I have not yet found our regular Indian place in Sydney (we used to have a few we frequent in Wellington) and I'm quite keen to find out if Kammadhenu really serves great curries. Browsing through their extensive menu, we eventually settled for a Chicken Pepper Masala for me and Lamb Vindaloo for Jono, and shared an egg hopper, garlic roti and basmati rice plus a Chang beer each to go with our meals. "Look at their spice level choices at the bottom of the page," said Jono and I laughed when I saw it - medium, hot or good luck! Gee, I wonder how spicy would 'good luck' be...Interestingly, we weren't ask which spice level we wanted for our curries. Oh well, I guess we'll find out shortly when the food arrives!

Kammadhenu with its purple and yellow themed setting

Garlic roti ($5), basmati rice ($3), Chicken Pepper Masala ($18.90),
egg hopper ($3.50) and Lamb Vindaloo ($16.90)

The egg hopper was interesting - popular for breakfast and/or dinner in South India and Sri Lanka, the egg hopper is a bowl-shaped thin pancake made from fermented rice flour with an egg broken in it as the pancake cooks. It has a neutral taste on its own and is usually eaten with a spicy condiment or curry. And speaking of curry, hmm, neither Jono or I were really impressed with our curries - the chicken pepper masala was ok (normal chicken masala with lots of cracked pepper) but the lamb vindaloo was terrible! It was nothing like vindaloo (by far the spiciest of all Indian curries I know of) and I think the cook had put too much vinegar in the curry, making it quite hard to digest. The garlic roti wasn't really great either. The roti itself was good but instead of using freshly mince garlic and cooking it with the roti, crushed garlic from a can was smeared on top of the roti - it was garlic overkill. Cost us $47.50 (after deducting the 25% voucher discount from the Entertainment Book) which was bit expensive for not-really-great food. Eyeing at other tables, I noticed most people ordering the dosai which looked quite huge (and impressive) for one. Perhaps we've ordered the wrong items this time round - will have to come back to try out the dosai next time.