Mango Chutney Hespeler

Mango Chutney
#15-900 Jamieson Parkway (at Townline Road), Cambridge
519-620-0798
www.mangochutney.ca
Open Monday-Saturday
Lunch for two: $40

Amuse-bouche: I have a hunch that Mango Chutney will become a new favourite of mine when it comes to Indian food. A sparkling clean restaurant with pure and fresh flavours, it appears that they love their food and try hard to ensure the best dishes that they can execute make it to your table.

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At the corner of  Townline Road and Jamieson Parkway in Hespeler, hunkered down in a strip plaza like so many other strip plazas, there is a year-old Indian restaurant that has caught the attention of my taste buds when it comes to Kashmiri, Goan, and Punjabi flavours.

Mango Chutney, the restaurant’s name has a whimsicality that betrays the perfectly executed cooking that I tasted, is destined to become a new favourite for Indian food for me. It is already that for other diners: a couple adjacent to my table said they have visited six or seven times.

What I imagine they have been enjoying is a subtlety and elegance to the manner in which the dishes’ are prepared. It is soothing and warm. That elegance is not exactly at odds with the simple and basic décor inside, either—one enhances the other. IKEA-style white tables, about 12 of them, and plain black plastic chairs actually seem to fit right in with the sleek élan of this basic cooking.

The place when I visited has been sparkling clean; granted, always easy in a new restaurant with clean, sharp lines and relatively little traffic, compared to say, a ten-year old restaurant. I hope they can maintain that.

Clean and simple design in Mango Chutney interior.

Seven or eight appetizers in the $8 range give way to a two-step lunch and dinner-ordering process: 1) pick from 15 chicken, lamb, or vegetable dishes; and, 2) select two of five sides such as naan, roti, basmati, salad, and delicious yogurty raita. The lunch version is $10; the dinner $14.

There are also larger platters for singles, couples, and families ($14-$48). Specials of fish masala and tandoori chicken are $16-$25, while Saturday breakfast-brunch from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. is $10.

A starter of hara bhara kabab is essentially four potato and spinach patties bound with a homemade cheese, spiced with cilantro, and shallow-fried. It renders those humble ingredients into stunning flavour and texture with virtually no grease. Exterior crispness gives way to a very interesting and satisfying texture. They are first-rate.

Hara bhara was followed by something even bhara better—and a dish that satisfied my need to find something different on an Indian menu. Amritsari fish is a marinated fillet of pure white basa, a Vietnamese fish comparable to catfish. By whatever methods Mango Chutney has handled what was probably a frozen fillet, they have prepared the delicate white flesh with a deft touch.

Fresh, crisp appetizers that don't bog you down with deep-fried heaviness.

My only previous encounter with anything Amritsari was a fictional account of the massacre that occurred in the golden Punjabi city in David Lean’s film version of Forster’s A Passage to India (though I can’t recall if the massacre is mentioned in the book).

Mango Chutney’s fve or six pieces of Amritsari fish is pure love (a motif in the Forster book) with a remarkably delicate and crisp coating, noticeably though not overwhelmingly spiced, and tender moist basa inside. With the fish’s mango chutney marinade, it is a revelation worthy of modern British literature—and the name of a restaurant.

Both of these appetizers sat atop a simple crisp Romaine lettuce salad, a few pieces of tomato, and chunks of cucumber with nicely seasoned peppery-cumin notes. That’s a nice touch.

Next, chicken vindaloo reveals the international nature of Indian cooking. The south-west state of Goa, with its largest city Vasco da Gama, is the country’s smallest in geographical area but is graced with a direct Portuguese influence that can be traced back hundreds of years and until the early 1960s.

The name of the vindaloo dish, a popular curry, is actually a linguistic evolution of the Portuguese vinha d’Alhos. It is described on the menu at Mango Chutney as fiery, and it does have a good but not crippling kick. What I really enjoyed about this sauce is its overall complexity and very pleasing smooth texture. The chicken breast-meat is lovely and succulent to boot.

If I also always look for differences in the sometime sea-of-sameness in Indian cuisine, it is found in Kashmiri Rogan Josh. The lamb’s texture has a heartening strength and hearty texture that maintains its tenderness along with a sauce that is appreciably different from the vindaloo. I could easily pick out the ginger notes, and again the colour and texture is divine.

Vindaloo (foreground) and Rogan Josh: curry goodness.

With both of these dishes providing a pretty good swat of chili heat, it is magical what happens when you combine the fragrant long-grained basmati rice, and a teaspoon or so of the cooling, tangy freshness of the raita. It’s a short concerto of Indian flavours.

Naan is slapped on the side of a fiery hot tandoor oven.

Several of the desserts at Mango Chutney are made in-house, and regardless they all look interesting. Ras malai reminded me of crème Anglaise with almond slivers and what I detected as a hint of cardamom. Following some hot dishes, this cool milky, paneer cheese finish was perfect. It had an almost satiny, very soft bread-pudding texture. The famous gulab jamun is also a milk solids-based dessert, but one shaped into a walnut-sized ball and deep-fried until it assumes a lovely caramelized brown. The temperature-heat of the nuggets contrasts with the sugary, honey-sweetness of the morsels.

Milky textures and honey sweetness for dessert.

Mango Chutney’s desserts are good examples of these dishes as were the others that I sampled. The way these dishes have been prepared, with the simplicity and yet elegance they exhibited, is a result of a restaurant that cares about its cuisine. And that is always a tasteful quality.