New management closed Kangchen Indian Cuisine, located in a strip mall between West Towne and the Beltline, in August and quickly reopened it as Haldi Masala. The focus here is south Indian cuisine, which focuses primarily on rice, lentils and stew.
The sizable menu includes southern Indian specialties such as nellore kara dosa ($6.99, crepe coated with chili paste), royyala iguru ($13.49, shrimp cooked in onion, tomato and spices) and Haldi special biriyani ($16.99, Basmati rice with chicken, herbs, spices and pepper gravy).
The buffet only is available at lunch time. While it seems small, the buffet does offer a representative assortment of items from the menu.
Vegetarian items
- The hot and sour vegetable soup slightly resembles the soup you would find at a Chinese restaurant, except this version is heavy in carrot taste.
- I keep seeing cauliflower on more and more menus. Here, the gobi is lightly breaded and sauteed. The chili flavor is prevalent, but you can still discern the cauliflower.
- Similar to the gobi, the fried lentils let you still taste the lentils in addition to onion and cilantro.
- The biryani seemed dry and lacking in ingredients.
- The Daal fry (loose lentil stew) is best complemented with the naan that is served at your table.
Non-vegetarian items
- Hope you like your eggs spicy. The guddu fry consists of hard-boiled eggs in a sauce that is heavy in onions and jalapenos.
- I really enjoyed the chicken 65. It’s fairly meaty and breaded in corn flour and spices, then deep fried and tossed with jalapenos.
- The tilapia is very tender from sitting in its own stew, which has hints of eggplant flavor.
- Usually tandoori chicken is too dry for me, but here it was juicy, a pleasant surprise.
- The baby goat is tender, just be careful of the numerous pieces of bone in the dish.
Haldi Masala is open every day for lunch, dinner and carryout.
We have so many Indian restaurants on the west side that it seems we’re running out of geographic locations to stick them. Yet, here’s Amber Indian Cuisine making a name for itself in Middleton.
But that’s not all. Many, many other items comprise the full menu. For example, there’s calamari ($7.95), Bengali salmon tikka ($17.95), lamb vindaloo ($13.95) and mutton pepper fry ($14.95).
The massive space in the shopping center on McKee Road that once housed a series of failed restaurants–most recently, Jimmy’s American Tavern–has been divided into smaller parcels. Taking over one of them is 
From the appetizers, I picked the meat platter ($7.95), which came with chicken pakora (fried chicken; too dry), fish pakora (I would eat this over cod for my Friday fish fry!) and a lamb samosa (absolutely the best samosa I’ve ever had; excellent fried flavor, though it seemed more of a empanada than a samosa).
