I had the misfortune to eat (not dine) at the Maharani last night. My friends had booked the "Fantasy Room" for 7:00 PM on a Saturday. On arrival at 6:55 PM, we were shown to what only could be called a penalty box (waiting alcove), which immediately filled with about four of the about 20 Indian families emerging from a tour bus.
After the four of us were seated at table designed for no more than two persons (with no response to my friends' question about the "Fantasy Room" promise), we discovered that the restaurant not only had no tandoori dishes but served only a very limited number of chicken or lamb dishes priced less than the $23 to $26 for "large entrees." The menu we were offered by the surly waiter had no resemblance to that I later found posted for the Peacock Lounge on Maharani's Flash-laden Web site. (The "Fantasy Room" has its own prix fixe menu.)
We ordered papadums (two orders at the suggestion of the waiter), onion kulcha, lamb tikka masala, a milder lamb dish whose name I forgot, bengan bartha, and a biryani. When I attempted to order a Flying Horse beer, the waiter asked if I wanted to "order an Indian Beer." (They didn't have Flying Horse and only had medium-size bottles of Taj Mahal.)
An "order" of papadums came as broken pieces of perhaps 1.5 papads. Two at our table were served, followed by about a five-minute wait for two of us. My lamb tikka kabob in a tomato-ish sauce, tasting strangly like Campbells Tomato Soup, obviously had been cooked with the meat earlier then reheated in a broiler because the tops of my few small lamb cubes sticking out of the sauce were burned. (I notice that other reviewers have remarked about the precooked food.)
The bengan bartha was adequate but Trader Joe's packaged version is better. The onion kulcha was tough and dry. The biryani was conventional long-grained rice, not basmati, gluey and had a strange-flavored sauce.
During our meal two more busses with what appeared to be Indian tourists arrived. It was obvious that the the menus we were given were intended for the bussed multitudes, which explains the precooked food.
The premises were a bit grimy, a condition noted by other reviewers. The overblown descriptions of the ambience and food quality obviously were authored by the restaurant owners or staff.
Anonymous from Oakland, May 18, 2008.
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