Scratch kitchen

Pakistani and Indian eatery Moti Mehal
keeps it fresh, delicious and traditional

by A.J. KINIK

I had a good feeling about Moti Mehal from the time I stepped up to its window. It wasn’t the newspaper reviews that’d been blown up and placed prominently in the window that caught my eye (although the owner was very proud of the attention the restaurant has received and made sure we took notice), it was Moti Mehal’s logo: a mortar and pestle, some herbs, a garlic bulb and a hot chili pepper. Simple enough stuff, but the logo suggested a kitchen that started from scratch, kept things fresh and did things right, and, for the most part, Moti Mehal’s cuisine lived up to that promise.

Moti Mehal serves “cuisine Pakistanaise et Indienne,” and both the restaurant’s name and its menu hark back to the veritable source. The name pays tribute to Moti Mahal, the Delhi restaurant that more or less invented modern South Asian cuisine in the late-1940s, when it began offering a small but tantalizing tandoor-oven-centred, Punjabi-inspired menu in a modest setting with an extravagant name (Pearl Palace). Moti Mehal’s menu features the three now-ubiquitous dishes with which its namesake established its reputation—tandoori chicken ($10.95 for a half chicken), dall makhni ($5.95), and nan ($1.99 each)—and its atmosphere is modest and family-friendly, but most of its best dishes are to be found among the dozens of other dishes on offer, especially among its Pakistani specialties.

On a recent visit, our party got things started with an order of tandoori quail ($3.99), a dish I’d never seen on a menu in all my years of frequenting Pakistani and Indian restaurants. Unfortunately, when it arrived the quail seemed more fried than tandoor-baked, and it was a little on the dry side and not exactly piping hot, but it did have a nice spicy crust to it, and it came with a tasty yogurt-based, chili-laced sauce that made a fine addition to some of our other dishes. Not that they needed it, mind you. No, from that point on, we were bombarded by taste sensations.

My two favourite dishes were the chicken balti ($9.95) and the cholay ($5.95), aka spicy curried chick peas. Both were absolutely irresistible. The chunks of chicken in the chicken balti were unbelievably tender and juicy, and the spice paste they’d been cooked in (chicken balti is a “dry” curry, not a saucy “wet” curry) was a highly fragrant blend of ginger, chillies, herbs, and a whole lotta love. The cholay might very well be the best chick pea dish I’ve encountered in Montreal, with its deep, rich sauce, and its chick peas so perfectly cooked that they imparted their natural sweetness to the entire dish.

Also excellent were the lamb/mutton qorma ($8.95) and that palak paneer ($6.95), or curried spinach with homemade cheese. As was the case with the chicken balti, the lamb (or was it mutton? The menu translates “agneau” as “mutton” and was notably fresh, but here it had been simmered in a heady yogurt-based sauce until each piece melted in the mouth. The palak paneer was one of the better spinach dishes I’ve had recently, partly because it was so wonderfully fiery—the spiciest dish of the lot—partly because its chunks of paneer were generous indeed.

The only dish that didn’t really wow me was one of the chef’s specials, strangely enough: the beef nihari ($6.95). In stark contrast with both the chicken balti and the lamb qorma, the beef nihari had a dull appearance and a flavour to match, one of the only let-downs of an otherwise tasty, and sometimes even exhilarating, meal.

As we walked back along Jean-Talon towards the Parc metro station we noticed that virtually every restaurant along the strip was more crowded than Moti Mehal, no matter the stripe: Indian, Greek, Greco-Italo-Canadian, fast food. I hope that changes, because for my money (and, given their affordable prices, I really hadn’t spent much of it), Moti Mehal is one of the best restaurants in Park Ex.

I asked the owner about the significance of the name Moti Mehal and he said, “You know the word ‘pearl’?” Exactly.