I’ve eaten there once and I agree with the "raw spice taste"criticism overall, even with the whole grilled fish. In our case, the dahi bata puri was balanced, although the puris were very fragile. It was probably the best thing we had there. The baingan bhartha was the next best thing, well balanced between heat and smokiness, and with no raw-spice taste. The “naans” were very tasty, both plain and garlic, but were closer to parathas than to naan in texture, thickness and chewiness. Their rara gosht, a dish that has chunks of lamb in a sauce made with ground lamb, was the worst offender in the raw-spice department, and the sauce had no discernible ground lamb in it (unless it was blended in). The dal was unmemorable – indistinguishable from a lot of overly rich black dals across town. (It’s a remarkable achievement that Indian restaurants in the U.S. have been able to reduce the vast variety of lentil dishes in India – with no two households producing identical dals, there are probably over a hundred million variations – to or three formulaic types.)
The biggest pleasure for me at Adda, but also the biggest let down, was the bheja (brains). The versions I’ve had in Bombay (or, in the U.S., at Devi, when it was around, and in a Pakistani restaurant in Allston, MA) were all unmistakably brainy – like soft scrambled eggs, flavored minimally with turmeric (more for color), ginger, chillies, etc. The Adda version comes in a thick reddish sauce (a little too like the one for the rara ghost for a restaurant that boasts of not using the grid approach to Indian food that’s sadly ubiquitous in the U.S. – where you choose from a sauce column and a protein row) that so smothers the brains that you have to hunt for for them.
The heat levels of the food were much below the ones that the rave NYT review claimed for their dishes. Indeed the raves both there and in the New Yorker are hard to understand. Indian food is badly represented in the U.S., but there’s better food available than this. If you catch Haandi, a steam-table place on Lex, when the food is freshly put out, it’s much more flavorful, for example.
