If anything raises a smile faster than good food, it's laughably cheap good food. So even if you've visited The Indian Club to scratch an itch for aloo mutter, you're in for a grin if you haven't checked out their weekend brunch.

From 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Sunday, toss $9.95 into the collection plate and your taste buds will be in for a religious experience -- as many times as you care to step up to the frequently replenished steam tables.

We walked into what looked at first like a flock of indoor egrets -- white napkins spilled from water glasses on empty tables. It was 1 p.m., and a scattering of couples and families sat here and there, some of them appropriately ethnic. The ceiling in the single dining room is two stories high, and international flags hang way up on two facing walls. Framed posters depict howdahs on elephants and finery on sloe-eyed women.

What looked like a giant puff ball passed by and was set down at a table next to ours, a reminder that prices here are reasonable enough that some buffet-time diners order from the regular menu. The fungus impersonator was a freshly fried pouri, one of the several unleavened breads available. After announcing our buffet intentions to our waiter, we were soon brought a large disk of naan, flat wheat bread fresh and tastily blackened in spots from the oven.

The menu's list of traditional breads is longer than some of the entree categories. They include chapati, and parathas stuffed with everything from a mashed potatoes-peas combination to minced chicken or lamb. The naans and another bread called roti are baked in a tandoor, a charcoal-fired clay oven.

An even better use for those Northern Indian ovens is for the tandoori chicken I fondly remembered and was pleased to see in the buffet. It was skinless and red on the outside from a spicy marinade, moist inside from the slow cooking the oven requires. At the Indian Club, the tandoor does well by lamb -- skewered or ground -- as well as shrimp, I recalled from the mixed grill ($15.95) I'd enjoyed there on our last visit. Oddly, beef is not prepared in this way, although five other preparations of this Hindu no-no are on the menu.

The chicken tandoori is always a buffet item, a waiter replied to my questioning, but the other items change. The following were offered during our visit: for an appetizer, there were vegetable pakoras (normally five for $2.95), which are deep-fried chickpea batter containing pieces of veggies. It was hard to resist seconds on the chicken in a mild curry sauce. Two vegetarian items were the channa masala, chickpeas cooked with onions, tomatoes, and hot spices, and dal makhani, lentils enhanced by ginger and garlic. All these main dishes are $9.95 on the dinner menu. Long-grained rice, speckled with shreds of carrot, provides the beds you make for these sauce-lush dishes.

The condiments on a side table include raita, a yogurt and cucumber blend helpful for cooling the orthodonture-melting spicy hot that Indian cuisine is known for. (Don't worry about the brunch buffet, though. To please more palates, there's not likely to be a necessarily fiery vindaloo.) On the other hand, if the tandoori chicken isn't hot enough, a chili-red onion chutney is provided. For those of you who don't measure your sub-continental cuisine sincerity by the sweat plinking onto your plate, the tamarind chutney, smooth and sweet, can be a pleasant flavor complement. In addition, there is a mint and parsley chutney with a vinegary tang, though there was no lamb to go with it on the Sunday when we visited.

There was no soup on the buffet, but you might want to indulge anyway, at $2.50 each. One is a dal stew, with lentils and split peas, but that might be too heavy for those who want to dig into the main dishes. The shami, or tomato-coconut chicken soup, might be a better bet.

For dessert, there was a big tureen of kheer, a sweet, milky rice treat. The menu offers five fancier desserts, none priced more than $2.95. There are exotic ice creams, including a kitchen-made kulfi badam pista, crammed with almonds and pistachios. If you arrive at Bloody Mary hour, cocktails, wine, and Indian beer are available, as well as mango mimosas.

Bill Rodriguez can be reached at billrod@reporters.net.

Issue Date: October 18 - 24, 2002