Thursday, February 8, 2007

Restaurant Review: Temptations

Temptations Isn’t Too Hard to Resist

By The Law Reviewers of The Law Reviewers

We here at the Law Reviewers (that’s three e’s, but not all together) have made it our New Year’s resolution to get the word out about Dallas’ new and/or unsung restaurants to more and more people hungering for food knowledge. We’ll always be here to help you, the young, impressionable and overworked lawyers of Dallas, know where to go to nosh on good grub and gosh on good nrub. And this month we’re excited to officially announce that we’ll be partnering with the good folks at PegasusNews.com, who plan to run our reviews on their website. Pegasus News is a local online news site for the DFW Metroplex. Its totally benign plan is to take over the world one city at a time by providing interesting, customized local news with a hip, clever edge. That and something about an army of underground-dwelling crab people and plans for the ultimate secret weapon are all part of their strategy for global domination, and we here at the Law Reviewers are more than happy to join them in this goal if for no other reason than we’ll be better defended when the armies from planet Starbucks finally enter into Stage 7 of their five year plan for global conquest and chai lattes.

Ahhh, the sounds of our readers scratching their heads at another satisfyingly strange intro. This month we review Temptations, 2719 McKinney Ave., 214-220-0022, a new Indian restaurant that just opened on McKinney Avenue in Uptown. The owners have unfortunately chosen a name that sounds like an establishment in the area bounded by Harry Hines, Northwest Highway and I-35 that your “wild” out-of-town client always wants to go to for “meetings” when he’s in town. Like Pegasus News and Starbucks, Temptations is also well on its way to world domination, as it has also opened another location in Irving (baby steps, people). It’s located in the same building that until recently housed the Italian/Spanish fusion place Tutto, which is Italian for “Not long for this space.” The décor hasn’t changed a whole lot from its Tutto days and, in fact, the checks still says Tutto on it, so maybe it’s all part of Tutto’s plan for worldwide domination (or a front for Starbucks). They have added many of the standard Indian touches – caraway seeds at the front door, gold and crimson tablecloths and elephant shaped pottery – but the ambiance is more formal and a little more stiff than most of the other Indian places in town. The service still has some kinks to work out. It was pretty slow on the couple of trips that we made, they didn’t bring our side dish of naan (tandoori oven-baked bread) until after we’d finished our entrees, and they brought the wrong dish another time.

Still, the food showed enough promise that we feel confident that, once they’ve livened up the atmosphere and straightened out the service issues, this will be a welcome addition to Uptown. We tried both the lunch and dinner menus. The lunch menu is more compact and includes salad, soup, rice and naan plus an entrée for $8-11. The salad had a dressing that tasted suspiciously like Indian Thousand Island, but the red curry soup had a nice tangy, garlicky quality to it. For entrees, we tried the paneer saag and the chicken tikka masala. Paneer saag is a dish that mixes spinach with cheese and spices. Temptations’ was zesty and creamy but was a little small, even for a lunch portion. The tikka masala sauce, which should be a subtle blend of spices and cream, tasted of too much cream and not enough (say it with us like Kyle MacLachlan in “Dune”) spicccccce. On another visit we tried the samosas, fried potato dumplings, which are the chips ‘n salsa of Indian food in that it’s the staple by which you can judge the food’s overall quality. The samosas were the highlight of the lunch, even though they weren’t actually on the set menu, which made us wonder what else Temptations was hiding. The tandoori chicken looked plump and delicious, but we didn’t try it and since it too was ordered off the set lunch menu, we had to wait a good half-hour of billable time while it was prepared.

The dinner portions are larger and the prices are correspondingly higher. For an appetizer, we tried the chicken wraps ($9). They consisted of chicken, onions and bell peppers wrapped in roti (which actually means bread, but that's not important right now). While tasty, they didn’t strike us as a particularly authentic Indian dish. We also tried the Rara Lamb ($17) which according to the menu was “painstakingly cooked in whole spices gravy.” It was tender and piquant without being overly spicy, and we hope they’ll learn to use less painful gravy in the future.

We wanted to fall head over heels for Temptations, we really did. Lord knows this town needs more Indian restaurants inside of the LBJ loop (or as we prefer to call it the “Lbjloop”). But, like Tony Romo, the place unfortunately fumbled the ball a few times. However, like Tony Romo, we’re confident Temptations can bounce back and maybe even lead the Cowboys to the Super Bowl next year all while dating Carrie Underwood and opening several new locations of Eiseman’s Jewelry stores around the Metroplex. It may not exactly be world domination, but it’s a start. On our fiendish, evil masterminded five-gavel scale, where five gavels is sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads and one gavel is an ill-tempered sea bass, Temptations gets two and a half gavels or several angry piranha, with tasers.

Pegasus News content partner - The Law Reviewers

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• Pegasus News content partner interview: The Law Reviewers (June 1, 2009)

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• Food and Drink > Dining / Restaurants

Comments

Chad Jones Verified

I've only eaten Indian food once, at the graduation ceremony of a high school friend, and despite my initial fright, it turned out to be pretty good. And now, after reading this review, I have this tugging sensation in my brain that is saying I ought to check it out in greater detail.

Anyway, great review. Kudos on referencing South Park, Fight Club, and Austin Powers (not sure if I missed any others) all in one shot.

But, please, do keep it on the DL 'bout the domination.

2 years, 4 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )