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When I finally sat down with a map, I didn’t know why I’d been surprised when restaurant entrepreneur Vik Kapoor of Harvard Square’s Tamarind Bay first floated the notion of a new venture specializing in Indian seafood. But it had seemed so odd to me at first. My mind was so firmly attached to a meat-and veggie-based Indian cuisine of goshts and murghs, and my idea of seafood so focused on things from Maine grilled with lemon and butter, that it didn’t compute. What would Kapoor serve, other than really good shrimp curry?
But then I actually looked at a map and noticed that India has a coastline of more than 4600 miles, one side bordering the Arabian Sea, another lapped by the Bay of Bengal, and the south bound by the Indian Ocean. What a dummy. In fact, Mumbai, the hub of urban India, was an ancient, aboriginal seven-island collection of fishing settlements when the rest of the world was still rooting for grubs. Huge catches of lobster, shrimp, and fish were hauled into port in Mumbai long before the first Portuguese sailors entered Goa and Mumbai harbor more than 500 years ago. Last year India exported over $9 billion of seafood (and sea cucumbers!), making it one of the top fishery markets in the world.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the food at the new Tamarind Bay Coastal Indian Kitchen in Brookline is so good. And with only one or two entrées above $20, it’s also a fabulous value.
The food is served in an elegant setting with a first-rate martini bar and windows that open to the street. The huge menu features more than enough vegetarian and meat dishes to please any Indian-food devotee. But it’s the seafood that makes Tamarind Bay Coastal so worth a visit. Think of all the spices and fragrances you associate with Indian cuisine — the aromatic garam masalas, the fresh chilies, the cinnamons and curries, the smoky tandooris — and then try to imagine how quiet, subtle seafood could possibly stand up to those powerful influences. It does, I assure you. But you have to think about it in a slightly different way. Classic New Englanders assume that seafood is best served clean, lightly spiced, and lightly sauced, with freshness as its biggest asset. Indian coastal cooking is entirely different. It’s big-flavor food, with sauces as complicated to construct as those prepared by a Michelin-three-star chef. The fish is as fresh and delicate as at Legal Sea Foods; just think bold sauces of yogurt, smoked tomatoes, ginger, and fried mustard seeds, and flavors of red chili oil, tamarind, garlic, and turmeric. The seafood preparations here are all about using a wild bouquet of spices and longsimmering sauces to add flavor, heat, and the kind of intensity that lingers in your mouth, cheeks, and nose but never makes your eyes water. It’s a magic trick mastered by the finest Indian chefs, a fraternity that must include Tamarind Bay Coastal’s Wali Ahmad.
Owner Kapoor is a serial entrepreneur. This second restaurant is his fourth company. He moved to the United States from
India with his family when he was 15; now he’s more Newton than Nawab. Other than the light lilt of a South Asian accent and the fact that there were more than 900 guests at his wedding in India a few years ago, you’d easily mistake him for any other Boston-area business smarty. But at heart Kapoor is a foodie, and that makes him different. When he opened the first Tamarind Bay in Cambridge, he had a dream of an Indian restaurant serving “cuisine” rather than food. He hired stellar five-star Indian hotel chefs (“not just Indian cooks”) to ensure that the food made the ubiquitous Indian steamtable lunch buffets taste like the last dregs of Sterno. “As far as I am concerned,” Kapoor says, “I work with the only two Indian chefs — not cooks — in Boston: Wali Ahmad, who is the chef at the new Brookline restaurant, and Sunil Soni, our executive chef in Harvard Square. Thomas John, formerly of Mantra, was a third, but he’s left the finedining field.”
The new Tamarind Bay Coastal is a small restaurant, but it’s a classy gem. I can well imagine the lines on Saturday snaking around the corner. In addition to lunch and dinner, they’ll be serving a traditional Indian “high tea” from 3 to 5 p.m. on weekends beginning in November, with lots of classic Indian street food including pakoras, idlis, and all manner of crunchy little nuggets and desserts. So far, my only complaint is that they don’t plan to serve coffee and tea at the restaurant during regular dinner hours. But of course, there’s a Starbucks just a hop, skip, and a jump away.
