Raja Chettinad Fine Indian Cuisine

Raja Chettinad can be ordered two ways, and only one of them does the kitchen justice. Order butter chicken and naan and you get a competent version of a dish every Indian restaurant in Kitchener keeps on hand. Order the Raja SPL Chicken Ghee Roast Varuval — bone-in chicken roasted down with a Chettinad spice blend, ghee, pepper, and curry leaves — and you get what the place was built to cook. The menu runs long enough to serve both diners, but its centre of gravity sits in the regional South Indian cooking of Tamil Nadu's Chettinad country, and that is where a first order should go.

The map of that cooking starts light. Dosa is a house specialty — the crisp Masala Dosa folded around spiced potato, the Mysore Masala Dosa carrying a chutney heat, the Ghee Paper Roast stretched thin and brittle — set next to tiffin plates of medhu vadai, the lentil fritters that come with chutney and sambar. From there the kitchen turns heavier. Varuvals arrive dry-roasted and pepper-forward: country chicken in the Naatukozhi, blue crab tossed with crushed pepper, fennel, and curry leaves. The seafood keeps going where most Kitchener Indian menus stop, with a Chettinad blue crab curry and a Kerala-style king prawn Malabar in coconut. Biriyani spans the regional styles a Chettinad kitchen is judged on — bone-in Ambur goat, Dindigul Thalapakatti, king prawn — and the bread runs from a plain layered South Indian parotta to the stuffed chicken veechu.