Masala Kraft

A single menu in downtown Lindsay now runs from butter chicken to Thai green curry, with a stretch of Indo-Chinese plates sitting in between. Masala Kraft was built around that reach — Indian, Indo-Chinese, and Thai sections on one menu, on Lindsay Street South in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes — in a city that hadn't had a kitchen putting all three inside a single order. The breadth is the practical kind. It answers the group that can't settle on one cuisine, the family splitting a vegetarian curry and a goat one, the diner who wants momos one week and a tandoori platter the next. It serves a town and the travellers who pass through it — a local standby that can just as easily catch a visitor looking for dinner.

The familiar anchors are there and handled properly — butter chicken, chicken biryani, a paneer makhani that reappears, improbably, as a poutine. The kitchen's real signature is the tandoor. Methi Malai chicken tikka is marinated in fenugreek, cream, and spice before it meets the clay oven; chicken seekh kabab, achari wings, and a non-veg lover platter come off the same fire. Kadhai chicken arrives loud with sliced peppers, onions, and tomato; smokey baigan bhartha is eggplant charred over an open flame and folded back into a curry. The curries run deep on protein — lamb korma, goat curry, prawn korma, butter lamb, paneer two or three ways — so a single order can swing from something mild to something built for heat.