KAASHI Indian Cuisine

The Country Road Champaran Lamb Curry gives the clearest read on what this Niagara Falls kitchen is after: lamb cooked low with whole spices and herbs in a pot, named for the Bihar district the style comes from rather than for the sauce it sits in. It is not the dish a visitor reaches for on instinct, and that is the point. KAASHI works hardest when the order moves past the obvious and into the regional corners of the menu, where each dish carries the name of the place it came from.

The breadth is real, and it starts before the mains. Appetizers run from Chicken 65 spiked with lemon, chilli, and curry leaf to chilli-lime prawns seared with onions and coconut, an Awadhi mushroom galouti kabab, and a Shikari Tribal Taco that folds spiced pulled lamb into chapati. The tandoor turns out charbroiled lamb chops, achari chicken marinated in pickling spices, cashew-soft malai kabab, and a clean tandoori salmon that gives a table something charred before the richer curry pots arrive. Those pots run from butter chicken and tikka masala through Kerala-leaning seafood — a salmon in rural-Kerala red curry, prawns in a Beypore lemon-coconut sauce, a pan-seared seabass done in the toddy-shop style of the backwaters. Biryani is its own category, with the Malabari version layering chicken, basmati, lemon, and pineapple into the rice. The bread list reaches past plain naan to Peshwari stuffed with coconut, cashew, and raisins, and a paneer kulcha. None of it is filler.