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Coriander Indian Bistro
Voorhees, New Jersey
(Scroll down to read the review)
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Coriander Indian Bistro
Reviewer's Summary: Lousy Food; Rotten Service
Address & Telephone No:
Coriander Indian Bistro
Ritz Center Mall
910 Haddenfield-Berlin Road
Voorhes, NJ 08043
Ph: 856-566-4546
Hours:
Lunch
Monday - Sunday
11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
Dinner
Monday - Thursday
5:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Friday & Saturday
5:00 PM - 10:30 PM
Sunday
5:00 PM- 9:30 PM
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Coriander Indian Bistro in Voorhees (New Jersey) is a new kind of fusion restaurant - a fusion of awful food and lousy
service.
If only Coriander's chef Vipul Bhasin would invest as much effort in honing his cooking skills as he does in pasting
marketing material to the glass front of his Voorhes restaurant, diners may have some chance of getting real Indian food
here.
Being diehard connoiseurs of Indian cuisine in all its avatars, we've dined at scores of Indian restaurants in NY, NJ, PA,
DE, DC and CA over the last decade. In our continuing quest for fine Indian food, we've had some pretty tasty stuff and some
so-so Indian food. Likewise with the service at Indian restaurants - we've experienced warm and friendly reception and also
indifferent and careless service.
We think we've seen it all. And seldom are we surprised.
But the fusion of disgusting food and pathetic service that we encountered at Coriander Indian Bistro left even folks like us
zapped.
For some diners, the unpleasant service at Coriander starts even before they are seated. Although there are several tables
vacant, the restaurant makes people wait until they clean up some corner table. Making people wait is understandable if there
are only one or two tables that are more suited for a larger group. But when there are plenty of vacant tables around, making
folks with young children wait is inexcusable.
Next there is the restaurant's dirty practice of keeping knives and forks directly on the table just after spraying some foul
smelling chemical on the table-top. Why can't these folks keep the forks and knives on a napkin? Even cheap American diners
do that.
If Coriander Indian Bistro was a new restaurant, we would brush off some of the rough edges as initial teething issues.
But as Coriander's owner Amalesh, a garrulous middle-aged man from the South Indian city of Hyderabad, explained to us the
restaurant was started about three years back.
More than the pathetic service, what got our goat at Coriander is its unpalatable food and shoddy handling of takeout orders.
We tasted several items at Coriander only to be disappointed each time.
One letdown dish relentlessly followed upon another.
We tried plain Naan and our perennial favorite, the Garlic Naan. Both were terrible. Their problem was that they landed on
our table only partially cooked, having been prematurely removed from the Tandoor (Indian clay oven).
Dal Makhani and Diwani Handi (a medley of vegetables cooked with spinach in a mild sauce) were hopelessly bland leaving us
with little appetite for either dish. Dal Makhani was so sour as to cast doubts about its freshness.
Upon tasting Coriander's Chicken Tikka Makhani, insulted diners would have dared the restaurant's inept chef to a duel if
this were the late 18th Century or early 19th Century.
By this time, we were in a state of utter bafflement as to how an Indian restaurant could turn out to be this bad.
One hypothesis is that the restaurant is saddled with a mediocre chef and untrained wait staff. Absence of competition in the
immediate neighborhood of Voorhees may have also made Coriander complacent. But Philadelphia with nice Indian restaurants
like Sitar and Uduppi Dosa House isn't too far at all from Voorhees.
Alu Capsicum seems to have been brought into the dining room with the sole goal of unashamedly displaying the kitchen's
ineptitude in preparing even the most ordinary of dishes. Apart from capsicum and potatoes, the tasteless dish seemed to lack
all other ingredients that go into this dish.
Coriander offers little respite from the mediocre run of dishes. Mixed Vegetable Curry, a seemingly hastily assembled medley
of vegetables boiled together, was a veritable assault on the taste buds. What was its raison d'etre?
Tandoori Chicken was one of the rare saving graces of Coriander. Cooked well and marinated with care, the chicken was juicy,
tender and tasty.
Coriander also has a cheap and nasty practice that we've encountered at other Indian restaurants occasionally. This is the
restaurants' disgusting practice of offering one plate of Papri Chaat, Dosa or some other snack/entree even when two people
go in for a buffet. In this instance, our clumsy waiter brought one plate of Papri Chaat to our table of two diners and
simultaneously one plate for a single diner at the adjacent table.
It's no coincidence that the words Cheap and Coriander both start with the letter C.
Just as we were dreaming of some fine desserts, reality dealt us another knockout punch.
Our two desserts Kesar Kheer and Kulfi Berries were more engrossing to behold than to ingest.
Kesar Rice Kheer was a sweetless mess while the Kulfi Berries was unimpressive and thoroughly overwhelmed by the tiny Berries
surrounding it.
Coriander's Madras Coffee ($3.25) is an absolute ripoff lacking any of that fine flavor that accompanies genuine Madras
Coffee. We've sipped Madras Coffee countless times that we can recognize an impostor with just one sip. Stop by at any New
Jersey Turnpike rest area and you are likely to get far superior coffee than the Coriander Madras Coffee impostor.
Little did we know the horror that lay ahead of us with our takeout order of Kadai Paneer ($12.50), a vegetarian dish made
from cottage cheese and peppers sauteed with tomatoes, ginger and coriander. On being asked how we wanted the Kadai Paneer
cooked, we answered spicy.
Alarm bells should have immediately rung when a few minutes later - in the midst of our lunch - one of the waiters came by
and rhetorically asked us, you got your takeout, right? We still hadn't and said as much. At the time, we dismissed the
waiter's confusion as just another instance of Coriander's clueless service.
But much to our dismay, on reaching home we found the careless zombies at Coriander had packed non-vegetarian mild Kadai
Chicken instead of the vegetarian spicy Kadai Paneer that we ordered. Since we saw another person waiting to pick up a takeout order at the same time, it's possible that the two orders got exchanged. Irrespective of how the mistake occurred, it's gross negligence and real sloppiness on the part of Coriander Bistro to pack a Chicken Dish when a Vegetarian Curry is ordered.
Also, it's customary to pack two paper plates, a set of forks/knives and some napkins with a takeout order. But don't expect the bozos at Coriander Bistro to know such basics of service.
In any case, the Kadai Chicken was pathetic - the Chicken was too hard and the curry far too mildly spiced to satisfy Indian
palates.
In the utter lack of attention to service and repeated displays of amateurish cooking, Coriander Indian Bistro is a true
disciple of mediocrity.
Coriander also offers catering and private room dining services but you'd have to be totally reckless and completely
masochistic to entrust your important event to this bunch of amateurs. - RR
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