Cuisine of India buffet, Mount Prospect

JoelF, in a thread about something else entirely, wrote:If I'm in that neighborhood I'll go to "Indian Cuisine" in the same strip. Cheap and effective dinner buffet.

The restaurant in question is Cuisine of India, and they still do the dinner buffet from 5 to 10 p.m. (also a lunch buffet). We stopped in just before 9 tonight, and the $9.95 buffet was plentiful -- at least a dozen dishes, plus naan and tandoori chicken brought to the table as well as desserts -- but the restaurant was deserted. I think this could be a very good thing if you stopped in near opening time, but by the time we got there things had started to congeal.

Himself risked it anyway, found soggy samosa and decent vegetable dishes that hadn't suffered too much if you dug beneath the skin that had formed on the surface. The lamb in the rogan josh tasted dry. I ordered from the menu: ample portions of well-spiced eggplant bharta, very nice; and flavorful but somewhat overcooked tandoori shrimp.

The Colony Square shopping strip is a very interesting one, with an Indian market, a Turkish market, the Kampai floating sushi bar and teppanyaki restaurant, a Thai place, a Jewish-style deli and an Italian liquor store.

Cuisine of India
847/718-1522
Colony Square Shopping Center
2348 S. Elmhurst Road, Mount Prospect IL 60056
Also Naperville and DeKalb

Thanks for the info, that place sounds disgusting.

Unless it's fallen waaaay downhill in the past couple of months, it truly isn't disgusting at all, but I will admit that by the end of a night a buffet can be a frightening thing. A couple of stirs of the sauced dishes would help keep the skin off, and most curries get better as time goes on and they continue to simmer. Fried things such as samosas ought to be replaced regularly if the traffic doesn't turn them over fast enough.

Their Rogan Josh is actually my least favorite dish on the buffet, with several of the other dishes being close to stellar.!

We eat relatively early for dinner most of the time, so I'd assumed that the relative emptiness of the restaurant is due to a later-eating crowd. If it's empty at 9, though, that kind of reasoning is flawed. They usually do have a number of big takeout orders going out while I'm there, and they may survive on the lunch traffic.

This message may sound like damning with faint praise, but I do like this place for a quick meal. Indian food is getting more plentiful in the near NW burbs, though, and I want to get back to Himalaya in Niles too.

JoelF wrote:Unless it's fallen waaaay downhill in the past couple of months, it truly isn't disgusting at all

You're right. I never meant to convey it as disgusting, just to advise going there earlier rather than later, or maybe for lunch, if you want the buffet. Because it did look as if everything on the buffet had been sitting there since 5 p.m. and most of what we tried seemed like it would have been good had it not been sitting quite so long.