Shanghai Daily news

The Indian restaurant Ashoka offers a contemporary chic ambience and classic Northern Indian cuisine. Tina Kanagaratnam samples the curries and tandoor.

A restaurant in a mall is burdened with low expectations, (think fast food), but when the mall is the glamorous Ciro’s Plaza and the restaurant is Ashoka, it’s a different story altogether.
For all its style, Ciro’s is a shopping plaza slightly ahead of its time: few shopfronts are open, and its corridors are bereft of people.
But step into Ashoka, which serves the classics of Northern Indian cuisine, and the warmth of India envelopes you. Gordon Pears, the beaming maitre d’, leads you past an army of chefs standing at the open kitchen, tossing dough, pulling skewers from the oven and slapping bread — a culinary ballet.
Warm wood furniture, Indian-inspired screens and a beatific Buddha are the exotic accents in this otherwise contemporary chic space. In a city where Indian restaurants make up an entire listings column in local magazines, Ashoka has carved its own niche: neither over-the-top exotic nor plain and homestyle, this is a place that is comfortable, not stiff, yet at the same time, stylish. (And part of the style, without a doubt, is the view: window tables offer breathtaking views of the neneoclassical Shanghai Art Museum, the Grand Theater and pinnacle of Tomorrow Square.) The 480-square meter, 150-seat space is cleverly separated into enclaves, making it intimate enough for a date, and gregarious enough to take the family.
Ashoka’s appetizers – 18 of them all together – could make a meal alone. Especially delicious are the tender skewers — chicken, prawn, broccoli, beef, marinated in a mix of fragrant spices and cooked in the tandoor oven. The lamb samosas, crisp, deep-fried packages filled with minced lamb, potatoes and peas; the chicken kebabs wrapped in the flat bread called romali roti.
Ask Gordon Pears what he recommends on the rest of the menu, which is a long, mouth-watering ramble from chicken to lamb, beef to seafood, vegetables to bread, rice and dessert, and after a quick discussion of preferences, he will invariably  suggest something from the tandoor. The clay tandoor oven, where the intense coal heat sears food and gives it a unique, almost barbecued taste, is a staple of the Northern Indian kitchen and a highlight at Ashoka.
The Tandoori Murga, marinated and barbecued spring chicken rich with spices, and the Sheesh Kebab tandoori – lamb, minced with coriander, fennel and pepper and the fresh Maharajah prawns are all stars. The tandoor flavor sets off the natural flavors of each dish.
Tandoor is an essential component of most Indian restaurant kitchens, but when it comes to subcontinental home kitchens, nothing is more important than curry.
And here, Ashoka does itself proud. The range of curries including the famously fiery Chicken Vindaloo, boneless chicken covered in a chilli-infused curry gravy; a tender “butter chicken” curry, barbecued breast of chicken in a milder, tomato-based curry gravy and the delectable Goan fish curry, fresh fish in a coconut-based curry gravy.
Dishes are accompanied with rice – the flavorful nutty basmati rice and eight different kinds of naan (flatbread), from
butter and saffron to garlic, potato and onion and even minced lamb.
The restaurants obviously recognizes that guests, filled up on the quantities of tandoor, curries and breads, will have little room left for dessert, and their offerings are suitably empathetic: a fresh fruit platter, perhaps, or a small dish of gulab jamun. The latter, a Norrthern Indian classic, is done well here: fried dough dumplings, served in a sugar syrup.
And to end, there is the fabulous Monsoon Malabar Blend coffee – like Ashoka, an Indian classic updated.

Ashoka, Ciro’s Plaza, 3rd Floor, 388 Nanjing Road East, Tel: 6334-5989 Lunch: 11:30am–2pm, Monday–Saturday; Dinner 5:30pm–10pm, daily.