Tawa is a Indian restaurant in Stelton Road, Edison, NJ. Since we decided to go out for lunch, we went to Tawa. I had been to Tawa over a year ago and it was good to see they have improved their interior design. The restaurant now looks more spacious than before. Their decorations are also well aligned with the colour scheme of the interiors. Overall the ambience is very nice in the restaurant.

They have a lunch buffet which contains both vegetarian as well as non vegetarian items.

For appetizers, in addition to all the usual items that we see in any Indian restaurant, they also have a good ‘Chaat Counter’, where we can make our own paani pooris with the huge variety of ingredients and items. Not sure if they usually have a person who helps us out with those, but we were excited to prepare our chaat using those items ourselves. It was quite tasty and hence stands out as the best of all their appetizers.

They also had vegetable cutlet, which I really liked as it was neither too spicy nor too bland, but just the right combination. In the non vegetarian section, they had the usual tandoori chicken, which has become a de facto item in every single buffer menu in any Indian restaurant in the US. In any case, the tandoori chicken was very average. Besides tandoori chicken, they also had chicken manchurian which was quite tasty and one of the best non vegetarian items in the buffet today.

A good thing is that naan is served to the table which is much nicer than many other restaurants where they have all the naans in a big container in the buffet counter itself.

They also had their Tawa Vegetable special, which was very tasty. It had noodles and fried rice mixed together, which was a very nice dish. Besides naan, white rice and Tawa vegetable special, there were different vegetarian gravies, dal makhani, paneer masala and navratna korma. They were not bad but nothing special about it. They also had a aalo mutter, which was ok.

In the non vegetarian main course, they also had chicken tikka masala and moghlai chiken. Chicken tikka masala was the best among the two. The goat briyani was missing quite a few ingredients and did not have any flavour.

The dessert section was the one which had the least focus. They just had two items, a carrot sweet dish and a bread pudding. The carrot item is very tasty, while the bread pudding was a very bad selection as it had no taste in it.

Before we left the restaurant, one of the staff asked us how the food was and we were very glad to tell them exactly what was good and what was not. He immediately said that when we come for Ala Carte he will help us get the dishes we order made to exactly our taste and level of spice/flavour in it.

Overall it was a very good experience and I am glad we went there today. I intend to go there again in the near future when I get a chance.