Battle of the Saag: New Delhi VS Lal Mirch

That would be saag, not sag. Battle of the sag would be entirely different (and not funny) matter.

I didn’t grow up eating spicy food. It wasn’t until college when I had Indian food for the first time (surprisingly, I had Bangladeshi food in high school but that is another post). My roommate would take me home to her parents some weekends where I swore they fed me the best Indian food. Did they cook it? Nah, it was always catered. And I never knew where from. But I could honestly say I’ve not really had bad Indian food. Well, there’s that one place but I’m not going to name them because I’m sure there are some people out there who enjoys greasy tasteless curries. Erm.

So! During my introduction to Indian food, I immediately latched onto saag. I love spinach. And I love seafood so I tended to order the shrimp saag (along with garlic naan and a mango lassi) wherever I went. It was really quite the unoriginal order (much like my typical unoriginal Thai order). It wasn’t until recently at Bhimas that I looked at an Indian restaurant’s menu and realized I hardly recognized anything on the menu. I still haven’t read the 15 or so articles a friend sent me about Indian food but I do know there must be much more varied menus out there. I just had to seek them out.

In the meantime, I went back to my trusty saag dish. I missed it at Nirvana but ordered it at both New Delhi Palace and Lal Mirch last week.

Anisha from Food is my Nish and I ordered the catfish masala and the lamb saag at New Delhi. When I first tasted the catfish, I thought I was eating a Thai dish. It was super sweet. Later, Anisha said it was probably from a different region of India where the food is much more sweet. The catfish itself was very good but I wasn’t into the shredded coconut.

I did however gobble up my lamb despite it being a little bit more creamy than I like my saag.

I spied strawberry lassi on the menu which I had to have since I hadn’t seen it before. Besides getting bits of strawberry stuck in the straw, it was all right. I prefer the tangy mango version after all.

New Delhi Palace

950 East Colorado Boulevard
Pasadena, CA 91106
(626) 405-0666

While we were waiting for our shrimp saag and mahi mahi curry, the gay boyfriend and I were given complimentary soup. The server explained since seafood took longer, he wanted to give us something while we waited. How nice!

The gay boyfriend never used to like Indian food. Over the last few years, he’s come to enjoy it more and when I had suggested Lal Mirch for dinner, he readily agreed. He really enjoyed his curry and I can see us coming back for more soon.

Lal Mirch’s saag was very different from whenever I had it before. I had always described saag as a bit like creamed spinach. Lal Mirch’s version featured very fresh spinach that still had some bite to it. Very toothsome. There was plenty of shrimp to boot which is always nice.

I didn’t see until after I ordered my iced tea they had strawberry lassi. Perhaps next time I’ll do a lassi battle!

Lal Mirch

11138 Ventura Boulevard
Studio City, CA 91604-3133
(818) 980-2273