Punjabi Palace, South Brisbane

Two Fridays ago, I ordered home delivery from the Punjabi Palace, possibly the longest standing Indian Restaurant in my neighbourhood.  The Punjabi Palace is possibly my favourite destination for curry.  This is due to not just the quality of the food, but also of their menu.  Unlike some other Indian restaurants, where I am usually partial to just a minor selection of their menu items, the Punjabi Palace offers several different kinds of high quality curries.  On this occasion, I was sharing with my parents, and was therefore afforded the opportunity to sample three of these curries.  I had chicken vindaloo, chicken Ceylon, and lamb palak, all medium spicy, with naan as an accompaniment.  I like the Indian approach to cuisine:  you take your meat of choice, and cook it in every herb and spice available.  Done correctly, this results in an excellent melange of flavours.  The Punjabi Palace did it correctly.  I will start by describing the bread.  Nine times out of ten, the bread is my favourite part of an Indian curry.  It absorbs the fine flavours of the sauce better than meat, vegetables or rice can.  Punjabi Palace's naan is quite similar to the naan you can get at most Indian restaurants, but this is OK as I rarely have had any negative experiences with this type of bread.  At the Punjabi Palace, and indeed many other Indian restaurants, the naan is almost the size of a dinner plate.  This suits me, because, as I have previously mentioned the bread is the most enjoyable part of a curry.  However, the largeness of the bread does mean that when you factor in the curry and the rice, you are getting a lot of food.  I was a little wary ordering the chicken vindaloo, as my last experience with vindaloo was a fiasco.  However, on this occasion, the vindaloo I received was almost exactly what I wanted.  It wasn't too spicy.  In fact I could have tolerated it to be a little more spicy.  The sauce was all that I wanted from a vindaloo.  The flavours of the tomato and vinegar were present, but not overpowering, and the melange of spices I previously alluded to were right on the money.  The chicken Ceylon is a coconut milk based curry and is quite unlike any other curry I have ever encountered. I suppose it was like a korma, but with coconut milk instead of yoghurt, and perhaps slightly stronger in terms of taste.  The sauce was smooth and creamy, and once again, the balance of flavours was just right.  As for the palak, this is a spinach-based curry, and I'm amazed how tasty the cooks managed to make something as bland as spinach taste so rich and satisfying.  It is worth pointing out that in all three dishes the meat was cooked to a high level of tenderness; the chicken dishes perhaps moreso than the lamb.  Overall, this experience cemented my opinion that the Punjabi Palace is one of the best curry destinations in Brisbane for all the reasons I have stated in this review.