The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian

4022 Central Avenue NE

Minneapolis, MN 55421

Today we visited The Vegetarian.


It was lunch time on a Sunday and there was a buffet for serving ourselves this day.

The restaurant itself is in a nondescript building along with other restaurants, offices and shops, and it is easy to miss unless you are looking for it. Once you enter, you see a small room which is sparsely decorated in the way most low budget restaurants are, with paper placemats and the like. However, the waiter/cashier/owner? Of the place is warm and friendly and makes you feel immediately comfortable and happy to be there.

We received the customary large glass of water that is standard at Indian restaurants, and proceeded to the buffet lunch that was set up this day. As I am sure you can figure out, all the dishes here were vegetarian, and some were vegan.

I tried some chickpeas with yogurt sauce, some palak paneer (paneer with spinach) and another chickpea dish with onions on top of excellently prepared basmati rice. There were also vegetable pakoras, which are a sort of fried, Indian hushpuppy.

The chickpeas and yogurt sauce were decent, but unmemorable, and the palak paneer was a little flat. However, the chickpeas with onions was wonderfully spicy and hearty. I really enjoyed this. I even had a second helping!

Along with the meal, you are served naan, which is a Indian staple flat bread baked in a clay oven. However, here, you are also served a masala dosa with your buffet meal. A dosa is essentially an Indian crepe. This one was filled with a spicy potato and onion mixture. I was not particularly fond of the crepe part, but the filling was very tasty.

I ended my meal with a taste of the kheer (rice pudding). This was very rich and tasty. It was creamy and sweet, but spicy with clove and perhaps nutmeg? It was a very nice way to round out the meal.

Overall, this was a good restaurant and I would like to go back in the evening when I could taste other dishes off of their menu.