New restaurants are always an interesting adventure. From picky eaters to cultural connoisseurs, you never know what to expect. One of the restaurants of the latter variety is Hyderabad Indian Grill, which recently opened a location in Fridley on 53rd Avenue.

Hyderabad offers a wide variety of dishes. They have numerous vegetarian options alongside seafood, lamb and chicken entrees! This wide variety spreads to heat as well, as Indian food is known to pack a punch with lots of flavor and spice. Hyderabad offers five levels of spice, allowing more people to enjoy their food without having to worry about spice tolerance.  

My family ordered 11 dishes, with a variety of spice levels and ranging from appetizers to desserts. Starting off with service, Hyderabad is small but decently busy. It has quickly become very popular with food delivery services such as Doordash and UberEats. After ordering, our food was ready in about 40 minutes, with the suggested time between 25-45 minutes. Included in the large order was sauce and plenty of rice to enjoy with the entrees. One sauce included is called raita, which is a yogurt cucumber sauce, similar to the greek sauce tzatziki. The other sauce is salan, which is peanut-based. Both sauces provide wonderful contrast to the different dishes and heat.

 The two appetizers were veggie samosas and Chicken Manchurian. The samosas are a staple item in most Indian restaurants and pair well with the raita and salan sauces. They had a delightful light pastry around them that nicely held together. The Chicken Manchurian was a family favorite. We ordered it at level two in heat, which provided a wonderful balance to the sweetness of the chicken at first bite. Very similar to orange chicken in its breading and look, the dish has a very unique taste to it. Along with the appetizers, we ordered two types of bread: naan and bhatura. Both complemented the entrees very well and are very good for dipping into leftover sauce. The bhatura has a slightly sweeter taste than the naan, making them different from each other in a wonderful way.

Moving onto the variety of entrees, a favorite out of the options was the Malai Kofta, which is a dish containing fried veggie balls in a nut-based sauce. They do have a strange texture, similar to that of a potato pie, but with the sauce it is very smooth and rich. 

A staple item we ordered was the Chicken Tikka Masala, which had a vibrant flavour and not too much heat, but there was a high amount of liquid with less bits of chicken and onion than expected. A similar item was the Chicken Tikka Skewer, which we ordered at a heat level four, but compared to some of the dishes at lower heat levels, was very mild in taste and slightly on the drier side. The chicken bits from the skewer did end up balancing the high amount of liquid that was in the tikka masala. The final dish was the lamb vindaloo, which had a perfect ratio of sauce to meat and vegetables

The final item was the Egg Street Noodles, which was like a stir-fry type dish. The entree had a mild flavor, and had noodles cooked with egg, carrot, and peppers mixed in. It was good as a stand-alone, but other dishes definitely stood out much more. 

For dessert we ordered the Gulab Jamun, which are deep fried milk balls in a sweet syrup. They were very sweet with a strange consistency on the inside. Similar to a jam donut hole doused in syrup, they provided a completely different flavour and ended the meal with a sweet sensation.

Overall, Hyderabad has a good range of flavour profiles and heat levels on its menu, with several options to satisfy both vegetarians and meat-eaters alike. The highlights were the Chicken Manchurian, the Bhatura, and the Lamb Vindaloo. If you like trying new food, or are a longtime fan of Indian food, Hyderabad has some staples and offbeat choices that are very good and highly recommended.