Madras - Indian Restaurant Palma

Madras Mallorca sits on Avinguda de Gabriel Roca, where Palma's Passeig Marítim runs straight along the harbour basin, only a few house numbers from the Auditòrium. The marina pontoons lie in front of the door, and Santa Catalina climbs the slope above the promenade. The name is a statement that deserves an explanation. Madras is the old name of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Behind it stands a kitchen of rice, lentils, coconut, tamarind and curry leaf that has little in common with the tandoor cooking of the north. Anyone expecting a dosa menu will not find one here. What does reach the table, though, is more layered than it looks at first glance. What Madras Mallorca makes of its name The main body of the menu is northern Indian in character and follows the canon European guests know from the curry house: korma with cream, raisins and coconut, a vindaloo declared very hot, jalfrezi with fresh onions and peppers, dopiaza, bhuna, dansak with pineapple and lentils, rogan josh built on tomato, and pasanda in a cream sauce with almonds and pistachios. A balti section of its own arrives at the table in the balti pan, and the clay oven turns out tikka, seekh kebab and half tandoori chickens. The house specialities are called Agra Especial, a chicken dish in masala sauce with tomato, ginger, onion and cream, alongside pollo mathi with fenugreek and fresh lemon, tikka masala and butter chicken. The south does not disappear underneath all that. It sits in a place that is easy to read past: the rice column. Lemon rice, tamarind rice, coconut rice and tomato rice stand there, and the menu explicitly marks them as a southern Indian preparation. This is the Tamil family of seasoned rice dishes, not the usual side order. There is also a sambhar, which the menu describes as a traditional southern Indian lentil stew with tamarind, and among the fried starters cauliflower and chicken appear with chilli, onion and curry leaf, the way they are served in Chennai. So the name here is more than decoration, even if it does not carry the whole menu. The range of the menu Madras Mallorca runs a menu with well over a hundred numbered entries. Paneer, the fresh Indian cheese the menu lists as the house cheese, carries nine dishes on its own: diced in chilli sauce, fried in chickpea batter, skewered with peppers and onion from the clay oven, with peas, with spinach, in a butter sauce, in the nut sauce of shahi paneer and in the karahi pan. Beside it stand dal makhani made from black lentils, channa masala with chickpeas and a vegetable korma on a coconut base. The bread list is unusually long: naan in several versions, with cheese, with garlic or stuffed with minced meat, plus chapati, parota, tandoori roti, kulcha and the deep-fried batora. And because Indian houses almost always cook Indo-Chinese as well, there are manchurian dishes, chilli pans and a noodle section that the menu itself describes as a Chinese classic with a Madras twist. Who the house suits Heat can be steered through the menu, and that is not an empty phrase: korma and dopiaza are laid out mild, the Madras curry that gives the house its name is medium-hot, vindaloo is very hot. Anyone eating vegetarian finds a proper section of its own rather than a token line. There is a children's menu for families, and the owners bring, by their own account, long experience from Mallorca's restaurant trade. Reservations go through the house's own booking system. Before a concert at the Auditòrium that is a good idea, because the position directly on the promenade makes Madras Mallorca an obvious address for the evening beforehand.