The Host

With American thanksgiving last week, a calm settled over the office on Thursday and Friday so there was enough time to head over to the Host for their Indian buffet on Friday. I'd been years ago a la carte but I hadn't ever had their lunch buffet (available Thursday through Sunday).

The buffet is in a back little room which is sort of a step up from the normal restaurant set up where the buffet dominates the whole room. I picked up my plate and immediately bypassed the salads. (For the interested, there seemed to be a number of them. They looked alright and were generally green in colour.) The first items that I picked up were some papadum and a pakora. Both were good but offered no real surprises. They also had spring rolls whose presence I did find surprising so I skipped them.

I moved on to the rice which was tasty. They had 3 or so vegetarian dishes but I was very displeased that there was no daal. I tried to make do with the chana masala but nothing can compete with good daal. I don't have the same love for butter chicken that most people harbour but I did find their butter chicken reasonably tasty with decent sized chunks of meat. You certainly didn't have to dig around the dish to get the meat as you sometimes have to on Queen St. I also had the beef and some tandoor chicken. The beef was reasonably tender and the tandoor I quite liked as again the chicken pieces were large.

I ate and then repeated the process again placing the most emphasis on the butter chicken.

I went onto dessert after that. They had a fruit salad (with pineapple!), kheer/rice pudding, carrot cake and gulab jamon. I of course tried them all more than once. The gulab which is usually my favorite were only alright. The balls looked terrific. They were slightly smaller than the typical gulab I've encountered. However, I really prefer the gulab warm so it was disappointing when they weren't. Other than that the taste was great. Janice would have loved the carrot cake with its delightfully sweet icing. I had no problems with the rice pudding and as noted previously the pineapple in the fruit salad made my day (well it made the fruit salad if not my day).

As with every sit down place in Yorkville, nothing comes cheap. It was 15 dollars all in although if you're willing to wait for awkward amounts of change you could get by with 14.25 problem.