On a recent Sunday at Angel Indian, a new, mostly Punjabi restaurant in Jackson Heights, where the bill of fare happens to be meat-free, an epicure I had brought along for lunch declared that he didn’t much care for vegetarian Indian food. An hour and a half-dozen dishes later, I watched him jump up from the table to chase down a pair of women who had studied the menu taped to the front door before walking away, so he could urge them to return.
House-made paneer is the star of the menu, nestled into biryani and crumbled in lotus-root kofta, but there are plenty of dishes that focus on vegetables, from okra to kale, and many dishes can be made vegan.
Angel is a welcome entry into the classic genre of humble, family-run restaurants that don’t look like much but offer meals that inspire passionate allegiance. Before opening his own place, the chef, Amrit Pal Singh, cooked at two of the city’s best and most stylish Indian restaurants—Rahi, in Manhattan, and Adda, in Long Island City (they share an owner). Though Angel has little in common with those establishments aesthetically, its food is on par with theirs.
For a dramatic start, order the dahi batata puri, a chaat, popular all over India, that looks something like a cluster of cartoon dinosaur eggs. Each crisp, fragile orb, made of a fried dough known as puri (or, sometimes, poori), is filled with aromatic mashed potato and dollops of tamarind chutney, cilantro chutney, and sweetened yogurt, then showered in sev (tiny shards of fried chickpea noodles) and a fine dusting of chili powder.
A chaat, or snack, called dahi batata puri features miniature orbs of fried dough filled with mashed potato, chutneys, and sweetened yogurt, all blanketed in tiny shards of fried chickpea noodles.
The kale pakoda is another showstopper, featuring leaves of the curly brassica fried until they’re as translucent as stained glass, encased in chickpea batter, and fried again, until they’re sharply crunchy. A stack of them, topped with festive zigzags of chutneys and yogurt, cuts a bit like a mille-feuille. A third appetizer, called Paneer PB 35 (a reference to the vehicle registration code for Singh’s home town of Pathankot, in India’s Punjab state), is less visually arresting than the pakoda but just as memorable: cubes of excellent house-made paneer—creamy, salty, curdy but firm, without a hint of squeak—tossed in a jammy, spicy mix of tomato, onion, green pepper, and long peels of fresh ginger. Sprinkled with chopped cilantro, it veers into Indo-Chinese territory.
The dum biryani, chockablock with vegetables, paneer, and whole spices, is sealed with a cap of naan.
That dish is just one among the restaurant’s impressively wide array of paneer applications. There are standards like saag paneer, with spinach, and matar paneer, with green peas, but also less ubiquitous dishes, like lotus-root kofta, for which paneer is crumbled, mixed with shredded lotus root and freshly ground garam masala, and rolled into balls. These are fried so they’re crisp and golden on the outside but still soft in the middle, then bathed in a luscious fresh-tomato sauce turned pale with copious butter.
Paneer is nestled, too, with rice, carrots, potatoes, onions, and whole spices in a beautiful dum biryani, which releases fragrant steam when you cut into its naan cap, shiny with oil and bright with a few shakes of paprika. If this sounds like a lot of cheese for one meal, fear not: there are plenty of dishes that are more centered on vegetables, including mashed eggplant (baingan bharta), fried okra (bhindi masala), and kidney beans (rajma masala), which are almost creamy in texture. All are complexly layered with flavor and heat and served with fluffy basmati rice flecked with fennel seeds.
Angel is the kind of humble, family-run restaurant that’s not much to look at but which makes food—all vegetarian, mostly Punjabi—that inspires passionate allegiance.
Silky tofu can be substituted for paneer in just about any dish, and Singh is happy to make vegan versions of many things. Angel, which is named after Singh’s five-year-old daughter, is a warm and accommodating place. On that Sunday afternoon, Singh’s wife and her brother darted in and out of the small kitchen, pouring milky masala chai into paper cups and shuttling plastic bowls and plates. Behind the takeout counter, the top of Angel’s head was barely visible, barrettes with bows fastened in her hair. We didn’t order dessert, but dessert came anyway: tiny ramekins of rice pudding, topped with chopped almonds. The pair of women came back and ordered a chaat to go. (Main courses $8.99-$11.99.) ♦
