What to order
What to order at a Indian restaurant as a picky eater
Indian food has a reputation that puts people off before they have read a menu. Some of that reputation is earned, and most of it applies to a section you can simply skip.
Eliminate sections before you read dishes
Indian menus are grouped by how the food is cooked, and that grouping does most of the work for you. Ruling out a whole section is faster than reading twenty dish names.
Often fried, often the mildest things on the menu.
Dry-cooked in a clay oven. Marinated in yoghurt, so rarely dairy-free.
An enormous range. Heat and richness vary far more than the word suggests.
Naan is usually made with yoghurt or milk; roti and chapati usually are not.
Biryani is a whole dish; pulao is a side.
Reliable starting points
Mild by definition — nuts, cream and gentle spice rather than heat.
Sweet, tomato-heavy and rich. The most familiar-tasting curry on most menus.
Dry-grilled and marinated rather than sauced. Nothing to hide in.
Lentils with spices. Comforting, gentle, and usually the cheapest thing you will enjoy most.
If you want to stretch slightly
Rogan josh
Aromatic rather than fiery — the red colour comes largely from Kashmiri chilli, which is mild and used for colour. A good first step away from korma.
A dish that shares most of its properties with something you already enjoy, and differs in one, lands far more often than a leap does.
What Indian menus don’t print
Nobody is hiding anything. These are foundational ingredients that a Indian kitchen treats the way you treat salt — not an ingredient, a medium. That is exactly why they never appear in a description.
Clarified butter, used as the cooking fat in a great many dishes including ones that read as dairy-free.
Korma, butter chicken and most tandoori marinades. Richness is usually dairy.
Thickens many pale, creamy curries — a genuine surprise for anyone avoiding nuts.
A common seasoning, and commercial versions are usually cut with wheat flour.
Recipes vary between restaurants and change without notice, so treat all of this as what to raise with the kitchen rather than a guarantee about any particular dish. The staff always have the final word.
TableSage reads menus using an AI language model, which gets things wrong sometimes.
Point it at the menu instead.
TableSage reads every dish on a Indian menu — including the parts that aren't printed — and tells you which ones suit you.