Dining out: No enigma here—Indigma serves tasty Indian fare

by Lynn Williams
maindish@baltimoreguide.com

“Indigma” is a conflation of “Indian” and “enigma.” It suggests that this new Mount Vernon restaurant is creating a contemporary breed of Indian food with extra charisma and sophistication and a lively jolt of the exotic. The real enigma, though, is why it took so long for someone to open an Indian small-plates restaurant here in Baltimore.
Indian food is a natural for the tapas treatment. Indian lunch buffets are popular not only because they’re a bargain, but because the dishes, with their diverse flavors, textures, and degrees of heat, are so tempting that one wants to try a little of everything.
My husband and I first sampled Indigma at an impromptu lunch during the Book Festival. The menu was terrific: diners put together their own meal by choosing as many starters ($1), meat ($3) or vegetarian ($2) tapas and breads ($1) as they crave. Order $11 worth of tapas, and you get access to a salad bar with a colorful array of atypical side dishes. I liked the results so much I scheduled a dinner with a friend for the following week.
At dinner, Indigma offers both a selection of small plates and more conventionally-sized entrees. (That’s about the only thing that’s conventional about a place whose menu boasts such dishes as venison vindaloo.) Accompanying each menu selection is a list of the ingredients and spices used.
Despite this menu assist, our meal fell into a common trap of mix-and-match dining: we chose dishes that while fine in themselves, didn’t work well together. We thought we were being diverse, with a meal that included avocado pakora, pumpkin soup with black-eyed peas (kadhu ki russ), coconut shrimp, and saag paneer, a spinach dish made with three different types of paneer cheese.
The pakora – slices of avocado rubbed with sun-dried mango powder, fried, and served with a shallot and ginger dipping sauce - were an intriguing beginning. The pumpkin soup wasn’t available, so we went with the malai chicken shorba, a dish of what looked like pure cream, and tasted rich beyond belief. When the shrimp arrived, however, we discovered that they had also been napped with an unctuously rich, creamy sauce. The shrimp themselves were big and fresh and gorgeous, and the sauce, which supposedly involved mustard seed, curry leaf, ginger and green chiles as well as coconut, was delicious, but after that soup we needed something lighter and more bracing. And the saag wasn’t it – it, too, was heavy and creamy-rich. None of this, I hasten to add, was the fault of the kitchen.
We could have had a better, more varied meal if we had opted for either the chef’s tasting menu ($30 for vegetarian, $40 for non, $15 more for wine pairings), or the tapas thali, an assortment of small plates designed for the pre-theatre crowd.
Indigma’s décor deserves a special mention. Tamarind-colored walls, filmy gauze at the windows, and Art Nouveau wallcloth patterned with roses and antelopes create a mood of sensual sparkle. The look is not necessarily Indian, but has an appropriate warmth, color and, especially, spice.

Indigma
Location: 802 N. Charles Street
Hours: Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily; dinner 4:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sun.-Thurs.,
4:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat.
Phone: 410-605-1212
Our dinner for two: $53.55

The Latest Dish…
Why should readers of the Baltimore Guide, the voice of South and Southeast Baltimore, be interested in a fundraiser for The Neighborhoods of Greater Lauraville? Well, they just might if they’ve discovered all the good eating to be had up in leafy “Norebo.” And everyone – not only neighbors – is invited to the afternoon event, to be held from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 20. Featured will be a food and wine tasting, presided over by WYPR’s Al Spoler, with contributions from such esteemed local businesses as the Chameleon Café, Red Canoe, Koco’s Pub, Alabama BBQ, Zeke’s Coffee, and caterer Winston Blick and Dang Good Food, Inc.; Tina Perry and Cookies and More will be bringing dessert. Tickets are $15 apiece, $25 a pair. For tickets and more information, call 410-444-9188, or check out www.greaterlauraville.com.