How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

How do you pick a restaurant as a group?

Savor Scout group rooms turn it into a 90-second vote. The host shares a link, everyone taps yes on anything they would eat, and each person gets one veto to remove an option for the group. When two options remain the vetoes stop and votes decide. No app or signup is needed.

Yes. Searching and group rooms are free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Food guides › Indian food

How to find good Indian food

Most Indian restaurants outside India run some version of the same North Indian menu, which was itself shaped by Punjabi migration and British tastes. It can be very good. It is also about two per cent of what Indian food is.

What separates a good one from a bad one

Spices ground and bloomed in the kitchen — The difference between layered, specific aroma and the generic smell of curry powder. This is perceptible before you sit down.
A stated region — Kerala, Chettinad, Hyderabad, Goa, Bengal, Gujarat, Andhra. Naming one is a claim the kitchen can be held to.
Distinct sauces — If the dishes look like the same base gravy with different proteins, that is exactly what they are. Good kitchens produce visually and aromatically different dishes.
A working tandoor — Bread made to order, and meat with actual char. Naan reheated from earlier is immediately obvious.
Serious vegetarian cooking — In much of India vegetarian food is the default rather than the accommodation. A menu with a deep vegetarian section is a sign of a kitchen cooking from a real tradition.

What to order

South Indian — Dosa, idli, uttapam, sambar, rasam. Rice and lentil based, fermented, light, and almost entirely different from northern food. Usually the best value Indian food in any city.
Chettinad and Andhra — The hottest regional cuisines, black pepper and dried chilli forward, and superb.
Kerala — Coconut, curry leaf, seafood, appam. Distinctively bright.
Hyderabadi — Biryani cooked in the dum style, sealed and steamed. A properly made biryani is a different dish from rice with curry poured over it.
Bengali and Gujarati — Mustard oil, freshwater fish and panch phoron in one; sweet-sour vegetarian thalis in the other. Both rare and both worth finding.
The thali — Several dishes at once, often unlimited. The best possible way to judge an unfamiliar kitchen.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Indian searches read heavily for regional vocabulary and for individual dish names, because the template menu is so widespread that a generic search returns the same restaurant everywhere. Searching for dosa or biryani specifically will surface a South Indian or Hyderabadi kitchen that a general search would bury under higher-rated North Indian restaurants.

Find Indian food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

Related food guides

curry, soup, noodles

When you might want this

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