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Food guide

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.

Where to find Indian food

Open listings put 8,634 Indian restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 312 Chicago, IL 126 San Francisco, CA 103 Sunnyvale, CA 77 Los Angeles, CA 77 Seattle, WA 72 San Jose, CA 72 Jersey City, NJ 72 Irving, TX 70 Philadelphia, PA 69 Washington, DC 66 Fremont, CA 64

Campuses with the most within a mile

The New School 99 Baruch 96 CUNY Graduate Center 94 FIT 80 Touro University 79 NYU 77 HCCC 52 Hunter 44 BMCC 36 John Jay 32

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

Indian food near campus

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 →

When you might want this

Where to eat when half the group is vegetarian Where to eat on a Sunday night Where to eat when you're broke What to eat on a cold rainy night