Savor Scout › Food guides › Tandoori
How to find good tandoori
Tandoori food is cooked in a tandoor — a clay oven heated to very high temperatures — and nothing else produces quite the same smoky char. Many restaurants call dishes tandoori without one.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- A real tandoor — Tandoori chicken should have char marks and smoke. Pale, evenly cooked chicken came from an oven or grill.
- Yoghurt and spice marinade — Overnight marinating with ginger, garlic and garam masala, so the flavour goes deep.
- Natural colour — The bright red is often food colouring. Good versions are a deep, spiced orange-brown.
- Juicy, not dry — Tandoori chicken cooks fast at high heat; overcooked is a common failure.
- Naan puffed and blistered — Slapped against the tandoor wall, with charred bubbles.
What to order
- Tandoori chicken — Half or full.
- Seekh kebab — Minced lamb from the tandoor.
- Paneer tikka — For vegetarians.
- Garlic naan — Freshly baked.
- Tandoori fish or shrimp — If available.
Where to find Tandoori
Tandoori is mostly found at Indian restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 8,675 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
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
Campuses with the most within a mile
New School University 99 Baruch 96 The Graduate Center 94 FIT 80 Touro University 79 NYU 77
A few to start with
- Indian Express — New York, NY
18 Murray St, New York - Tikka N Curry — Chicago, IL
400 S Financial Pl, Chicago - Spice of America — San Francisco, CA
1655 Market St, San Francisco - Pani Puri Company — Sunnyvale, CA
620 Hollenbeck Ave, Sunnyvale - BADMAASH Downtown LA — Los Angeles, CA
108 W 2nd St, Los Angeles - Cafe Zum Zum — Seattle, WA
823 3rd Ave, Seattle
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.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for tandoor, charred, smoky and clay oven, and favours places where reviewers describe the naan as blistered or puffy — a reliable proxy for a working tandoor.
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.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX
Related food guides
Indian food, Butter chicken, Kebabs
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