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| - I'm struggling with writing this review, as sometimes individual dishes here can be quite good. I've had the buffet here 4 times, and each time there have been issues. Today was no different. I'm a big fan of rasam, the spicy South Indian soup, and, while the rasam here is delicious, it's never, ever hot. Again today, lukeworm soup. Last time I complained, but today I thought "why bother?", as it appears they didn't learn anything from the last time. When I went to dish it out, there were no soup cups or bowls there, only the little saucers that they serve their chutney and pickles in, and teacups for the nonexistent chai. When I asked the woman there for a larger bowl, she went to the kitchen and brought some out, but the owner, who was overseeing this exchange in his micro-managey way, stopped her and then brought me one of these little saucers to serve myself some soup in. Really, it's like a thimbleful. So ok, annoying, but not a deal breaker. On the buffet there is a meat section and a vegetarian section, and there are always interesting dishes available that you might not find at other Indian restaurants. Today they had goat curry and chicken biryani. I like their goat curry, but the chicken biryani was too spicy. I also don't really like meat in a stew to be served on the bone, and both of these were...it's just too damn hard to eat. I like spicy food, but they go overboard with the cayenne here. I'm seeing from some of the other reviews that this chef is from Tamarind, and now I understand, as Tamarind uses too much cayenne also. Better Indian chefs rely less on cayenne and more on fresh green chiles and an array of dried chiles to spice their food. It shows a lack of creativity and subtlety that this guy just dumps cayenne all over everything. Lots of the dishes have this problem, even the toor dal, which should never be hot...you lose all of the other delicious flavors. There was a Northern Indian veggie dish on the buffet today that would have been good but for the overwhelming preponderence of garam masala, which effectively wiped out the taste of every other ingredient in the stew. The one bright spot on the buffet today was a delicious vegetable upma. Upma is a sort of cereal made with rava or semolina, often eaten for breakfast in Southern India. When it shows up on a buffet, it says comfort food to me, and this one was good; flecked with whole cumin and mustard seeds, with broccoli and carrots that were done to perfection. But for that I might have gone hungry. The folks from Tamarind also took over one of the only other good Indian restaurants in the area when they bought the place in Cranberry. I can't remember the name of it then, but now it's Taste of India. It was a great restaurant before they bought it...now the food is like at all of their other restaurants. If you do go to Mintt, don't show up just as they open. They'll let you in the door, but then ask you to wait while they finish setting up the buffet. That chai tea never did make an appearance today, so they're not ready for business when they open their doors. None of these things alone would stop me from going there, but, taken all together, they equal a very poor dining experience. One of the reviewers here mentioned that the Indian food scene here in Pittburgh has been rather spotty. I'd say it still is.
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