Junnoon, an upscale Indian restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, recently opened a new cocktail lounge and is conducting a renewed publicity effort to get local diners hooked on a place they may have overlooked when it opened a few years ago, at the peak of the recession. They invited me to come have dinner, so, with my faithful dining companion in tow, I stopped by their hip, modern space earlier this week.
Junnoon is one of those restaurants that takes a cuisine most Americans are familiar with in greasy, take-out form and elevates it – a pretty cool concept that has especially proliferated in Palo Alto. (There are more fancy-schmancy pizza places near campus than are probably necessary.) Junnoon also operates on the challenge of putting a modernized, a-geographic spin on the ancient, well-defined and highly regional Indian cooking tradition. So this definitely isn’t your typical Indian restaurant – the menu steers clear of curries and samosa, and the few staple dishes available have been reformatted as sleeker, sexier versions of what you might expect. It would probably be an unnerving dining experience for the Indian food purist, but for the average Stanford student, it’s a fun way to try vaunted staple ingredients of California fine dining (goat cheese, salmon, obscure vegetables) slathered in less-common flavors like tamarind.
For our dinner, we had several small plates and split an entrée. First out, we had pork and chive dumplings, which apparently are from Eastern India but honestly seemed to be on the menu more as a concession to people who can’t tell Indian and Chinese food apart. I love dumplings, so it was kind of a disappointment that these were, well, pretty unexciting. But it was nice that the filling was seasoned in an unexpected, distinctly Indian way, which made them stand out slightly. We also got a peanut sprout salad. The ingredients in the salad (peanut sprouts, oranges, julienned zucchini) were all obviously very fresh and it was a nice, light dish – a lot of times American Indian restaurants can be infuriatingly heavy, but the salad struck us as too experimental. There’s a reason most salads aren’t made predominately with peanut sprouts.
Fortunately, the next two appetizers were really, really good. My favorite was a unique, sort of strange-looking plate of eggshell-thin semolina flour shells, stuffed with chickpeas and tamarind chutney. I didn’t know what to expect from this dish, since it’s not exactly made from obvious ingredients, but it was surprisingly a highlight of the whole dinner. We also got fried balls of spinach and chickpeas, stuffed with warm, gooey goat cheese and served alongside tamarind chutney. The goat cheese was a little too strong for my dining companion, but I gobbled them down. Finally, we had a really incredible halibut dish served with neon green coconut curry sauce. The fish was light and perfectly cooked. I thought the sauce might overwhelm the halibut, but it was exactly right. By the time our waiter brought out cups of homemade chai and an Indian-spiced molten chocolate cake (yum!), we were full and satisfied.
There were some things at Junnoon that we found lacking, though. We sat outside, which was a nice idea but a bit loud since the restaurant faces University Avenue. The food came a little more slowly than most Stanford students are probably accustomed to. The prices are also steep; at about forty dollars a person, on a college student’s miniscule budget dinner here would probably be only for a special occasion or a date you really, really liked. However, it was a really fun alternative to most “nice” restaurants around here, which can get frustratingly similar. The service was great, the atmosphere is really cool and we ended up fighting over who got the last bites of the molten chocolate cake.