Flavor of India — Restaurant in Longmont

(This review pertains to the lunch buffet)

Oh Flavor of India, how I love you sometimes.

I'm not sure I know good Indian food. I've been to several Indian restaurants around the country, and I cook Indian food often at home, and I absolutely love it...but I have never been to India.

In general, in my opinion, Flavor of India has some great food, and is the perfect spot to get a nice lunch for a decent price. Two people can have the buffet, and if they stick to drinking water get out for just under $22. They include fresh hot naan with the meal, and will bring you as much as you want, though we've only ever asked for one refill over the years, so we really haven't tested the waters on that one.

Why 3 stars? The buffet can be kind of hit-or-miss. My partner and I used to go to Flavor once a week. We loved it, and the quality was always stellar. Lately they have made some changes to the buffet and now the quality can be a bit sporadic. On a good day their veggie Korma is full of vegetables and studded with wonderful chunks of potato. On a bad one, as I had last week, the korma is virtually soup.

To be clear this was not a case of arriving close to the close of lunch and pulling up to a ravaged buffet pan with no veggies left. No, last week we were there a few minutes after they opened. Though Flavor can also really suffer from "buffet fatigue" as it were, and if you arrive late in the lunch service you might find the meat dishes are mostly sauce.

Within the last year they have reduced the number of dishes offered for lunch, removing their daal altogether. They now have a fixed menu of 5 hot dishes: tandoori chicken legs and thighs, chicken tikka masala, curried meatballs, saag, and vegetable korma. They also have one hot vegetable dish that changes daily. It is usually either a potato dish, cabbage, or curried zucchini.

The buffet also includes naan fresh from the kitchen, basmati rice, veggie pakora, and they have a small salad bar with a greens mix and a few vegetables(and I think ranch dressing?), a chutney or two, raita, and some spicy pickles.

The rotating vegetable dish is another reason I rate them 3 stars. Some days it is wonderful, like a few weeks back when they had an eggplant and potato dish. The potatoes were cooked perfectly, tender but still holding their shape and having absorbed the wonderful curry sauce, and the eggplant was perfectly stewed in the spicy and rich red curry.

Other times this rotating dish seems like an afterthought, and the vegetables will be mushy and bland. A few months back I had another of their potato dishes from this pan, and it was like a watery mush, and by far the worst thing to land on my plate in my 6+ years of eating there.

At the end of the day I still go to Flavor at least once a month, and I still bring all my friends who come through town there for lunch, but these days I'm not as sure as I used to be that I will have a...

Me and my boyfriend decided to try Flavor of India to celebrate my birthday, gotta say we are quite disappointed! After reading a fair amount of reviews and hearing decent things about this place we were excited to try it but it was overall really disappointing.

Our server was not very attentive and it felt like he only listened to half the things we said. My boyfriend had asked if an italian soda with white chocolate for a drink seemed like it would be good and our server did not have much to say. He made a face and said he was unsure if they had any of the flavor left and would go check, then walked away before we finished our order, he took about 10 minutes to come back to our table. He dropped the italian soda off, i ordered my drink then we tried the italian soda and it was nasty so my partner told our server, asked if he had any suggestions, to which he was like im not sure and mumbled something. In the end my partner was able to get the same drink as me, we both got a white peach lemonade, it tasted super sugary and was hard to drink but was drinkable after adding a fair amount of water. Our server maybe came to our table on his own 2-3 times after that, just to bring food and for us to pay.

The food took a bit to come out, we got appetizers and the presentation was very rough to look at, just like they had taken it out of the fryer and thrown it into a bowl. Appetizers were decent but its not hard to mess up fried food. When our entrees and naan came,, we were excited to try it. I got chicken saag and my partner got lamb curry, both of us got the garlic cheese naan. My chicken saag was okay, I’ve had way better at other Indian restaurants. The naan tasted like a microwaved cheese quesadilla. Despite getting right below the highest spice level, the lamb curry barely had any flavor and just tasted like bland spaghetti sauce. My partner had taken maybe like 3 bites of curry before wanting to trade it out for something else, our server didnt come to our table until my partner stopped him as he was walking by to ask if he could get a refund or switch out his dish. The manager came over and we had a chat with her, after that they ended up letting him take home a new dish.

Overall, a really disappointing experience with pretty mediocre food. We will probably stick to our usual Indian cuisine restaurant, Gurkhas, the service and food are way better and the ambiance of the restaurant is a lot more chill and not so all over the place....

We started eating at Flavor of India before they even had their liquor license, and it has invariably been a splendid experience. We have watched the family progress for these several years, and it's a real pleasure to have seen Dahman and Sukhi marry and reproduce into a nice happy family. If you think you can take it, ask for Dahman's hot sauce, but don't take more than a fork's tine dip worth for starts. We occasionally have a visit from a Virginian who really grooves on hot food, and we of course bring him to FoI. Sweat is rolling off his brow in short order, and he's a happy camper.

The point to make here is that heat can make the well-spiced flavors cooked into the food taste even better. On the spectrum of mild/medium/hot/Indian-hot I have settled on hot, and FoI knows what they are doing, the heat level reliably repeats. It is really full-spectrum heat; Darcy has backed down to mild, and the flavor is sustained.

FoI is definitely not a one-spice-fits-all Indian restaurant. The flavors are individual and very distinct from jalfrazzi to mahkini to tikka to bindi and all the way to the end, kulfi. I'd like a little more body to the kheer, but I'll say the flavor is great. Now if only FoI had licorice ice cream, I'd just be wholly satiated as I stagger out the door.

As regular customers, when we walk in the front door, Dahman has the kitchen fire up our own favorite kulcha (I can say it, but I don't vouch for the spelling) and it shows up at our table before we even turn in our order. This food, too, is entirely reliable in its excellence.

We have our favorite go-to selections from the menu, but occasionally we stray off into the exotic. The marinated lamb chops are spectacular! I asked our waiter one night what he thought of whatever it was I was thinking of ordering. "No," he said, "you should have the lamb chops." What a good call! It was an exceptionally good item to order, and I continue to order them on special occasion. I wouldn't say FoI is the least expensive eatery in downtown Longmont (you may figure that out for yourself by looking at the prices on the menu). I don't always want the minimally priced items, and for sure you are advised to give the chops a try when you want to impress someone (maybe just yourself?) with a marvelous fine...