Lazeez Indian Cuisine — Restaurant in Philadelphia

My husband and I visited this restaurant last week while attending a concert in Pennsylvania. Having traveled from New Jersey and craving Indian food, we decided to try this place based on its positive reviews. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a disappointing experience. We ordered the Gobi Manchurian, and the portion size was surprisingly small—just five pieces on a plate.

Hoping for a better dish, we asked the server about their Veg Biryani, specifically if they prepare it traditionally with the masala and rice cooked separately, rather than mixed like a Pulao. He assured us it was made authentically, but to our surprise, it tasted more like a Pulao, with the masala, veggies, and rice all mixed together. To make things worse, the dish had broccoli and chickpeas—ingredients you wouldn't typically find in a traditional Biryani. Who adds chickpeas to Biryani?

On top of the disappointing food, the bill came with a tip already included. While I understand this was mentioned beforehand, I’d like to ask the restaurant management: if you're not serving quality food, why take a tip directly from the customer?

Never thinking to go here again. Totally disappointed!

Edit - Responding to the owner comment: I didn’t know that only rich guys can come to your restaurant & why don’t you put that as well on your menu saying “Only rich customers are welcomed!”.

You don’t even know how to respect your customers & before saying me that I can’t afford your restaurant food, let me tell you it’s not any great food that I come again to eat. (The owner edited the response after seeing my reply, he has a history to comment bad on negative reviews). Your food tastes bad. It was the worst Indian food I ever had. You first learn to respect customers. This attitude of yours will not entertain any customers. Regarding the food you are saying we finished it all, of course we don’t have habit of...

At first we ordered manchow soup which was burnt. There were many other issues related to food and tip of 18% was randomly charged forcefully eventhough the bill had an option to tip between 15% to 25%, for which we approached the server/manager telling him about the food (its too much lengthy to write here but just to give a gist, they don't provide dry noodles with veg manchow soup, if you order 2 entries then you would get rice just for one, roties were served after almost 10 -15 mins after the entries were served and we had to follow up almost twice for the same even though we were the only guest) as well as asking about justfication for randomly charging the tip without giving us an option to chose the desired tip amount but our queries were not addressed professionally and we felt that the server/manager was rude as he didn't gave any valid justification to our queries and kept telling us its been set that way by the owner and he had nothing to do with it and even then we did pay them judiciously. Overall it was not a good...

I only tried the biryani. It’s usually my litmus test for any Indian restaurant that has biryani on their menu.

I’m from NYC and I’ve tried biryani from nearly every restaurant in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Especially Queens. Even the likes of award winning Adda Indian Canteen.

The lamb biryani at Lazeez far exceeds the fragrance, flavor, and texture of any of these other restaurants. Adda is critically very flavorful but the heat flavor ratio is completely misbalanced. You’re not supposed to be wanting to gulp down a glass of milk for every bite of biryani because of the heat.

That’s what Lazeez gets: incredibly well balanced flavor. The lamb is so tender and you don’t have to go fishing for it in an ocean of rice. The fragrance is fantastic: mint, cilantro, cardamoms… the whole gamut....