New Tandoori Cafe — Restaurant in San Jose

So we have been coming to this location for several years and the food is delicious. Butter chicken and the many different flavors of Naan are tasty. Unfortunately this location and like many other restaurants, the price for food has gone up and my family of 5 (2 adults and 3 children) rang up a bill of $120+! So if you're trying to dine on the cheap, I would suggest going elsewhere and reserve this for a date night. Overall, the food is fantastic but can get really pricey really fast!

The reason this place doesn't get 5 stars is because the service is really lacking and the wait time for food to be ready is a bit long. Another reason is the cooks behind the counter making the food. My family speaks and understands Spanish very well, so the loud talking of the Spanish speaking cooks is unacceptable. As we were trying to enjoy our Sunday brunch we could hear them using vulgar language and even caught them talking about customers coming in to pick up online orders!

I'm being very generous with my rating as the food is really that good but after hearing these cooks talking the way they did, I will never bring my family here to eat again. This place will remain a pick up my food and go. I will come back again to see if this has changed at all and I will update my review at a later date. But as it is now, don't bring your family here unless you don't mind hearing people laughing and get that weird feeling that they are talking about you and your family. More than likely they are talking about you. My advice is to just call in your order and take it home...

Me and my wife went there at lunch time during the week. The prices were reasonable. You stand on the line to order, you get a number and then they bring you the food. So after some minutes of standing on the line our turn came. We ordered a Chaat and a Chicken Wrap. I added a 20% tip. We took a table and the chaat came within 8-10 min.. both of us were sharing the chaat and having conversation.. after almost 20 min my wife pointed out that everybody else got their food except us. We asked the server about out wrap. She went to check with the manager, the manager was oblivious of the order of wrap.. I showed her the receipt and she was even more surprised that how did I produce a receipt with a wrap in it :) Instead of apologizing and taking care of the scenario, the manager made us wait another 15 min until she finished taking care of all the people on the line. then returned us $6 in cash which does not even include the tax. When I asked her why not the full amount for the wrap.. she was very surprised and angry that I asked back the tax for the food that I didn't get.. :) Then I waited another 15 min for her to be gracious enough to refund the tax as well.. It is not unlikely that restaurants may forget or mismatch order. But in those situations I have always seen them being apologetic and trying to make amends somehow, the customer does not feel good after wasting the precious lunch hour sitting without food. In this case, forget amends, I ended up paying 60% tip for the little Chaat that I shared...

I used to be a regular from 2009-2016, and I would've fought to the death arguing that they had the absolute best butter chicken on the planet, and my entire friend group all agreed. We came all the time.

Then they lost the cook, the second El Camino Real location, and then we got "new management " and EVERYTHING went downhill. It became extremely self service, had signs for "self service lane" and the fountain drink machine vanished in favor of cans. The dinnerware changed.

I saw it somewhat recently moved from Cupertino and figured it's been years, let's see how it is now and see if they got back to their roots.

The butter chicken has gone even more downhill, it's unrecognizable. Everything else is just alright. Still decent but merely a FRACTION of how good it used to be. They still freshly skewer chicken for the curry but that's the only familiar part. The curry is so bland, I don't know what happened. It just tastes like curry powder now. Spicy spice level isn't even mild. But that's such a small concern compared to how badly massacred the butter chicken became in the last 8 or so years. The naan is still very good.

But as far as butter chicken goes, it might just be time I let this place go as it only deviates farther and farther from what it once was. What I'd give to be able to have the old dish just one more time.

Included a pic now compared to a pic from 2017 (which even then, the dish was steadily becoming more and more inconsistent). So sad, I was in love with this place but it...