Atithi Indian Cuisine

Atithi Indian Cuisine @ 2445 Burrard St.

I ate at this place yesterday for lunch. It was one of the worst Indian meals I've ever had. I just had to write about it to warn people away.

My point can be summed up in one word: Tortilla.

Either they think their customers are too stupid to notice the difference between a chapati and a tortilla, or they ran out of chapatis and decided to make due with some Old El Paso tortillas.

Even the cheapest and crappiest of Indian restaurants serve fresh naan, but not this place. They give you tortillas.

The buffet, as it were, consisted of all the usual suspects, with some weird items.

The lentils were watery and without taste, the Tandoori chicken the most tasteless I've ever had, and the strange fish was pretty much rendered inedible by the peculiar sauce they used, which tasted like corn starch + tomato paste.

They didn't even have any raita that I could see. For dessert they offered some sweet rice that was bland and a pudding that turned out to be mango pudding, but was synthetic tasting and not like any Indian dessert I've ever had. It's really amazing: I couldn't finish almost any of the items I chose, from mains to dessert. Oh, and the pappadums? All broken into little bits. Not a single whole pappadum available.

You've been warned.

Good Indian food is something I've had a hard time finding in Vancouver. Well, let me rephrase that. Good, inexpensive Indian food. When I lived in Houston, I knew of any number of Indian restaurants serving a lunch buffet with a dozen items, each of them delicious and authentic, for between $5 and $7. And the buffet changed on a daily basis. I could say the same for Mexican food. In Texas, Mexican food was by definition cheap. Up here, even the most shoddy, inauthentic enchilada dish runs you $12. Pepita's at Burrard and 4th is a typical example of a place that serves crappy, overpriced Mexican food. There's no justification for this - it's beans and tortillas, not caviar and foie gras. Maybe in the past with the exchange rate there was some justification, but with the exchange rate where it is now, I find it laughable to charge these prices. (I'm paid in US dollars, and the Canadian amount was less than the US amount for the first time ever when I exchanged my last paycheck, so maybe that's why I'm a little grumpy.)

Anyway, the reason I tried this place out is because the buffet was cheap (for Vancouver), $7.99, and I don't know of any good, inexpensive Indian restaurants nearby so that I don't have to do a 40 minute drive south to Sunset every time I want to eat cheap Indian food. There's an Indian buffet around Denman and Davie called Swagat Tandoori that is probably, shockingly, even worse than Atithi. I'm amazed that after all these years it is still around. There are naturally some good Indian restaurants on Davie and on Robson, but they are absurdly overpriced. So I had high hopes this place would be good, which made my disappointment all the more bitter.

I was hopeful when Desi Lounge opened up at Denman and Barclay just near my place a few years ago, but dismayed to find the menu typically overpriced. The buffet was also overpriced and not that impressive. I tried it twice and never went back. I was really disappointed. I would have frequented the place if it was cheap and good and simple. Instead they went for this ridiculous ostentatious concept with a huge hall and fancy styling and HD TVs, etc., not at all what I want from an Indian restaurant. I want good Indian food, not chintzy glitz. It was a real shame and wasted opportunity. They closed down not long after opening because I think nobody went. It was a bad location (second floor), and they were undoubtedly paying too much for the rent.