If I say “all-you-can-eat Indian food,” you probably imagine a long table draped with a white tablecloth, stately metal trays full of tandoori chicken, butter chicken, chana masala, and plain rice or biryani arranged on top, set up every day from 11:30am to 2:30pm, in a dimly lit, refined interior. Bonus points if they bring naan to your table and if a mango lassi is included.

That’s the “off the shelf” Indian buffet concept as it’s existed for decades and as found all over the country. For whatever reason, different cuisines follow other operators in their cuisine. For example, an all-day buffet-only concept is pretty much limited to Chinese buffets and the American steakhouse-ish buffets. The lunch-only buffet with the individual fancy metal serving tray is nearly exclusive to Indian restaurants. I’ve seen multiple Korean and Japanese lunch buffets, but those typically use steam tables, and almost never operate at dinner. The “bring you the food and serve tableside” concept is pretty much exclusive to Brazilian all-you-can-eat steakhouses.

But then there’s Jodhpur, a new-ish restaurant in Herndon, Virginia, not too far from our home, and they do the Indian buffet concept differently. It’s an Indian restaurant, but it has several features that make it a really smart business. Plus, it’s really good!

First, it’s vegetarian. This is good business because it opens up your customer base—vegetarians can eat it, but meat-eaters typically know Indian cuisine does vegetarian fare really well, so they’re less likely to be turned off by it.

More subtle is that the quality of chickpeas and potatoes and rice and bread is consistent, as are the lovely sauces if you make them right. A batch of chicken, lamb, or goat, the typical meats in Indian dishes, can be gamey/tough/bony/fatty, cut too big/cut too small/raw/overcooked, etc. A single gristly piece of chicken, or a seemingly boneless piece of goat with a bone fragment, can turn your perception of a whole meal. The sorts of ingredients typical in Indian vegetarian cooking are more forgiving than meat—meaning the kitchen can produce them well and consistently over time.

Second, there’s no drink menu. Not even tea! (We went here the first time with a friend of ours who’s Indian American, and he was rather surprised. He’d never seen an Indian restaurant that didn’t offer hot tea.) The only drinks available, aside from the free ice water, are a few canned sodas. What this means is there’s no supplier issues with imported beers, no alcohol sales regulation, no bartenders or “bar managers” or poorly executed cocktails in their absence, etc. etc.

Third, the menu itself is fixed. Each day a single thali is served. A thali is, simplified, a platter of several dishes, including rice/bread, what you’d consider “main courses,” and a dessert item. Lunch and dinner on a given day are the same menu. To my palette, they’re not all that different—we’ve had two of the three thalis which are served across a full week—but there’s enough to want to try all three eventually and to enjoy the variety within a single platter.

The service is simple and as shorn of interaction or communication as possible. It consists entirely of being seated, given your water, and given your initial fully stocked thali. Servers constantly circulate the dining room, offering in succession every item on the platter. No ordering, no time limit, no “premium” items you can unlock with an extra $5 or $10, nothing handed out only grudgingly, like the ribeye that might show up once or twice at Fogo de Chao. (You know that corny line where you say “walk the cow past the kitchen” to order a rare steak? At Fogo de Chao you walk past the kitchen and that counts as serving you the ribeye.)

There are also no tips—there’s a generous fee and gratuity built in, though with their own line items—and payment comes to you quickly in the form of a waiter with a card reader. There are also no reservations. The one departure from this streamlined simplicity is a pastry counter, with a number of Indian sweets for sale in the entrance area of the restaurant. (They’re really good. One of them reminded us of a rum baba!) It’s a frictionless, pleasant, lovely dining experience, and it it feels “classy” too (if, unlike me, you need your all-you-can-eat not to feel like all-you-can-eat).

Everything feels like someone decided the food would be the star of the show, and cuts were made in order to free up capacity to do the food really well. In other words, less is more. With restaurants, and especially old-school buffets, seeming to struggle so much these days—I almost feel bad burdening them by being a customer, because you can almost feel the struggle—it’s such a nice feeling to dine out and know the place is making decent money while your own experience is completely smooth.

It’s also cool to see an adaptation of the Brazilian steakhouse all-you-can-eat format with Indian food. Some reviews identified it as the first all-you-can-eat thali restaurant in the D.C. area. (This was not strictly true—another restaurant in Herndon switched from a lunch buffet to an unlimited thali during the pandemic). But it’s certainly the first restaurant to actually be known for this concept, and to serve nothing else.

It’s always neat when you can discern what management is thinking from how a business is run. I’m pretty certain the restriction of choices and consistency of food and experience is the goal here. Quality, uniqueness, consistency, getting really good at a fixed routine and at making a relatively limited number of dishes really well. And it’s a concept that probably won’t proliferate that much and end up feeling like a fad. (Surprisingly to me, nearly every customer in the restaurant with us was Indian. I would have expected more non-Indian general foodies and restaurant enthusiasts to be there.) It strike me as a smartly run business and a really tightly, expertly run restaurant.

This is one of those things that’s so cool about living in the D.C. area. The affluence and diversity here mean there are all sorts of places to go and people to support them. This isn’t “supporting immigration just for the food” or some dilettantish attitude. It doesn’t mean the D.C. area has no particular culture or sense of place. These are things I hear from folks who love living here but love to pretend they don’t. Drop the charade, embrace your place, and try Jodhpur.

Related Reading:

Buffet Chronicles: Back to the Beginning

Buffet Chronicles: Disappearing Sushi

Buffet Chronicles: Royal Spread

No Time To Dine

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