Last Updated on June 18, 2015 by hungryoungwoman

Tucked away in the old side of Dubai, what you see from the outside is entirely different from the inside. The saying, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, stands true here. New Sind Punjab has two locations in Dubai. The branch I visited was in Al Karama. From the exteriors, you’d think that this is a basic restaurant, but when you enter you’re actually surprised. The restaurant has two floors, the lower one serves bachelors mostly. ( I’m assuming this as there were just men having lunch downstairs ). We were taken to the upper floor which is usually reserved for family. The top floor is spacious and comfortable, with dim lights. It had a pleasant and soothing ambiance, again this might be as we were the only ones present at the time.

As we scanned the menu, I noticed that the prices here are very affordable and are quite light on the pocket. We ordered a butter chicken, reshmi kebab, chole bathure, with butter naans and parathas. A special mention to the server here, he was very helpful and suggested us what to order. Also, Chole Bathure is a breakfast meal, but he requested the chef to prepare it for us since we asked for it.

Coming to the food, the butter chicken, upon arriving, seemed average. The butter chicken is supposed to have a tinge of sweet flavoring to it, which was missing. When pointed out to our server, he immediately brought us a newly prepared one! This one tasted creamy, tasty and also had the right amount of sweetness!

The Reshmi Kebab was not as expected and came off as a little dry, which proved difficult in having it. The Chole Bathure is a combination of pooris and chickpeas curry. While the pooris were soft, and not too oily, the curry was equally good to have. It also reminded me of the times I’ve had chole bathure in my childhood.

The parathas were good. Nothing much to rave about, they are like the ones you’d get in any household of an Indian family. The butter naans, on the other hand, were delicious. In this case, the more butter, the merrier. 😉  They were served with a good amount of butter, which will have me gaining a few of those inessential calories…

Overall, Sind Punjab provides a good competition to most of the high end Indian restaurants out there, which might be appealing to the eyes, but not too good taste-wise. It also is quite pocket friendly and can be rightly known a true hidden gem of Dubai. I know I will be coming back soon to try their famous biryani and chicken tikka!