Returning home from the Adirondacks involves more driving time than you think, since most of the drive is meandering along US Route 4 as it passes through eastern New York and Vermont. Interestingly, part of this drive is four-lane divided highway (roughly between Fairhaven, VT and Rutland, VT, a byproduct of one of the original alignments of I-89 that never came to be, and briefly considered in the 1970s as a potential I-92), but mostly the drive bounces from one small town to the next until you get to New Hampshire. Between our Lake George trips and most of our westward voyages to upstate New York, I think I’ve done that drive a good hundred times, and it isn’t all that often that we notice a new place showing up. But as we were driving through Whitehall (one of several claimants to be the Birthplace of the US Navy), we had spied a relatively new Asian restaurant, Whitehall Red Panda, and decided to give it a try.
Situated right at the edge of Whitehall proper, in a renovated building that used to hold a Subway (I remember the Subway there, and the eagle-eyed patron can also still spy a “Subway” logo on one of the door) Red Panda bills itself as a “Nepali, Indian, and Indo-Chinese” restaurant, and does sport a pretty extensive menu. On the Indian side, they’ve got a nice selection of appetizers, curries, biryanis, and naan. On the Nepali side, they’ve got momos (dumpling appetizers), and thukpa (Nepali noodle soup). And for Indo-Chinese, it’s a bit more limited, mostly chow mein, chicken lollipop, and chilli chicken. But that’s an impressive spread for a single restaurant. We decided to order up a variant of one of my Indian favorites (Gobi 65, crispy fried cauliflower, with spices and herbs) and sit at a table. Surprisingly, we were the only people in the place at 6pm (although there was also a large to-go order picked up while we were dining), but the tables were nice and the staff friendly.
The gobi 65 quickly arrived, and it was everything I like in this dish: tender cauliflower with just enough of a flour coating to let it crisp up nicely, served with some onions in a more tangy-than-hot spicey sauce with a fair bit of curry leaf and chile pepper.
Next up was a pleasant surprise; a lot of smaller Indian places I’ve been tend not to have a really good oven or tandoor, and you end up getting naan that lacks the right texture and char, and that definitely wasn’t the case here, the garlic naan was particularly good: a nice chewy bread base, nicely crisped, the garlic well-applied, and more than a little ghee brushed over it. Definitely one of the highlights of the menu.
Our first main course then arrived, a chicken vindaloo. You couldn’t help but notice its arrival at the table, since this was, in all serious, I think the most vividly-colored vindaloo I’ve ever experienced. This was beyond “fire engine red”, or even “Kool-aid Man” (Oh-Yeah!) red. Enough red food color that it would allow Macbeth to turn the multitudinous seas incarnadine. Seriously, it was that boldly colored (and seriously, that amount of red requires food coloring). But despite all that, despite the vivid coloring, this was actually a pretty nicely executed vindaloo: the chicken was nicely tender and flavored, with the spices permeating the meat nicely. The sauce had some very nice cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric notes, and the potatoes were nicely tender but not yet falling apart. I’d actually get this again.
Finally, we had an enjoyable bhindi (okra) masala. The okra is served up sauteed with onions in a rich cumin, coriander, and cardamom sauce, and the result here was quite tasty. As anyone familiar with okra knows, it can be a challenging vegetable to work with, since cooking it too long, or in the wrong pH, can result in it quickly turning into a relatively inedible mess of soft, slimy bits; the bhindi masala at Whitehall Red Panda was cooked perfectly without any slime, and with the various spices well-combined and flavorful. I’d like a bit more peppery spice to this, but really, this was a good example of “spicy and flavorful” without being otherwise “hot”.
Overall, we really liked Whitehall Red Panda: for a fairly quiet eastern NY town, this was some surprisingly good Indian food that was affordable and flavorful. I’m hoping other people like the place, and that it’s more popular at other times in the week. And we’ll be talking about how red that vindaloo was for a long time…
