At 10 am on a recent Friday, Davinterjit Singh rushed around the dining room of his restaurant getting ready for the day’s service while a Sikh chant blared through the speakers. The powerful smell of toasting cumin wafted from the kitchen. A server hurriedly mopped the floor.
Singh, who hails from Punjab, India, opened Thind Pakora House as its chef and owner in the former Café 440 space on Coburg Road in north Eugene on Nov. 15 of last year. Since then, the restaurant has been slinging piles of pakora — deep fried delights battered in chickpea flour — to hungry Eugeaneans.
Thind Pakora House serves paneer (cheese) pakora, gobi (cauliflower) pakora, bread pakora, mixed vegetable pakora, fish pakora, hot fish pakora, chicken pakora and hot chicken pakora. A “veg combo” order comes with a few pieces of all of the vegetarian options.
The paneer pakora is particularly delicious with spongy cheese enveloping a filling of onion, cilantro, mint and spices, as is the bread pakora, which comes filled with potato, green beans, cilantro and spices. All of the pakoras are served with herbaceous cilantro chutney and tangy-sweet tamarind chutney.
Singh’s brother, Rajibir Singh Thind, is the restaurant’s namesake.
“This is a family restaurant started by my brother in Canada,” Singh says. “The main branch is in Canada.” Thind started serving bulk orders of pakora out of his backyard for parties and weddings to Calgary’s sizable Indian community in 2017. Demand grew, and he eventually opened a food truck, then a brick-and-mortar business.
Meanwhile, for the last nine years, Singh says he was living in Olympia, Washington. Working as a trucker, he’d often pass through Eugene to pick up products from the Franz Bakery in Glenwood. He says he liked the calm energy of the city. When Singh’s family decided to open another location of Thind Pakora House, he scouted a number of cities on the West Coast, including Sacramento, Bakersfield and Portland, eventually settling on Eugene.
With the new location, Singh expanded the menu to include a full menu of dinner options with curries, tikka dishes and biryanis, including a large number of vegan and vegetarian options.
In the aloo gobi, each piece of potato maintains its integrity while staying super tender. The eggplant bharta is sweet and tender, best scooped up with pieces of buttered naan or roti. The samosa chaat is a wonderful mess of crispy vegetable samosa, soft chickpeas and crunchy onion, all dressed up with tamarind and cilantro chutneys and yogurt sauce. The lamb biryani is spicy and richly flavored, with lamb fat and oil coating each grain of slightly al dente rice. Golden raisins balance out the rich spice profile with a little sweetness.
The menu also includes all of the classics you’d expect at an Indian restaurant in America: saag paneer, chana masala, dal makhani, butter chicken, chicken tikka masala and tandoori chicken.
To drink, the restaurant serves sweet lassi, mango lassi, salty lassi and chai along with a selection of beer (on tap and bottled), wine and cider. Dessert consists of rice pudding, ras malai (a cardamom-scented milk curd dessert), gulab jamun (milk dough balls in syrup) and mango ice cream. Singh says he plans to add a full bar soon with a television for sports games, and he hopes to bring back some of the crowd who used to come to Café 440 for cocktails.
Though the quality of the food at Thind Pakora House is impressive, Singh is unpretentious about his work. He says there are no secrets to his cooking.
“My goal is to just serve good food, natural food,” Singh says.
Thind Pakora House is at 450 Coburg Road, #208, Thindpakora.com, 541-780-6905, 10 am to 9 pm Wednesday through Monday