Although there are a few areas where I hope for improvement, Aroma has been open for a very short…read moretime. (Frankly, I'm being a bit generous, with rounding up an extra half star, because they are so newly opened.) Overall, my wife and I really enjoyed our meal (actually, "meals", given that we had two additional meals of leftovers). Also, the staff person with whom I dealt was super friendly. I am really happy that this is the closest restaurant to my home!
I am including photos of pretty much everything we ordered. Clearly, as you can see from the photos, this was a To-Go order. We didn't actually order the rice, but it appears to have come with our entrées. And I did not take pictures of the sauces that typically come with some Indian dishes.
Starting with the appetizers, we had Meat Samosa and Samosa Chaat. We loved the Samosa Chaat. Very flavorful, quite good textures. And even a couple days later, the leftovers were really tasty. The Meat Samosa could use a bit more work. I thought that most of the pastry was really good; good flavor to it, and most well cooked and flaky. But some of the pastry was a bit undercooked and I thought that the filling could benefit from something to help it hold together a bit better, rather than being crumbly, falling back onto the plate, and needing to be corralled with a spoon. That said, I really liked the flavor. But I would lean more towards ordering the Samosa Chaat, based on this one experience.
On to the mains. The Tandoori Chicken may be the best we have ever had, anywhere. (Note: I have tried the dish in well over a dozen restaurants from coast to cost in North America.) Great flavor. Well cooked. And, importantly, still moist. So many versions are disappointingly overcooked and dried out. We will definitely be ordering this on a regular basis. The Chicken Cashmere had a delicious sauce; a really flavorful dish. I would recommend that the chicken be cooked slightly less, to help keep it tender and juicy. We were torn between ordering the Cashmere and the Korma (which we have had elsewhere), and will likely be trying the Chicken Korma next time.
And, then, additionally: The Papadums were nicely cooked and are among our favorites, though there is nothing particularly special or different about these. The Paratha, one of our favorite kinds of Indian bread, were OK, but seemed to be made using a somewhat overlapping spiral, rather than the multitude of layers we have had elsewhere. Toasting it lightly (in pop-up toaster, each half cut in half again) really boosted it. The Mango Chutney was a good version, as was the Achar. The rice was cooked with some spices, and so had a more interesting flavor than one gets with plain white rice.
I was asked on the phone how spicy I wanted things. I said, "medium". Maybe the question was automatic and the dishes we got were not intended to by very spicy at all or maybe they don't expect the typical Central Tennessee resident to be capsicum-tolerant, but there was really little-to-no capsicum in evidence.
So, next time, as I said, we'll be trying the Chicken Korma instead of the Chicken Cashmere. And we will probably be adding a Biryani. (For the Biryani, I'll be pushing for Lamb -- we'll see how that idea goes over.) And I just noticed that they have a Coconut Soup, and that seems intriguing.
And, as an aside: I offered to use my sheet scanner to create a better quality copy of the menu. The original JPEG scans were about 11.5 MB each, and I converted them to a set of more manageable ~325 KB versions. (If the restaurant wants the full original scans, I can provide them.)