Passage to India, the book by E. M. Forster, is a trip back to the wonderful land of tea, spices and unrepentant colonialism. Unfortunately the Passage to India at 1320 Walnut Street is just a really tacky Indian restaurant.
Located in Center City, Passage to India boasts a wide variety of … la carte options, but its buffet is ostensibly the most popular dinner option, and with good reason. For only $9.99, you can enjoy a range of dishes that hail from various parts of India - the unifying theme of the array being an extravagant amount of salt and/or grease.
There's no need to worry about pesky waiters bothering you during your meal. They pop over to your table with glasses, a jug of ice water, and cut to the chase: "Buffet? Okay, go ahead" and just as quickly disappear into the kitchen. The manager was nice enough to ask how my food was; the rest of the experience was pretty impersonal.
All dishes are labelled with hand-written index cards, to help guide you through the stuffing-your-face process. Make sure you watch your head on the overhead Christmas lights (featured year-round) as you get your food, though.
Nowadays, it's standard for Indian restaurants to play Hindi film music as a part of their ambience. Passage to India takes it one step further by adding the visual side as well: they have a television in one corner of the room where music videos from hit 90s Bollywood movies play. Most of the non-Indian people in the restaurant were visibly excited by getting to experience that side of modern Indian culture.
Although there are healthy options available at a make-your-own-salad station, more than half of the items in the entree section were fried food. Thus, their tastes were indistinguishable from one another.
All of the entrees were fairly bland, but they were nothing less than what you would expect from a typical Indian restaurant in America. The only creative dishes were a chicken concoction (whose little note card was smudged, and thus its actual name tragically unknown) which tasted more like liquefied salt than anything else, and "Tofu Matar", an animal-friendly take on a classic. Everything else (tandoori chicken, chana masala, naan and other typical favorites) was up to par, but somewhat forgettable.
Unless getting a dose of Bollywood is vital to your Indian dining experience, you would be better off saving the subway fare and going to one of the similar "fine Indian cuisine" establishments closer to home in University City.
