Omnivore - Madras Woodlands opens for dinner

• Cliff Bostock

• Cliff Bostock

Decatur is the place to head when you're hungry for Indian food. We visited the latest to open there, Madras Woodlands (2201 Lawrenceville Hwy., 404-248-9333), Sunday night.

This restaurant occupies the shopping center space that was most recently Madras Chettinaad. Before that, it was Bollywood Masala. The new name is a common one, derived from restaurants of the same name in India, according to our server.

The restaurant's very inexpensive lunch buffet has created some buzz (11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. daily), but it apparently only opened for dinner the night before our visit.

Madras Woodlands' enormous menu includes cooking from both the southern and northern parts of India — meaning that both meat and vegetarian dishes are on the menu. The most unusual dish we sampled — unusual to us, anyway — was a very aromatic curry flavored with cinnamon, featuring crab claws (top photo). We also nearly killed ourselves with an order of batter-fried hot peppers that looked kind of like corn dogs (right photo).

Overall, our meal was good. I'll have more to say in "Grazing" later this week.