Taj Mahal Indian Cuisine

Royal Butter Chicken anchors most first orders at Taj Mahal, and for good reason — boneless chicken barbecued in the tandoor, then simmered in a creamy tomato-and-butter gravy that gives any table a dependable centre. But the butter chicken is not what makes the menu interesting. This downtown Elora kitchen cooks a wide North Indian repertoire — tandoor plates, biriyani, curries, and fresh-baked breads — and then keeps going, into a full lane of Hakka Indo-Chinese cooking that most curry houses treat as an afterthought. A single order can hold that butter chicken for the diner who wants something familiar and Chilli Chicken for the one chasing heat, with a plate of Palak Paneer between them for the table's vegetarian. That breadth lets one visit answer a weeknight craving, a family pickup, and a quick midday plate without anyone having to settle.

Past that anchor, the kitchen's strongest work is on its shared plates. Mixed Tandoori Grill gathers the char side of the menu onto one platter — tandoori chicken, chicken tikka, shrimp tikka, and lamb seekh kabab — for a table that wants the meal to feel like more than a row of curries. House Special Biriyani is the move when someone wants a single aromatic basmati dish instead of three separate mains, and it has company in chicken, lamb, and shrimp versions. Around those sit the smaller tells of a kitchen paying attention: Tandoori Chicken marinated overnight in homemade yogurt, Hariyali Chicken Tikka gone green with coriander and mint, Chana Puri with its deep-fried whole-wheat bread, Peshwari and keema naans off the tandoor, and a cup of the house butter sauce sent out with garlic naan for dipping.

What the menu says about the kitchen is that it refuses to be one-note. The Hakka section — Chilli Chicken, Vegetable and Chicken Hakka Noodles, Vegetable Spring Rolls — is a genuine second cuisine, the Indo-Chinese cooking that Indian kitchens across Ontario have quietly made their own, rather than a token line or two at the back of the menu. The plant-based side carries the same seriousness. Chana Masala, Daal Tarka, and Aloo Gobi share the menu with a spinach-heavy Palak Paneer and a peppery Karahi Paneer, so a vegan or vegetarian diner works a real route through the meal instead of accepting a single grudging substitution. It is a kitchen comfortable being asked for very different things on the same ticket.

The formats matter as much as the flavours. Taj Mahal runs both dine-in and takeout, with an online ordering path that turns a curry-and-naan pairing or a Family Meal For Two into a low-friction pickup dinner. Weekday middays bring the lunch specials — a Two Item Meal and a Two Item Vegan Meal that trade the full spread for a focused, contained plate, the kind of thing that makes the kitchen useful on a Tuesday and not only on a Friday night. Delivery is not part of the model, and there is no online reservation flow; a phone call handles a larger table or a question about timing.

Taj Mahal sits on Mill Street, in the walkable core of a village better known to visitors for its gorge and its limestone storefronts than for a plate of biriyani. The placement does quiet work. It makes an Indian kitchen with this much range a convenient stop for people already wandering downtown Elora and a reliable pickup for the ones who live nearby. A curry-and-naan order on a weeknight, a family meal boxed for the drive home, a two-item plate squeezed into a lunch break — the menu is built to slide into all of them. From Royal Butter Chicken to Chilli Chicken to a vegan lunch plate, one kitchen covers the whole span — the kind of practical breadth a village this size rarely gets to keep within a few doors of the gorge.