Shehnai Restaurant

At midday, Shehnai solves a problem most lunch crowds never bother to state: how to eat well, eat a lot, and not spend the meal deciding. The all-you-can-eat buffet runs every day from late morning to mid-afternoon, a standing option on Main Street West for diners who want range over commitment. Come back at dinner and the order shifts to à la carte — the curries, tandoor plates, and combination platters that have carried this Hamilton kitchen for years.

The order path is easy to read. Butter Chicken is the gentle centre of gravity, mild and saucy and built for pairing with rice or naan, and the dish most first-time tables reach for. Around it, the kitchen invites a table to range: Tandoori Chicken, marinated in yogurt, garlic, ginger, and ground spices before it roasts, sets a dry-spiced counterweight to the richer sauces; Vegetable Samosas and Vegetable Pakoras open the table with something crisp before the curries arrive; Chicken Momos, the steamed dumplings served with a tomato-nut sauce, reward the diner who wants something off the expected track. Combination platters bundle appetizers, a curry, a vegetable dish, rice, and naan into one order, which is how groups here tend to solve the problem of everyone wanting something different.

The breadth is the other thing worth knowing. The appetizer page runs well past the samosa: Onion Bhaji, Bhel Puri tossed with puffed rice, peanuts, crispy noodles, and tamarind, Amritsari Fish Pakora cut from basa and dressed in Punjabi spice. The Chef's Special sizzling platters send chicken, paneer, shrimp, or a vegetable medley out still hissing from the heat. Even the soups carry some history — Mulligatawny, the old Anglo-Indian standby, sits on the menu the way it has lived on Indian restaurant menus across this country for generations. It is a long list, and its real function is reach: whatever a table is in the mood for, there is a plate that fits.

What the menu signals is a kitchen comfortable in its lane. There is no fusion reach, no reinvention of the genre; the appeal is reliability — warm, shareable North Indian staples cooked the same way often enough that regulars know exactly what they are getting. The vegetarian side, in particular, is more than a courtesy. Vegetable Korma, Paneer Masala, the samosas and pakoras, and a meatless combination platter let a non-meat table build a full meal with crunch, sauce, and a genuine main course rather than a single token plate.

The rhythm of the week is easy to plan around. Lunch and dinner run daily, split by a mid-afternoon closure that resets the kitchen between the buffet and the evening service. The buffet does quiet work that à la carte cannot: it lets a newcomer taste the range in one sitting and gives the midday crowd a low-stakes reason to return. And the dishes that share well at a table travel well in a box — saucy curries, roasted tandoor chicken, samosas and pakoras all hold their structure on the way home — which makes Shehnai a sensible call on a night nobody wants to cook.

Shehnai has been doing this on Main Street West since December 1990, which in a city that has cycled through plenty of Indian openings counts for something specific: not novelty, but the settled confidence of a kitchen that decided long ago what it was. The buffet line, the combination platters, the Butter Chicken a first-timer orders without overthinking — none of it is trying to surprise anyone, and that is the point. Thirty-some years on one street is not an accident; it is what happens when a kitchen quietly becomes the answer to an ordinary question, asked again and again: where can we just get a good Indian meal tonight?