Inchin's Indian Kitchen

Goat Laal Maas arrives bone-in, the meat pulling away in a Rajasthani gravy built on dried red chilies instead of tomato or cream — a curry that leads with heat and does not apologize for it. It is one of the more uncompromising plates at Inchin's Indian Kitchen, and it marks out the restaurant's Indian side without much ceremony. That side shares a menu, and a kitchen, with something else entirely: a full Indo-Chinese lane of Manchurian, Hakka noodles and chilli-garlic cooking that comes off the wok a few feet away. Inchin's runs both at once, out of a storefront on Lake Street in St. Catharines.

The North Indian half is the deeper of the two, and it works from the tandoor outward. Indian Kitchen Changezi sets chargrilled bone-in chicken in a sauce of tomato, cream and spice; Amritsari Fish Pakora comes as basa fritters with a house chutney; and tandoori chicken, garlic naan and bullet naan carry the clay-oven end of the menu. The starters run through samosas, aloo tikki and masala wings before the mains arrive. Behind them sit the slow-built standards a diner expects and wants done properly — butter chicken, daal makhani, kadhai paneer, mughlai shahi paneer, chicken korma, chicken tikka masala. Biryani turns up often in what locals reach for, and it is the kind of plate the kitchen takes seriously rather than treats as a side.

Then the menu crosses over, and the crossing is the whole point. Chicken 65 — chicken brightened with curry leaf, peppers, dried chili and mustard seed — opens a section that keeps going through Manchurian dishes, Hakka noodles and Szechwan fried rice. These are not a single token stir-fry dropped at the bottom of an Indian card; they amount to a second menu with its own logic, ordered as often for their own sake as the curries are. Indo-Chinese cooking was born in the Hakka Chinese community of Kolkata more than a century ago, and it lands here as a full lane of the kitchen's work.

Running two cuisines in parallel is the kind of reach that usually costs a kitchen its focus, and the tell here is that neither lane reads as an afterthought. The fish pakora and the goat maas are not softened for a general audience, and the noodles are not filler. What that range buys a table is the end of the usual argument: one person after butter chicken, another chasing chilli-garlic noodles, a third set on biryani, all settled at a single address. The plates come generously sized, and most substantial mains land between roughly seventeen and twenty-five dollars — a mid-range built for regular visits more than special occasions.

The restaurant is built to be used more ways than sat in. Its kitchen runs from late morning to late evening seven days a week, and exact-location menus on the major delivery apps keep takeout and delivery current for the nights a table stays home. Reservations are on offer too, through the usual booking channels, for groups that want to plan around it. On the Lake Street strip it reads as a neighbourhood workhorse — the address a household orders from on a Tuesday as readily as it books for a Friday.

Inchin's opened on Lake Street in 2023, and its short run has gone toward cooking two cuisines side by side without letting either come second. The Rajasthani goat and the Szechwan fried rice sit a few lines apart on the same page, and both are made like they matter. For a table in St. Catharines, that leaves the choice of what to order as the only real decision of the meal — whatever the mood, the kitchen has probably already committed to cooking it.