Raja Fine Indian Cuisine

A table headed to the Avon Theatre has a narrow window and a wide range of appetites, and Raja Fine Indian Cuisine sits directly across the street, built to serve both. Downtown, a few steps off Market Square, Raja has grown from a Stratford Indian kitchen into one that now runs a full Thai menu alongside the Indian one — two distinct repertoires under a single roof, ordered from the same table. It is not a fusion experiment. It is two complete kitchens that happen to share an address, a dining room, and a single set of hours.

The Indian side is where Raja built its name, and butter chicken remains its clearest signature — tandoor-barbecued chicken finished in a creamy tomato gravy and butter, rich without tipping into heavy. The tandoor does much of the work beyond it: tandoori chicken, chicken tikka, fish tikka, king prawn tikka, and paneer shashlik all come off the same fire. The curries run from a beef rogan josh and a chicken korma among the chef's specials to chicken tikka masala and a king prawn jhalfrezi. Vegetable cooking gets real estate rather than a corner — paneer makhani, chana masala, and a biryani offered in chicken, lamb, shrimp, goat, and vegetable. A seafood platter and a rotation of soups round out a card that runs from appetizers to desserts. Breads arrive to match: plain naan, garlic naan, and the sweet, nut-filled peshwari.

The Thai menu is the newer arrival, and Raja treats it as a second kitchen rather than a fusion gesture. Pad Thai, pad see ew, and pad kee mao anchor the noodles; the wok turns out Thai basil, ginger, and cashew dishes; pineapple fried rice, Thai soups, and a green mango salad fill in around them, with set dinners built for two or four. Nothing on it borrows from the Indian side — no curried noodles, no tandoor crossover. Keeping the two menus separate takes two pantries and two sets of technique, held ready at once. For a table, it widens the math: a vegetarian, a curry traditionalist, and someone set on pad Thai can all order from one card.

Lunch runs as its own service, with separate Indian and Thai specials, and it draws a different crowd than dinner does — downtown workers, festival visitors with an afternoon to fill, diners after the range without committing to a full meal. Prices stay mid-range across both menus, which keeps Raja in everyday rotation rather than saved for occasions. The kitchen packs the same range for takeout, so the breadth travels. The cooking has earned it local recognition as one of the area's best ethnic restaurants, a reputation built the slow way, lunch by lunch and curtain by curtain.

Raja has been part of Stratford since 2005, and co-owner Zafar Quazi is the throughline. Earlier accounts trace a longer path through Ontario kitchens — Brantford, Fergus, Stratford, and London — the kind of route that explains how a small-city Indian restaurant arrives at this much range. Local reporting has also tied Quazi to community meal work in town, including a holiday initiative for Stratford residents without housing; the same butter chicken and fresh naan that anchor the menu have gone out as part of that effort.

None of it keeps short hours. Raja opens at noon and runs to ten every day of the week — steady enough for a slow weekday lunch, quick enough for the stretch before an eight o'clock curtain. Two decades in and directly across from the Avon, it has the timing a theatre town runs on: seat a full party, send out Indian for some and Thai for the rest, and have everyone in their seats before the lights go down.