The Indian Spice Restaurant & Bar

The Blue Mountains runs on ski hills, chalets, and the menus that follow a day on the slopes — wings by the fire, a burger, a plate of nachos. The Indian Spice Restaurant & Bar answers that corridor with a tandoor, a rack of clay-oven breads, and a full bar pouring cocktails, lassi, and spiced mocktails. Started by three Indian-food enthusiasts who wanted a proper Indian kitchen where the area didn't have one, it sits along Grey County Road 19 in Craigleith and reaches across North Indian comfort cooking and Indo-Chinese heat without thinning out in either direction.

The cooking runs on specifics. Butter Chicken begins with boneless chicken in a yogurt marinade, finishes in the tandoor, and arrives in a creamy tomato sauce rounded with fenugreek. Chicken Tikka Masala takes the same clay-oven route before its masala sauce; Chicken Vindaloo goes the other direction, Goan-style, hot and sour and built on pickle-style spices. The breads come from that same oven — Garlic Naan blistered fine, Amritsari Kulcha stuffed and served alongside chickpeas. Order a curry and a bread together and the kitchen's centre of gravity shows: the tandoor does the defining work, from the marinated meats to the breads blistered against its walls.

The vegetarian half of the menu is no afterthought. Dal Makhani simmers black lentils and red kidney beans long and slow; Yellow Dal Tadka leans on roasted cumin; Chole Bhature pairs a Punjabi chickpea curry with fried bread and tamarind. The chaat comes cold and tangy — Dahi Bhalla soaked in yogurt, Aloo Tikki set on sweet yogurt and chickpea, Samosa Chaat layered over the top. Several curries and tandoor items come gluten-free, and a kids' menu rounds out a meatless range deep enough to anchor a table on its own.

What the menu makes plain is a kitchen unwilling to pick a single lane. Beside the North Indian mains runs a full Indo-Chinese section — Honey Chilly Cauliflower tossed with honey and sesame, Vegetable Manchurian, Chilli Chicken sautéed with green chilies and peppers, momos fried or tandoori. Both registers hold the menu at full strength rather than one shrinking to a token listing. The bar keeps the same range, from cocktails and lassi down to a Cola Masala that finishes cola with lemon, mint, cumin, and ajwain.

The story behind the kitchen stays at the level of roles rather than names. Its menu was designed by a master chef the restaurant credits with more than thirty-five years at the stove, and the place opened in 2023 with the aim of bringing Indian cuisine to a resort area that ran mostly on chalet and après-ski fare. The restaurant frames itself as a celebration of Indian culture and heritage, and puts weight on hospitality and flexible reservations to back it. The operation is built to flex in the practical sense too: a table books for dinner, or orders curries and breads for pickup and delivery before the drive home, with dine-in, takeout, and L.L.B.O. service all running off one kitchen and a dining room set toward the Blue Mountains view.

Online, an all-week buy-one-get-one deal covers selected curries, breads, chaats, pakora, and Fish Amritsari — the kind of math a table notices when it is feeding a group on the way back from the hills. None of this is staged as special-occasion cooking. It is a broad, from-scratch Indian and Indo-Chinese kitchen with a tandoor and a full bar, open seven days from late morning into the night and later still on weekends, set down in a corridor that mostly runs on pub fare — cooking the wide menu rather than the convenient half of it.