Neon Tiger

"Not your Uncles' Butter Chicken," Neon Tiger says on its own homepage, and the kitchen keeps that promise literally — butter chicken never appears. What fills the gap is T.F.C., double-crispy tikka fried chicken with mango gastrique, green chutney, pickles, and Bombay mix, built on owner Naveen Chakravarti's mother's tandoori recipe. The restaurant calls itself the work of "the son of an Immigrant," and the menu argues that line harder than any tagline could. Neon Tiger is a modern Indian restaurant on the Ossington strip, open Thursday through Sunday evenings and serving into the small hours. It is where a Toronto table goes when dinner is meant to turn into a night, and where the food declines to become background while that happens.

The menu chef Akshat Chawla designed runs from the small plates outward. Corn Cheese-O-Yaki sits somewhere between pakora, takoyaki, and Korean corn cheese: cheese corn fritters under tamarind dressing, a parmesan sprinkle, and bonito flakes. Velvet Avocado Kebab arrives creamy, with tomato salsa, desi mayo, and pickled onions. Tandoori Shrimp goes into a seventy-two-hour spice marinade before it is charred and set beside kachumber salad. Midnight Charcoal Chicken takes drumsticks through activated charcoal and applewood smoke, then cools them with mint chutney. The larger plates hold that line rather than retreat from it — Short Rib Biryani with masala raita, Lobster Curry Over Coconut Rice built on an Alleppey coconut curry, and Slow Cooked Lamb Vindaloo, a lamb shank in a bold vindaloo with pickled onion, chilli oil, and kulcha to pull it apart with.

Read across, the menu is doing something more disciplined than fusion. The pan-Asian references are real — the dumplings, the bonito, the takoyaki lineage of the corn fritters — but they are guests in an Indian kitchen rather than co-hosts of a borderless one. Tikka seasoning goes onto fried chicken. Charcoal and applewood smoke go onto a drumstick. A coconut curry from the Kerala coast takes on a lobster tail and remains a coconut curry. Chakravarti has said he wants to rewrite what Toronto thinks Indian food is, and the mechanism is not novelty. It is refusal — the absence of the dish every diner expects, and the insistence that what replaces it be more personal rather than merely more clever.

The relaunch carries a biography. Chakravarti, a first-generation Indian Canadian whose Toronto history includes OddSeoul and earlier versions of Neon Tiger, rebuilt this one in the address Please and Thank You once occupied, returning to the kitchen after a fire and a cancer diagnosis, according to local reporting at the time. He came back and pointed the menu at his family's cooking. That decision does its work on the plate rather than in a press release: the tikka on the fried chicken is his mother's, and the French Roasted Chicken lists "mom's spices" beside the curry leaf and the flaky croissant, with no further explanation offered.

A table can spend two different evenings here. The share plates hold a range that lets four people order widely — Papa's Salad of raw mango and papaya julienne under tamarind dressing, the momos with chilli oil, Bang on Shrimp in an in-house bang bang sauce and garlic aioli — while the lamb shank, the lobster, the biryani, and a ten-ounce striploin with chimichurri chutney and triple-baked fries push the ceiling considerably higher. Vegetarians have real paths through it, though not effortless ones. The avocado kebab and Papa's Salad are marked, and Corn Cheese-O-Yaki sits among the vegetable plates while still listing bonito flakes. Ask before that one lands.

The hours make the rest of it legible. Neon Tiger opens Thursday through Sunday and runs to one in the morning, with cocktails — Espresso Flip, Tropicalia, Neon Sour, Tiger Buck — a Kingfisher on the beer list, live DJ nights, and neon over retro signage carrying the late half of the evening. Four nights is a decision rather than a limitation: it concentrates the week into the evenings built for a table that shares, argues over whether to add the biryani, and stays. Order the T.F.C. first, because it explains the kitchen faster than the rest of the menu can. Then let the room take over. The restaurant's own summary of the arrangement is shorter than any of this: great food, great drinks, cool vibe.