Indian Restaurant Lotus

Lotus is the newest, and most welcome edition to the Yokosuka food scene, which has a dearth of Indian food by any measure. (Update: I recently had the pleasure of eating lunch with the owner of Lotus. Details of our discussion can be found on the Nirvana post)

Lotus

 I was recently tipped off to Lotus by a fellow food spotter and frequent contributor to the blog. Lotus just opened on 27 August 2013. For his contributions he has reached the coveted Aficionado Club "Elite" (yes - ACE) status.

In earlier posts I surmised that all of the Indian restaurants in town were being run by one big group of Indians. I'd see (or at least thought I'd seen) an employee from one Indian restaurant working at a different Indian restaurant. But convinced myself otherwise. Couldn't be.

In any case, we all know that there are not enough Indian restaurants in town. Let's see, there are about eight of them that I can think of off the top of my head. Royal Kitchen, Lotus, Nirvana, Go-Go, Delicious, Nirvana II, Nishan, and Malika. So we obviously need more. There is some justification for this though, because each of these restaurants seats only three people. 8x3=24. OK so maybe we do need eight restaurants in town.
Update, Update: a kind reader has alerted me to another up the hill from Yokosuka Chuo station(see the comments below) AND I recently saw there is now a Nishan II that just opened!

Now, the idea that they could all be run by one large family or conglomerate is becoming more and more apparent. A huge clue was revealed when I saw a young employee at Lotus wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. Not just a little breast insignia either - it was like "Nirvanafood.com" with the phone number across the entire back of the shirt.

They are trying to slowly take over Yokosuka, one restaurant at a time, and they are off to an excellent start.

Lotus is located right next to Bamiyan near the end of the main Honch area. The same road where the crosswalk is over to Daiei. See the blog map or the location link at the very bottom of this page.

Lunch menu

The lunch menu is very organized. Choose your set, choose your curry, choose your level of spicy, and lastly choose your drink. Top to bottom. In a bold move that does set them apart from their partners, they offer the never been seen before "Lunch beer"  (see bottom right of menu).

"Lotus" - by the way is a beautiful name, depending on who you ask.  It's a water plant of course and a difficult yoga position. But in Buddhism it has very deep meaning. The red lotus (that is used on their restaurant sign) is a symbol of love and compassion. The fact that it is fully open represents full enlightenment and self-awareness, much like restaurant Nirvana. In Greek mythology, Odysseus' men were blown off course and ended up in a land where the locals ate Lotus. This put them into a state of blissful forgetfulness with nary a worry in the world. They didn't want to return to the ship.

Such it was when I ate at Lotus - I didn't return to work that afternoon, and ended up wondering Verny park among the roses until I snapped out of it.

Lotus is very, very similar to the other Indian restaurants in town - I can't put my finger on it but perhaps it's the menu sets... The food was all very good. Went for my typical Naan Upgrade to Garlic Naan for an extra 180 Yen.  I will say that this unusual in that most other restaurants charge 100 or 150 Yen for the upgrade so they're stretching it. The garlic on the naan was the dried flaky stuff. I much prefer the fresh kind that some of the other  restaurants in town use.

Nice large Naan and lotus flower swirls in the curry

It is all you can eat rice and Naan for lunch if you're able to down more than they give you on the initial serving. (By the way, I don't know why I've been capitalizing Naan. It just seems better that "naan." The restaurant also prefers "nan" to "naan" so it's one of those words that seems open for interpretation of use)

The "free drink"

A drink is included in the set meal, but are not shy to make it seem like you're getting something special and free. Incidentally, the kanji 無 means no or none and　料 means fee. You'll run across it quite often.

Please walk through the Honch to get to either Bamiyan or Lotus. The city markets Yokosuka as a "Navy town" or "America town," especially Dobuita Street - so you need to help out and do your part by being an "American" walking the streets.  Keep some of the not-so-admired American traits suppressed though - if you know what I mean. 

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"The Honch" in daylight

Menus