The lamb korma arrives before you’ve even settled into your seat. That’s Rafiq — the owner of Bombay Chili on Josey Lane — sliding the bowl toward you with a quick nod, because he remembered what you ordered last time, three months ago, when you came in with your sister during a rainstorm and ended up staying two hours past your intentions.
Bombay Chili sits in a low-profile strip mall off Josey, north of Rosemeade Parkway, sharing a parking lot with a nail salon and a dry cleaner. There’s no valet, no Instagram-bait mural, no line. Walk in on a Thursday evening and you might find eight tables occupied, a Bollywood soundtrack running at a polite volume, and Rafiq moving between the kitchen pass and the front door like a man who genuinely cannot sit still. He’s been working this room for years, and it shows in the way the place runs — tight, warm, a little informal in the best possible way.
The menu is North Indian, long enough to take seriously. You’ll want to start with the samosa chaat: the pastry is crumbled over chickpeas and yogurt and two chutneys — green and tamarind — and if you’re not careful you’ll fill up on it before the mains arrive. The butter chicken here is legitimately good, not the fluorescent orange paste you get at lesser spots. It’s a deep brick-red, the fat properly emulsified, and the chicken is thigh, not breast, which matters. But the real reason regulars keep coming back is the lamb — particularly the lamb rogan josh, slow-cooked until the meat gives at the pressure of a spoon. Order a paratha to soak up the gravy.
Vegetarian options are plentiful and treated as equals, not afterthoughts. The dal makhani — black lentils simmered overnight with cream and butter — is the kind of thing you eat and then quietly resent every lesser version of. The palak paneer is properly seasoned. The paneer itself has a firmness that suggests someone is actually making decisions about texture.
Lunch service runs weekdays, and that’s when you can do serious damage for under fifteen dollars. The lunch buffet isn’t always available — call ahead — but if it’s running, you’ll find four or five rotating dishes, rice, bread, and a dessert. Dinner runs closer to twenty to thirty dollars per person with drinks, though they don’t have a liquor license, so bring your own wine or beer if you want it. Nobody will blink.
Friday and Saturday evenings fill up by seven, so go earlier or later if you want Rafiq to actually sit down and talk food with you. He will, given the chance. He’ll tell you where his family is from in Rajasthan, why he prefers certain spice blends for winter cooking, and which dish on the menu he’d order if he weren’t the one making it. The answer, last time anyone checked, was the korma. Mild heat, deep flavor, lamb that’s been in the pot long enough to mean something.
This is the kind of restaurant that doesn’t need to advertise. The parking lot has the same cars in it every Friday. You’ll probably become one of them.
