Whoever said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day clearly was not from India. Most westernized countries have some sort of nominal breakfast dish, be it some type of danish, cereal, muffin or toast dish.  Not in India. You usually just get pakoras for breakfast. Which I guess might pass for hash brown patties. Other than that, you usually have to order off the same menu as you would for supper. I’m not sure that Butter Chicken will ever replace Wheaties as “The Breakfast of Champions”. (matt)

I dunno about butter chicken.....but seriously....if you have a left-over naan, and some bratwurst and some cheese you can have the best multi-cultural breakfast ever.  Basically...wrap the cheese and sausage in the naan and have you a giant piggie in a blanket.  Freaken tasty.  Especially if its one of those garlic naans from the NE with the giant chunks of garlic on 'em that are so potent that you're guaranteed to go kissless for 24 hours or your money back.  (ren)

At 9 AM, Ren texted me that he wanted to go for curry.  Unlike most of his text messages demanding a curry, this time he was serious. I scoffed at his suggestion that we would be able to get curry for breakfast but thought we’d give it a go to see what we could find. (matt)

MATT!!! IF YOU'RE READING THIS......BRING ME A CURRY!!!!  (ren)

There aren’t a lot of Indian restaurants in the SW but Touch of India is one place reasonably close to my house. Plus as luck would have it, they were open at 10 AM.  Located next to a carpet store and laundromat in the back of a dodgy strip mall off of 37th Street SW, I wondered how anyone would ever happen to stumble upon this place. I guess maybe the owner’s logic is that many people need to wash their clothes and/or buy berber. Aside from its bizarre location, we were troubled by the name of the restaurant itself. Touch of India. Sounds dirty. Like the Bloodhound Gang’s “Bad Touch”. (matt)

It reminds me of that time Matt got into trouble on the C-Train for indulging his frotteurism. Honestly, I've stopped being surprised by any of our restaurant's names, or locations, or neighbours.  We would be doing you all (both of you readers) a grave disservice if we didn't mention that “Calgary Hot Yoga” was also in the same mall complex.  (ren)

You can only get Take Out or Delivery at Touch of India. The reason for this becomes obvious once you enter. The restaurant is no bigger than my own kitchen/dining room. Their business office is on one wall, a large buffet table on the adjacent wall and a few coolers for pop in between. I can’t imagine they have much more than a stove/tandoor and some warming wells in the back. I get the sense that much of their food is made offsite, likely in some Indian grandmother’s basement and then transported to the store. (matt)

I don't know...maybe some of the prep-work is done off-site....but our meals took a reasonable amount of time to prepare (meaning long enough) so I wouldn't be surprised if a fair bit of the prep happened in the building.  Basically it looks like one of those small, privately-run gas stations offices.  Pop cooler, desk, clutter, food rack, cash register, just with painted walls instead of wood paneling.  Also the back room has food preparation in it rather than enough random spare car parts to assemble a 1953 DeSoto Firedome. (ren)

For breakfast (well...actually more like brunch – ren) they have 3 options: Butter Chicken, Chicken Curry, and Vegetable Curry. Ren went with the butter chicken and I had the chicken curry. While we waited for our meals to be prepared, we were given complementary kebabs. They were very unexpected and more importantly, very appetizing. We got our meals and since there were no places to sit we decided to eat at the laundromat. We didn’t think this would be a problem as there were no signs stating NO CURRY ALLOWED. There was however a sign above the washer and dryers stating NO HORSE BLANKETS. We’ll keep that in mind for next time. (matt) (They also seem to not want you to wash oil, tar, grease, diesel, gas, etc....nothing about curry there either-Ren).

We ordered 3 meals so I'd be able to take one home for ang to eat so we ended up with 3 kebabs.  They were round balls of meat rather than the usual meat-on-a-stick-minus-the-stick that kebabs usually are.  I really wanted to ask the lady if we could act out the meatballs in the hands scene from “The Wedding Singer” .... but decided to just shut up and eat 2 of the kebabs before matt finished his and claimed ½ of ang's.  They were quite crispy on the outside and tasty soft on the inside.  Very impressive, especially for a freebie. (ren)

The food was very high quality and would make for a suitable hang-over remedy on a Saturday morning. As a side note, a few weeks later our friend Caligula invited us to the Sunset Lounge just three doors down from Touch of India. If you are looking for a good dive bar with Karaoke, this place beats Ducky’s any day. Its really a special place. You can probably even sing some Bloodhound Gang. (matt)

I really enjoyed the butter chicken.  More cream than tomato which to me is a good thing.  Just enough spice to make it interesting too.  According to the menu the lunchbox thing we got is available monday-saturday from 11:30-2:30 and they do have a full menu for other times of day.  Its a whole lot closer than the NE spots to my place so I'll probably try them out again for a full-menu attempt.  (ren)

Touch of India scores a solid 8/10, losing points because we were denied the option of paying via Debit Machine (the one employee didn’t know how to work it). Other than that, we’d definitely go again.

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