Herbivore Indian Cuisine

Herbivore Indian Cuisine at 1639 Wisconsin Avenue NW occupies the upper Wisconsin commercial block in the section toward the Glover Park neighborhood, serving Georgetown’s dining community with vegetarian Indian cooking at a time when plant-based eating has gained a customer base that extends well beyond the traditional vegetarian consumer.

The vegetarian tradition in Indian cuisine is not a modern accommodation to health trends but a culinary practice with deep roots in the religious and philosophical traditions of the subcontinent. Hinduism, Jainism, and certain schools of Buddhism have maintained vegetarian dietary practices for millennia, and the result in the culinary tradition is an extraordinary depth and variety in the meatless preparations of Indian cooking. The cuisine has had centuries to develop sophisticated techniques for producing satisfying, complete meals from vegetables, legumes, dairy, and grains, and the best Indian vegetarian cooking does not require or miss the meat that other culinary traditions treat as the center of the plate.

The paneer preparations represent the dairy category of Indian vegetarian cooking: the fresh cheese that is produced by curdling hot milk with lemon juice or vinegar, then pressing the curds into a firm block, is the primary protein in many Indian vegetarian dishes. Palak paneer, which combines the fresh cheese with a pureed spinach and spice sauce, and paneer tikka, which marinates the cubed cheese in the same yogurt and spice preparation that the meat tikka uses before grilling, are among the most ordered paneer preparations.

The dal, which encompasses the full range of cooked lentil and legume preparations in Indian cooking, provides the protein and the flavor depth that the bean and lentil traditions of South Asian cooking have developed. The Wisconsin Avenue address at 1639 is accessible from the Georgetown Circulator. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday with Sunday midday service. The vegetarian Indian restaurant concept is particularly timely in the Georgetown market, where the health-conscious professional population that the neighborhood houses is increasingly open to plant-forward eating that is not compromised on flavor. The Indian vegetarian tradition, which has had millennia to develop satisfying meatless preparations, produces a depth of flavor from spice work, fermentation, and slow cooking that Western vegetarian cooking has historically not achieved. For the Georgetown customer who is reducing meat consumption without reducing their expectation of a satisfying and complex meal, Herbivore at 1639 Wisconsin Avenue provides the culinary tradition that has solved this problem most thoroughly. The upper Wisconsin Avenue location at 1639 serves the residential Georgetown and Glover Park communities who want vegetarian Indian food without traveling to the Indian restaurant concentrations in Adams Morgan or the Virginia suburbs. For Georgetown residents who are vegetarian or reducing meat consumption, the meatless Indian tradition at Herbivore provides the full flavor depth of the Indian kitchen without the concession that Western vegetarian restaurants often require. The dal makhani, the palak paneer, and the chana masala are the preparations that best demonstrate this depth. Hours run Tuesday through Sunday.