Aki's Indian Restaurant

Here's a vibrant eatery where one can fine-dine outside on the Finger Wharf or indoors in a lofty main room peppered with Indian ornaments and fuchsia pillows. A signature dish of crab and iddiappam (string hoppers) is full of life, with sweet flecks of blue swimmer, black mustard seeds, ginger and tomatoes on a nightingale-sized nest of rice-flour noodles. Lamb boti kebab (sans stick) pleases with a punchy marinade of cashews, poppy seeds, fennel and rum, but Indian really equals curry and Aki's has some of the city's finest. Meen kozhambhu sees barramundi fillets swimming in a delightfully thick sea of tamarind and crowned with batons of murungaikai (also known as drumstick. Note. leave the vegetable's fibrous outer layer and scoop out the pulpy goodness inside.) Service is graceful, if a little unpolished, but not as sweet as semolina cooked in pineapple and laced with saffron, fried cashews and sultanas. Like much on the menu here, it's a many-textured thing.