A restaurant
and a butcher.

Leduc had Indian food before we opened. What it did not have was somewhere you could eat tandoori chicken at noon and walk out with two kilos of the same marinated chicken to cook yourself on Saturday.

That gap is the whole idea. On one side of the room there is a clay tandoor and a line turning out butter chicken, biryani, karahi and fresh naan. On the other there is a chilled counter of chicken, lamb, beef and goat sitting in the marinades that kitchen mixes every morning. Same spices, same hands, two completely different ways of getting dinner.

Quick service, cooked properly

We built this as a quick-service restaurant, which usually signals compromise. It does not have to. The parts of Indian cooking that take time — the slow-simmered gravies, the overnight marinades, the whole spices toasted and ground each morning — happen before you arrive. What is made to order is what should be: the bread, the tandoor items, the rice.

So you order at the counter instead of waiting on a server, and the food still tastes like it came out of a full-service kitchen. That is the trade we wanted, and it is why the lunch rush works at all.

What we do not shortcut

• Spices are ground in-house. Pre-ground masala loses most of what makes it worth using within weeks of being milled. We grind ours.
• Marinades are mixed daily. Not from a jar, not from a premix, and not made in a batch on Monday to last the week.
• Bread is baked to order. Naan held under a lamp is a different food to naan straight off the tandoor wall.
• Heat is adjusted per plate. Mild means mild and hot means hot, because the dish is finished when you order it rather than portioned out of one pot.

The counter

The meat counter started as an argument about waste. A restaurant kitchen mixes marinade in volume; some days there is more than the line needs. Selling it — on the cut, by weight, to people who want to grill at home — turned out to be the most useful thing we could do with it.

It has since become the reason a lot of people come in. You get a restaurant's marinade without paying restaurant prices for the meat, and you get to run your own fire. More about how the counter works.

Opening day

We opened by putting the food out for free. A buffet-style tasting, the first crowd through the door eating on the house, and a lot of honest feedback in the first few hours. It is a nerve-wracking way to launch a restaurant and we would do it again — you learn more in one afternoon of that than a month of guessing.

Leduc turned up. That is the short version, and we are still grateful for it.

Where we are

We are at #121, 4812E 43A Avenue in Leduc, five minutes from Edmonton International Airport and straight off the QE2 — which puts us within easy reach of Nisku, Beaumont, Calmar and the south end of Edmonton. Free parking in front. Open Monday to Thursday 11am–9pm, Friday and Saturday 11am–9:30pm, and Sunday 12pm–8pm.

Come and eat, or come and buy meat, or both. Directions and hours · Full menu · (825) 203-6767