Thali by Chef Prasad

What is Thali by Chef Prasad in New Canaan? It is a recently opened Indian dining room that brings back the Thali restaurant concept tied to Prasad Chirnomula’s career, with a menu anchored by tandoor cooking, biryani, vindaloo, and a tableside Kolkata-style snack rather than a generic suburban curry-house checklist.

For a first-timer, the useful read is to treat this as a focused order: start with Chef Prasad’s signature take on Kolkata’s puffed-rice street snack, assembled tableside with tomato, cucumber, crispy chana, mung dal, raw mustard oil, roasted spices, black salt, pepper, and lime. That dish gives the meal a sharper opening than jumping straight to richer mains.

Order around the tandoor, biryani, and sharper sauces

The main-dish signals are clear. Lamb biryani is built around spice-marinated leg of lamb with slow-cooked basmati rice, mint, cilantro, and shallots. Shrimp vindaloo is the hotter, more vinegar-led choice, with cinnamon, clove, garlic, and red chili sauce. Butter chicken is the safer comfort order, made with bone-in chicken grilled in the tandoor, deboned, then simmered in a creamy tomato sauce. Tandoori chicken is listed as hot, gluten free, cooked on the bone, and requiring extra time, so it is a better pick when the table is not rushing.

The verdict: book this when the appeal is Indian food with a few specific house markers, especially the tableside Kolkata snack and tandoor-centered mains. Skip treating it as a broad, all-purpose comparison against nearby venues; the available signals point more to what to order here than to a wider New Canaan ranking.