A confusing but compelling complexity reigns at San Antonio’s Hyderabadi Spicy Matka

My visits to Indian restaurants have often been much like I imagine life in the country itself to be: noisy, colorful and teeming with exotic aromas and tastes.

Those encounters are also fraught in a couple of ways: the menus are often voluminous and filled with unexplained terms, which makes selecting anything beyond tandoori chicken kind of a crapshoot. And there’s frequently a free-for-all among diners to make sure each gets a fair share of every dish.

Chaos, in other words.

Of course, all of India can’t fit into a single basket. Someone with roots in Kerala on the southwest coast may have little knowledge of the foods of landlocked Punjab in the country’s north — and that’s not even considering the subcontinent’s variety of languages and religions.

The Hyderabadi part of San Antonio restaurant Hyderabadi Spicy Matka’s name honors of the capital of Telangana, a state in India’s south-central region. To understand what this means, get busy ordering. And googling.

The menu breaks appetizers into veg, non-veg and Indo-Chinese categories, but the only items recognizable to diners not deeply immersed in Indian cuisine are samosas. Clearly, we couldn’t do samosas. But a category called “Indian Street Delights” beckoned.

Doubtless, most Indian consumers are more adept than I at figuring out how the restaurant’s Tikka Roll works on the run. The veg edition I received came swaddled in so many layers of foil and paper that the original wrapper, a paratha-like flatbread, was almost inaccessible. The filling included onion and cabbage in a mildly spicy yogurt sauce — great in its own right, but so moist as to render the primary wrapper limp. Maybe we should have ordered a less drippy Paratha Roll with chicken instead.

We also took a chance on Mirakapkaya Bajii. On the off chance that you don’t know, these are fiery green chilies slit, stuffed with an unspecified sour and oniony mixture, coated in a chickpea batter and fried. They definitely cleansed the palate for what’s to come. So much so that one diner had to retreat to the bathroom to deal with perspiration.

Next, from Andhra Pradesh, just south of Telangana, came Nallakaram, a dish which consisted of boned chicken pieces — fish and shrimp are also popular — sautéed in a complex spice mixture that traditionally includes lentils, coriander seeds, cumin, tamarind, curry leaves and more. The dish was only moderately tongue-torturing and, and in testimony to its success, none was left halfway through the meal. The mitigation of the house’s pungent garlic naan was hardly needed.

Naan is an essential sidekick to the curry and curry-adjacent dishes at Spicy Matka, which arrive in small steel pots. None of the curries we ordered would win any beauty prizes, but all scored high on the taste spectrum. Having a fondness for potato curries, I might award an extra point or two to the Pudina Wale Aloo Curry, which pairs the tuber with much mint in a slurry with green chilies, bay leaves and a plethora of other companionable spices. Kudos also to the Nilgiri Korma, with its plentiful chunks of chicken bathed in an herby sauce that might or might not have included the traditional grated coconut but did definitely sport a cohort of dried red chilies.

By that point, it was getting hard to discern specifics under the assault of so much full-throttle flavor. Flavor was not the issue with the Nattu Kodi Curry, again with chicken. Indeed, this was the most complexly herbed and spiced of the curries, boasting anise, black cardamom, curry leaf and much more. It was the splintery chopped chicken and loose skin that, traditional as it may be, diminished this one for me.

One doesn’t escape complex spicing even with the biryanis, or fragrant rice dishes. These arrive heaped into a clay bowl and are eminently shareable. A little preliminary research suggested that Gongura Biryani would be heavily influenced by its bountiful inclusion of sorrel leaves — think hibiscus or jamaica — and to be sure, there was a hint of characteristic tart sourness. But fresh mint and star anise were equally apparent. We had the dish prepared with cubed paneer cheese, but goat and fish are other options.

I’m of two minds about the impressive and eminently Instagrammable Matka Masala Dosa: either you should start with it as a comparatively mild-mannered introduction to Matka’s compelling cuisine, or it should be a soothing parting shot. In either case, the dosa is a huge and beautiful quasi-crisp rice- and lentil-flour disk folded over a filling of crushed, herbed potato and served with a trio of chutneys, each of which had its partisans.

Yes, use your hands. It’s all part of the delightful chaos.

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This article appears in Nov 13-26, 2024.