Spicy-Bite offers an array of curries and Tandoori meat dishes that
will satisfy any palate. Visit us in person or Order
Online and we will deliver for free to your home or office.
We deliver the freshest, most flavorful Indian
food in The City! We use only the best ingredients and make fresh
Naan to order in our Tandoori Oven. Our speedy delivery service
assures a great meal every time you order. If you need extra napkins
or plates, simply use the comments box on the delivery form when you
submit your order.
We offer a clean and comfortable atmosphere
for our dining customers and feature a nice selection of wine and
Indian beers to enjoy .
In addition to cash and travelers cheques, we
accept:
Hours of Operation:
We deliver every day, starting at 5pm and are
open for dining during the following hours:
Be sure to visit our Location
page to make sure you are in our delivery area before ordering.
Reviews:
"Bowled
Over"
LET'S
SEE, last week we talked about love. I did most of the talking, I
guess: Crawdad this, Crawdad that, love love blah blah blah. So it
stands to reason, logically speaking, that this week I announce our
big breakup. Well, I don't know where you studied logic, but I got my
higher edgy-cation at the clam counter, Howard Johnson's, every single
Wednesday between 1978 and 1987, in the company of great thinkers with
great names like Moose, Bud, Louise, Tony, and old Crow Black Jack
Masterson, you want to talk about on and on and on ...
Sit
down girls (and bi-curious boys) ... I'm still a-takened. In fact,
nothing could stop us now because we ate Indian food together, which,
if you were paying attention at all six years ago when I said so, then
you wouldn't need to read the rest of this column to figure out what
the hell I'm talking about.
Eight
years we been hokey-poked to each other, five of them officially, and
never once, until last night, did me and Crawdad eat Indian food
together – reason being that she broke up with her last several
lovers before me in Indian restaurants. And it wasn't just a question
of juju; there's a certain spice in Indian food which makes Crawdad's
head spin around in complete circles, by way of an allergic reaction,
leading not only to a twisted neck and tweaked upper back, but
restricted oxygen to the brain, general all-out craziness, and,
inevitably, arguments. Big, blow-out breakup ones.
So
eating Indian food with her, relationshipwise, is like finding a dead
fish head under your pillow, or pulling the eight of spades. However
you want to look at it.
But
I love Indian food, and Crawdad loves spicy food in general, including
Indian food, and when we received in our mail a mailer for a new
restaurant, Mission and Cortland, called Spicy Bite, specializing in
Indian and Chinese food ... we both figured, well ... I could get
Indian, she could get Chinese. Right?
OK,
so far so good. Spicy Bite is a superfriendly, cozy corner restaurant
with an exposed-pipe ceiling, niced up very nicely with wraparound
plastic flowers. They got those fancy-pants designer hang-down lights,
a two-and-a-half-foot strip of shiny metal sheeting screwed into the
walls at tabletop level – don't ask me why. And the oddest touch of
all is three backlit plug-in paintings, including, most spectacularly,
a waterfall one with the water not only lit up but in motion, like
water, ripples of light moving across the pool at the bottom of the
painting too. It's the damnedest thing, and well worth the trip even
if it is going to end in a broken heart.
Which
it isn't – not for me. Although I did break several other internal
organs I think in the process of eating my soup. And this is what I've
been dying to tell you about: the soup. It's off the Chinese section
of the menu, which is relatively small and very questionably Chinese.
The
so-called hot-and-sour chicken soup ($2.99), for example, was like no
hot-and-sour soup I've ever had in a Chinese restaurant. For starters
it was nine-hundred thousand times better, a ton of tiny bits of still
crunchy carrots, cabbage, green onions, red peppers, peas, and
probably about 10 or 20 other things (not to mention the chicken,
which was perfectly cooked, plump, and juicy), all adding up to the
spiciest, zaniest, most medicinal, and most maddeningly delicious bowl
of soup ever. More flavorful even than Vietnamese hot-and-sour, or tom
ka gai.
I
loved this soup, and at the same time I wanted to strangle it, it made
me so mad. It drives me crazy when something tastes this good and you
can't scarf it. I mean, this soup was so spicy I was sweating from
places where I didn't know I had sweat glands.
Crawdad
got the same thing only vegetable-style ($2.99), and it was the same
with hers. Off the charts and out of this world. But she can take it,
which isn't to say she didn't go crazy too. She even ate Indian food,
we were so out-of-our-minds from the soup. It didn't matter. The
Chinese stuff was basically Indian too, like Gobi Manchurian ($4.95),
which is cauliflower with ginger, garlic, onions, and green things in
an orange coriander sauce.
Chicken
vindaloo ($7.95). Excellent, exceptionally tender chicken. Barra kabab
($9.95). Excellent, marinated and tandooried lamb chops with grilled
peppers and onions, a side pile of cabbage, cucumber, tomato – nice
cool-down stuff. In short: we survived, with flying colors and runny
noses. And now Crawdad and me have our first-ever favorite Indian
restaurant!
Spicy
Bite. 3501 Mission (at Cortland), S.F. (415) 647-4036. Dinner:
Everyday, 5-10:00 p.m. Beer and wine. Delivery & Takeout
available. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.
Review
by- Dan Leone, the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch
Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning
of Lunch (Mammoth Books) in the March 3, 2004 edition of SF
Bay Guardian.
