Indian restaurants are booming in Columbus, with three new Indian eateries opening in October alone and more of the city’s newest dining rooms built around the cuisine, The Columbus Dispatch reported in its Nov. 2 roundup of restaurant openings and closings. The Dispatch summed up the moment simply: Indian is in — not that it ever left.
The newest arrivals span the region. Bombay House Restaurant & Bar opened Oct. 2 at 496 Polaris Pkwy. in Westerville, taking over a former Winking Lizard Tavern on Polaris Parkway, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Its menu runs from tandoori dishes and Indian street food to Indo-Chinese dishes, biryanis and dosas, with plenty of vegetarian options, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
A Columbus Monthly representative’s recommendations at Bombay House, relayed by The Columbus Dispatch, point diners to the vada pav — a Mumbai-style potato fritter slider with chutneys — along with butter chicken and the Bombay 65 appetizer, crispy bites of chicken, fish or shrimp tossed with curry leaves, garlic, chilies and South Indian chili masala, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Two days later, on Oct. 4, Durbar Nepali and Indian Cuisine opened its second location at 64 Granville St. in Gahanna, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Durbar debuted in Reynoldsburg in 2020, and its Gahanna menu ranges from chicken wings and chana masala to chicken vindaloo — but, as owners Sagar Dhital and Himod Sharma say on the restaurant’s website in reporting relayed by The Columbus Dispatch, momos are why people come back, served six ways from chili-tossed to steamed with spicy achar.
Downtown, Sitara Fine Indian Cuisine began serving Oct. 2 at 427 E. Main St., The Columbus Dispatch reported — the address Indian Oven left after 26 years when it moved toward a new home in Delaware. Sitara is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week and offers an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for $17.99, according to The Columbus Dispatch. In other words, downtown did not lose its Indian restaurant; it traded one for another within a month.
The boom is not only about new Indian restaurants, either — the cuisine is bleeding into the rest of the menu map. Flour & Fetty’s, which opened Oct. 22 at 1540 Polaris Pkwy., grew out of Flour Modern Pasta Bar, an Indian-Italian fusion concept, and now layers Thai, other Asian and South African flavors onto dishes like curried crab rangoons and pappardelle with short rib beef rendang, The Columbus Dispatch reported. When an Indian-Italian pasta bar can reinvent itself on Polaris Parkway in the same month three Indian restaurants open, the cuisine is a Columbus staple, not a niche.
The boom is part of a wider October reshaping of Columbus dining that The Columbus Dispatch catalogued: a matcha studio inside Fukuryu Ramen in Upper Arlington, a nonprofit training restaurant called The Line, a second Overdose Hot Chicken on the Northeast Side, and closings that included Hoster Brewing’s third shutdown in its long history and True Food Kitchen’s Easton departure. Related coverage of the region’s dining churn: Dutch Bros Coffee opens its first Columbus drive-through on West Broad Street, and the chains keep coming — Dunkin’ plans at least nine new stores across the Columbus area through 2027.
What makes the Indian openings stand out in that churn is that they are independent, cuisine-led bets rather than chain rollouts: a Polaris conversion, a Reynoldsburg favorite expanding to Gahanna, and a new name stepping into a 26-year downtown institution’s room. Each is a wager that Columbus diners will keep choosing regional Indian and Nepali cooking — tandoori, dosas, momos and buffets — as a regular part of the rotation, not a special occasion.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
Confirmed, per The Columbus Dispatch: Bombay House opened Oct. 2 at 496 Polaris Pkwy. in Westerville; Durbar Nepali and Indian Cuisine opened its second location Oct. 4 at 64 Granville St. in Gahanna; and Sitara Fine Indian Cuisine opened Oct. 2 at 427 E. Main St. downtown, with a $17.99 weekend lunch buffet. Still to come are Indian Oven’s opening date at its new Delaware home and whether any of October’s newcomers add further locations.
What happens next is the simplest market test there is: lunch lines and dinner crowds through the holiday season. If the October trio holds its tables into the new year, Columbus’s Indian boom will have proved it is a dining shift, not a one-month coincidence.