Imagine for a moment a trio of silky lamb chops just yanked smoking-hot from the tandoori oven, deeply brown on the outside, but still a faint juicy pink in the middle. Now deposit them in a cream sauce laced with such spices as coriander, cinnamon, clove, cumin, and fenugreek, rendering the gravy dark and fragrant. Finally, fling a handful of crushed almonds into the swamp—making lamb pasanda ($9.99), one of the richest and tastiest dishes ever to grace a stainless-steel salver in a South Asian restaurant.
With a name meaning "golden" in Bengali, Sonali Cuisine is the latest small dining establishment to arrive on the Sunnyside stretch of Queens Boulevard, which has gradually developed into one of the city's best food neighborhoods. It's also the most recent Bangladeshi café to hit west-central Queens, following in the footsteps of Spicy Mina and Deshi. I'm pleased to report that Sonali is less quirky and cantankerous than the former, and less obsessed with mustard oil than the latter. (Although the intemperate use of mustard oil isn't such a bad thing, I guess.) The Sonali premises may be tiny—just a couple of unadorned tables, a counter, and a door leading into the kitchen—but the flavors are big, big, big.
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