The Cottage Cheese – 64 Oxford St, Toronto, ON M5T 1P1
Country: India     
Must-try dish: Coconut Tandoori Prawns
Seating: Indoor seating with a lot of windows and an outdoor patio
The high: Everything in the restaurant is done with thought – the name, the decor, the staff uniform. 
The low: It’s not immediately obvious that it’s an Indian restaurant, so more branding would be good since Torontonians would enjoy eating here. 

Paneer – the Indian cheese used in curries and on the tandoori is made with cottage cheese that’s drained and then hardened. The texture is similar to tofu, but soft when you bite into it, with much more flavour. 

The Cottage Cheese is partly named after paneer, but it’s also named because the restaurant has a wooden interior with a cottage feel. The uniform that the staff wear resembles a Hawaiin shirt but with leaves instead of flowers. The print also matches the floor if you take a peek at your shoes. 

The fun doesn’t stop here – the menu offers both traditional dishes alongside others with a modern Indian twist. Having discussed with our server, modern Indian is experimental recipes with classic Indian flavours and ingredients. There may even be a little influence from street food. Seeing as most Indian restaurants carry similar but different variations of the same dishes, this was a refreshing dining experience to taste Indian food in an exciting way. 

A gift from the kitchen kicked off our meal. It’s a dish invented by the chef called Haricot Mungo that looks like a small cookie but is a yellow lentil base mixed with Indian spices and topped with a plum chutney. This delightful treat set the pace for the rest of the meal. 

Dahi Puri is an easy dish to share with friends. It’s made with shells stuffed with bean sprouts and potatoes, then topped with tamarind sauce and yogurt. The variety of textures makes for a party in your mouth. A word for the wise – make sure to get the whole puff ball into your mouth in one go, otherwise things might get messy! 

Meanwhile, the Samosa Chaat is the perfect dish to use with your fork and knife. But feel free to use your hands if that’s what makes you happy. It’s made up of potatoes doused in sweet, spicy, and creamy sauces with nuts and pomegranate seeds. It’s an excellent dish to sample, even if only a few bites because of the drastic flavour combinations. 

As for the main, we started with the Shashlik Paneer Tikka to keep up with the restaurant’s name. You can’t ever go wrong with paneer, but this was next level. The square shaped cubes are seasoned with spices then grilled on an Indian-style barbecue called a tandoori along with pineapple, bell peppers, and onions. The pieces of cheese were like biting into a delicious cloud. It goes without saying, this is one of The Cottage Cheese’s signature dishes. 

For our final dish, we wanted to veer away from the more classics and more towards an urban Indian dish called the Coconut Tandoori Prawns. The dish comes with four massive tiger shrimp that could be confused with lobster tails. They’re marinated in a rub made from coconut, spices, and lime juice and then grilled in the tandoori. The crispy rub lightly falls off the shrimp and tastes delicious on its own, but this entire dish is a thing of beauty. 

It was a welcome change to have other dishes aside from the usual curries with rice and naan bread. There’s a lot more to Indian cuisine than what people think, and going to a restaurant like The Cottage Cheese exposes diners to something else. The service was friendly and helpful in guiding us through the menu, then explaining all of the sauces and ingredients involved in each dish. 

There are a few more tasty looking numbers on the menu, so a return trip is in the books. 

Eat with you soon, 

Mandrea Bike
(Mat & Andrea)