All we knew, once it closed last summer, was that options for ethnic delivery food in Center City were suddenly dreary and slim - a glaring shortcoming for a town that prides itself on eating well.
Could Tiffin owner Munish Narula become our new home-delivery tandoor hero? You can bet his precious new iPhone on it.
The Wharton-trained Narula, who founded (then left) Old City's well-regarded Karma, is a food entrepreneur with a high-tech fetish. And he's determined to take the mundane task of ordering supper into the realm of cyber-convenience, serviced by crisply efficient deliverymen in ties guided to your door by GPS tracking.
I'll get back to Tiffin's somewhat convoluted online identity in a moment - because it works, though not as seamlessly yet as it should. Tiffin's humble restaurant storefront on Girard Avenue, which currently pays homage to Minar's downscale frump, is another continuing storyline about to improve.
It is Tiffin's cooking that has me truly excited, because it is the most vividly flavored and intriguingly varied Indian food in town.
The name, Tiffin, was inspired by the lunch courier networks of Bombay, in which barefoot deliverymen called dabbawallas bring multichambered metal boxes of freshly home-cooked meals to office workers each day. And the heart of Narula's operation was dedicated to creating a changing, daily selection of three complete box meals inspired by homey specialties rarely seen on typical restaurant menus.
A recent tiffin called subzi mangoli, for example, brought a medley of fresh vegetables in a richly creamed curry tarted up with sweet mango pulp. Another had tender morsels of chicken cloaked in a smoky puree of charcoal-roasted eggplant baingan bharta. Each came with sides of fluffy basmati rice, wonderful curried pumpkin, and an earthy daal stew of yellow lentils.
