Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant runs out of the Maxwell Arms Hotel on Maxwell Street, a family-run hotel and lounge on the south-east edge of central Dalbeattie not far from the Town Hall and the High Street. The hotel-and-restaurant pairing is the only sit-down Indian operation in town: bookings happen in the hotel's lounge dining room rather than a shop front, while a parallel takeaway operation runs from the same kitchen and is what most of the local catchment knows it for. The menu reads as the long, classical-format Anglo-Indian list rather than a tight modern one — full starters and tandoori, biryanis, dedicated chef's-recommendation section, seafood dishes, classic curries, sundries and English-side options for non-curry eaters in a group — with a £10 minimum on collection. Reviewers writing about both the hotel and the restaurant tend to compliment the family running it as much as any one dish, with the cooked breakfast and the lamb-based curries singled out on the food side. The setting — a working coaching-style hotel in a small Solway-coast granite town — gives Taj Mahal an atmosphere that very few takeaways nearby can match, which is partly why it has held on as the town's only sit-down Indian for many years.