The pizza naan at Spice Xing

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

The greater D.C. area has some terrific Indian restaurants, whether Heritage India in Glover Park or Bombay Indian in Silver Spring, but none of them are like Sudhir Seth’s Spice Xing in Rockville. You likely know Seth as the man behind the spice-perfect Passage to India in Bethesda, which may make you wonder why the hell he’s opening another subcontinental outpost under a different name. Well, because the new place ventures beyond the standard regional cuisines that many Indian restaurants peddle. As the name implies, Spice Xing specializes in the unique cross-cultural dishes that have been incubated in Seth’s home country. It could be a simple roast chicken, influenced by the bland British diet, which has been dressed up with East Indian spices, or it could be the shrimp Balchao, a Portuguese-inspired dish of crustaceans in spicy vinegar sauce that comes from Goa in western India. There are also nods to the Italians (pizza naan, don’t bother) and the Persians (a lamb and apricot stew, don’t miss it) as well as many of the traditional Indian dishes that we’ve all come to embrace. Which means that at Spice Xing, you can either experiment with Indian fusion—or just fall back on an Indian classic, which may actually be a cultural fusion that has merely passed the test of time.

Spice Xing, 100-B Gibbs St., Rockville, Md., (301) 610-0303

What started as a simple request on the DonRockwell.com board has blossomed into a full-fledged Indian crab dinner/book signing/general-foodie-wonkiness dinner at Spice Xing in Rockville on Sunday, July 12.

Sudhir Seth, chef and owner of both Passage to India and Spice Xing, will team up with cookbook author Monica Bhide to offer a three-course dinner completely focused on blue crabs. The feast starts at 6 p.m. with crab tikkis, which are essentially Bhide's take on Maryland crab cakes, and moves on to pollachi crab masala (crab sauteed in fennel, cinnamon, pepper, and poppy seeds) and crab gassi mangalorean (crab in a curry gravy).

Sandwiched around these courses will be an aperitif called "pomegranate delight" — Bhide's rum cocktail with pomegranate juice, lime, and grenadine — and a dessert called shrikhand, which is a strained and flavored yogurt with fresh strawberries, kiwi, and mango. The opening course will be in audio form: Bhide will talk about her latest cookbook, Modern Spice, and sign copies.

The whole shebang will set you back $60, which includes a copy of the cookbook. So what's the catch? You have to go through DonRockwell.com to get your name added to the list. Sounds worth it to Y&H.

Over the years, I've sampled garlic naan, naan stuffed with goat cheese, kashmiri naan with nuts and raisins, and, of course, regular ol' naan blackened and blistered straight from the tandoor. But until I dined recently at Spice Xing, the new Rockville restaurant opened by Passage to India's Sudhir Seth, I had never tried khurmi naan.

It's naan covered with tomato sauce and sprinkled generously with shredded cheese. It is, in other words, pizza naan.

The naan fits into Seth's precise vision of Spice Xing, which features Indian dishes influenced by those European cultures that have had a presence on the Subcontinent, whether British, Portuguese, Spanish, or French.  But since the Italians never laid a colonial finger on India, the natives had to improvise their own version of the classic Neapolitan flatbread, which wasn't so easy in a country with few pizza or conventional gas/electric ovens.

Even tandoor ovens are hard to find in certain regions in India, Seth tells me. Sometimes eight or more families will share one communal tandoor, or some enterprising soul will open a tandoori shop, where the locals will bring their own homemade dough to bake in the blazing hot clay ovens. Likewise, Seth notes, the ingredients that usually go into khurmi naan — commercial ketchup and processed cheese — are not always widely available in India.

All of which is to say that khurmi naan is typically a restaurant item in India, not something made at home.

Seth's own version doesn't stray far from the original back in the home country. About 40 percent of the sauce slathered onto his naan comes straight out of a ketchup bottle; the rest is homemade, a reduced tomato sauce infused with cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaves. The hybrid sauce is then topped with two kinds of processed shredded cheese — cheddar and white cheddar.

So how is the naan? The sauce, which is ladled on thick, immediately creates a problem for those who like their naan (or their pizza, for that matter) to be both chewy and crispy; these slices go limp. The sauce itself is rather sweet, no doubt due to the large percentage of sugar-laden ketchup. The partially melted shredded cheese adds only a cold element of fat to the bread.

The naan sort of reminds me of those Totino's frozen pizzas from the 1970s, back before Wolfgang Puck and California Pizza Kitchen got into the freezer section of your local grocery store. I suspect that khurmi naan, in its own way, must hold a certain nostalgia for Indian immigrants in America. As for me, though, the flatbread's fascination is limited pretty much to its history, not its taste.

During an interview this afternoon, Seth said Spice X-ing would include, aside from the requisite butter chicken and saag paneer, a number of dishes influenced by the outside cultures that have had a presence on the Subcontinent, whether British, Portuguese, Spanish, or French. The dishes, unlike the home-style cooking found at Passage, will require a good deal of research and conceptualizing, Seth says. Also expect more small plates.

Among the plates that could land on the menu, Seth says, are a roast chicken with Indian spices and a potato stew called ishtoo, a mispronunciation of the English word "stew," which includes, of all things, fresh grated coconut to extract its milk.

"I'm not recreating Passage to India, that's for sure," Seth says. "I plan and hope to change the menu more often than I have been able to do at Passage to India."