delicious.100: Tonka is one of Melbourne’s best restaurants.

Tonka is Melbourne’s best passage to modern Indian food and is where you’ll find a hotly-priced menu reinterpreting classic tastes of the subcontinent.

Tonka’s lamb curry. Pictures: Andrew Tauber

REACHED down a graffiti-scrawled lane, Tonka is Melbourne’s best passage to modern Indian food.

Here you will find a hotly priced menu reinterpreting classic tastes of the subcontinent, allied to a sophisticated drinks list that draws deeply on European wines.

Tonka.

Tradition is respected. Tonka’s tandoor ovens see to that with quail, chicken and naan springing from their hot clay hearts. But elsewhere, executive chef Adam D’Sylva keeps things fluid. Among the chargrilled lamb cutlets and housemade palak paneer, you may find spanner crab salad with puffed rice or a Port Phillip scallop with Jerusalem artichoke puree.

Scallop in shell with Jerusalem artichoke.

Chocolate cremeux.

Tonka’s confident feel for the spices and seeds that give Indian food its complexity shines in a cardamom-scented lamb curry. Not so much in a duck korma with apple and vanilla spiced beetroot where flavours seemed strangely muted.

Sweet stuff? D’Sylva delivers with gulab jamun balls starred with gold leaf and a charcoal-honeyed chocolate “cremeux”.

These treats are all the more enticing for being served in a space free of Bollywood cliches. Tonka — framing a wide angle view — is techno instead of sitar strings, clouds of mesh instead of flock wallpaper. Good luck getting in.

Must eat dish: lamb curry

Tonka

20 Duckboard Pl, city.

Ph: 9650 3155

tonkarestaurant.com.au

Cuisine: Indian

Chefs: Adam D’Sylva, Ved Navghare

Price: between $41 and $80 a person for two courses, food only

Bookings: yes

Open: Mon-Sat noon-3pm and 6pm-late

Instagram: @tonkarestaurant

This restaurant was ranked the 57th best restaurant in Victoria in the 2016 edition of the delicious.100.