Indian food is one of the categories where Utah Valley genuinely over-performs its size. Five restaurants across Provo and Orem serve Indian cooking at a standard that would hold up in a much bigger city, and one of them has been doing it since before most of the valley's current restaurant scene existed.
What no other guide to these four tells you is the scheduling, and the scheduling is most of the practical problem. One of them has no lunch at all and takes no bookings. One of them closes in the middle of the afternoon. And exactly one of the five opens on Sunday, which in this valley is the single most useful fact on the page.
The five restaurants
1. Bombay House
Northern Indian · $$ · 463 N University Ave, Provo · closed Sunday
The one everybody names, and it earns it. Bombay House opened on 5 February 1993 as Utah's first Indian restaurant, which means essentially every Indian kitchen that has opened in the state since opened into a market this one had already spent years building. It was founded by Daniel Shanthakumar, raised in Chennai, who came to Utah after a degree in hotel and restaurant management from Brigham Young University–Hawaii — a more specific origin than the usual family-restaurant story.
The cooking is built on ground-in-house spice and from-scratch preparation, and the consistency across three decades is the thing regulars talk about rather than any single dish. Chicken tikka masala is the volume order; the vindaloo, the lamb korma and the biryani are all worth displacing it for.
Two things to know before you go, both of which catch people out constantly:
There is no lunch, and there has not been for years. Bombay House opens at 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and is closed Sunday. It ran a lunch service including a buffet for long enough that it lodged in local memory, and search results and word of mouth have not caught up. People still turn up at noon.
You cannot book a table. It is walk-in only, running an in-house waitlist at the door, and it is not on the major reservation networks. Phoning to reserve will not produce a table. Arriving close to opening is the reliable strategy, particularly for a group or on a weekend.
⚠ Its closing time is published two ways and this guide will not pick one. The restaurant's own location page has listed a 10 p.m. close while aggregators and current listings show 9 p.m. That is not resolvable from outside, and it matters precisely when you are cutting it fine on a waitlist. Phone ahead for a late table.
The full profile is here, including the reason the gluten marking on its menu works backwards from every other restaurant you have been to.
What to order: Chicken tikka masala, lamb vindaloo, garlic naan, mango lassi. The biryani is the most overlooked thing on the menu.
2. Haveli Modern Cuisine
Northern Indian · $$ · 2005 State St, Orem · open Sunday
The highest-rated of the four in current listings, and the only one of them that opens on Sunday — which, in a valley where Sunday closures are the default, is a genuine competitive position rather than a detail. It is in Orem, on State Street, not in Provo; earlier versions of this page said otherwise in a sentence that contradicted its own address line two lines above.
The cooking is traditional Northern Indian with a more composed presentation than the category usually gets here, and the room has a view, which almost nothing else in this category offers. Lamb dishes are the consistent standout — the chops and the rogan josh both get named repeatedly — and the bread selection goes well beyond plain and garlic.
One recurring note from diners with a high spice tolerance: even the hottest setting here lands moderate. Ask, and then ask again.
What to order: Lamb chops, rogan josh, malai kofta, garlic naan. Mango lassi.
3. India Palace
Northern Indian · $$ · 98 W Center St, Provo · closed Sunday
Downtown Provo's Indian restaurant, unassuming from the street and much better than it looks from outside. This is where the lunch buffet is — a full spread of curries, rice, naan and vegetable dishes at a price that makes it one of the best-value lunches in the city, and the easiest way for a newcomer to work out what they actually like. Note that the buffet runs at lunch rather than all day, so confirm the timing before building a plan around it.
It is also the practical answer for a large group, which our group dining guide covers: everyone serves themselves, the per-person cost stays modest, and the vegetarian coverage is better than almost any other budget option in Provo. Listings type it as vegetarian and vegan friendly, which is not a claim every Indian restaurant's own listing makes.
What to order: The buffet at lunch. Butter chicken and garlic naan otherwise.
4. Tandoor Indian Cuisine
Indian · $$ · 1600 N Freedom Blvd, Provo · closed Sunday
The largest omission in earlier versions of this page, and it is hard to defend: a well-established Indian restaurant inside Provo, on Freedom Boulevard, carrying more than a thousand reviews, and this guide had never named it. Nor had any of the other 369 articles on this site.
It is also the one that is not straightforwardly Northern Indian. Diners describe the cooking as leaning southern in style, and the vegetarian menu goes well beyond the standard four — gobi manchurian, chilli paneer, kadai paneer, baingan bharta and dal makhani all get named by large vegetarian groups eating here together, which is a good sign about both the kitchen and the room. The bread range includes Peshwari naan. Lentil chips arrive before the meal and a small dessert after, neither of which you order.
The setting divides opinion — it is a converted older building with a more formal dining room than the category usually gets here, and reviews split between finding that pleasant and finding it dated. The food is not in dispute.
What to order: Saag paneer, the vegetarian mains, Peshwari naan. Ask what is prepared in the southern style.
5. Kohinoor
Northern Indian and Pakistani · $$ · 75 State St, Orem · closed Sunday
Family-run, generous, and priced below what the food would suggest. Kohinoor is listed as serving Pakistani as well as Indian food, which is worth knowing rather than glossing: Northern Indian and Pakistani cooking share the tandoor, the kebab tradition, the wheat breads and much of the same spice vocabulary, so the overlap on a menu is the norm rather than a hedge. The breads are the thing to explore here — aloo paratha in particular.
⚠ It runs a split service, closing in the middle of the afternoon and reopening for dinner. A three o'clock arrival finds the door shut. This is common among independents in this valley and it catches visitors out constantly.
What to order: Boti kebab masala, butter chicken, aloo paratha. Samosas to start.
The Sunday problem, and the one answer
Sunday closures shape eating out in Utah Valley more than any other single factor, and this category shows the pattern in a very clean form. From current listings:
Open Sunday: Haveli Modern Cuisine, Orem.
Closed Sunday: Bombay House, India Palace, Tandoor, Kohinoor.
That is the whole map for Provo and Orem. If it is Sunday and you want Indian food in either city, there is one restaurant and it is on State Street in Orem. The one other valley option is Swad Cabin down in Spanish Fork, which opens Sunday and closes Tuesday instead — the opposite of the pattern almost everyone assumes. No competing guide to these restaurants states this, because guides in this category are organized around ranking rather than around whether the door will be open — and hours are exactly the thing a reader needs at the moment they are searching. Our guide to restaurants open on Sunday in Provo sets out the wider pattern and the reasons behind it.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. Hours in this category move, and a single restaurant's Sunday service is exactly the kind of thing that changes without announcement — so confirm. And Sunday demand concentrates: the one open restaurant in a category absorbs the whole day's traffic, which is a reason to go early rather than at the obvious hour.
The lunch question, corrected
Earlier versions of this page said that every restaurant listed here runs a lunch buffet, and quoted a price range for all of them. That was wrong in a way worth correcting explicitly, because it is the claim most likely to send someone to a closed door.
Bombay House has no lunch service at all. Not a reduced one, not on select days — it opens at 4 p.m.
The buffet in Provo is India Palace's. Haveli and Kohinoor both run lunch services and are worth going to at midday; treat any specific buffet claim about them as something to confirm at the door rather than something this guide has verified. Prices in this category drift enough that printing a number here would be stale within a season, which is why there is not one on this page.
Eating vegetarian and vegan
Indian cooking has the deepest vegetarian tradition of any cuisine well represented in Utah Valley, and this is the single best category in the area for a vegetarian eating with a group of people who are not.
The substantial vegetarian main courses to look for: paneer dishes such as paneer tikka and palak paneer, dal in its various forms, chana masala built on chickpeas, aloo gobi of potato and cauliflower, and malai kofta, which is the closest thing the category has to a celebration dish. None of these is a side or a compromise; several are the best things on the menu outright.
The thing to actually ask about is dairy, not meat. Northern Indian cooking uses ghee, cream and fresh cheese heavily, so a dish that contains no meat may still contain a lot of dairy. Vegan diners should ask specifically about ghee in the base and cream in the finish. Most of these kitchens will adjust a curry to a coconut or tomato base on request. Our healthy eating guide covers the wider vegetarian picture in the valley.
Beyond Provo and Orem
The valley's Indian scene does not stop at the city line, and two of the places worth knowing are outside it.
Swad Cabin, 856 S Spanish Fork Pkwy, Spanish Fork. Well reviewed, generous, made to order, with a heat scale the kitchen actually asks you to pick a number on. It opens Sunday and closes Tuesday, which is the reverse of the valley norm and the single most useful thing to know about it. Our Spanish Fork restaurant guide covers it in full. Worth a note for anyone who has read older listings: its city was genuinely hard to confirm for a while, with at least one platform filing it elsewhere. Its address is in Spanish Fork.
Ganesh, in Lehi and American Fork. The Lehi site trades as an express, fast-casual format — order at a counter, combos that add bread, rice and a drink for a small supplement — and it is listed as serving South Indian as well as North Indian food, with a strong vegetarian menu. Closed Sunday. For the north end of the valley it is the convenient option rather than the occasion one.
South Indian, and what the valley is still missing
Almost everything described above is Northern Indian: tandoor breads, cream-and-tomato gravies, kebabs, biryani. That is what most Americans mean by Indian food, and it is what Utah Valley overwhelmingly serves.
South Indian cooking is a different tradition — rice and lentils rather than wheat, coconut and curry leaf and tamarind rather than cream and cashew, and a set of dishes that barely overlap: dosa, the enormous fermented rice-and-lentil crepe; idli, its steamed cousin; sambar, the tamarind and lentil broth that comes with both; uttapam; vada.
The valley is thinner here, but it is not empty, and it would be wrong to say otherwise. Tandoor in Provo is described by diners as leaning southern, and Ganesh lists South Indian food on its menu. What Utah Valley does not yet have is a dosa specialist — a kitchen with a dedicated griddle turning them out to order. For that, the nearest options are north in Salt Lake County, where several restaurants build their menus around dosa and biryani, and where the Indian grocers are.
That is a genuine gap rather than a slight, and it is the most likely shape of the next Indian restaurant to open here.
Cooking it at home
The ingredients are mostly a drive. The dedicated Indian grocers nearest Utah Valley are in Salt Lake County — Sandy, Taylorsville and West Jordan all have one — and they are where to go for whole spices in quantity, bulk rice and lentils, fresh paneer, frozen paratha and the ready-made pastes that make a weeknight version realistic. Inside Utah County, the Asian Market at 266 N State Street in Orem is open seven days including Sunday and carries a useful subset: rice, lentils, whole spices, ghee and frozen breads, if not the full Indian range. Our grocery guide covers the wider picture.
The one technique worth learning is the tempering step — heating whole spices in fat until they pop and pouring the result over a finished dish. It takes about ninety seconds and it is the difference between a curry that tastes homemade and one that tastes like a restaurant. Cumin seed, mustard seed and dried chilli in ghee is the standard starting point.
What you cannot reproduce is the tandoor. A clay oven running far hotter than a domestic one is what gives naan its blistering and tandoori meat its texture, and no home oven gets close. That is a good reason to order bread out rather than attempt it, and a good reason to judge these restaurants partly on their bread.
Ordering well
Heat runs mild by default. Every kitchen here calibrates its standard setting for a general Utah palate. Medium here is often mild elsewhere. Say hot and mean it, and do not be surprised when the staff double-check.
Order breads deliberately. Naan from a live tandoor is a different product from the reheated kind, and it is where the difference between these restaurants is easiest to taste. Garlic naan is the safe pick; stuffed breads and paratha are where the range shows.
Curries travel better than almost anything else. Flavor continues to develop as the dish sits, which makes this the best takeaway category in the valley and makes leftovers genuinely better the next day. Rice and bread do not travel as well — order those to eat immediately.
Biryani is not a rice side. It is a layered main course cooked with the protein, and it is routinely under-ordered here because menus file it near the rice.
None of these restaurants is built around alcohol. Bombay House does not serve it. If a drink pairing matters to your evening, check first rather than assuming.
Related Guides
- The Bombay House Profile
- 30 Best Restaurants in Provo
- Best Restaurants in Orem
- Best Group Restaurants in Provo
- Restaurants Open on Sunday in Provo
- Best Lunch in Provo
- Best Food Near BYU
Last updated: August 2026. Addresses, cities and Sunday status verified this update against current listings; the "lunch buffet on select days," "reservations helpful" and "Haveli in Provo" claims in earlier versions were corrected here. Hours change — confirm before you drive.
Frequently Asked Questions
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