Guru the Caterer serves up Indian lunch specials to locals, students and professionals alike.
You can also grab dinner here, if you're willing to pick it up before seven. Known for their lunch boxes, Guru's daily offering includes a goat or lamb dish, a chicken dish and a vegetarian option. Each comes with rice, a choice of one vegetable side and homemade naan. And with the student discount, this is all under seven bucks.
Guru isn't far away at all. It's located on Broadway, past Teele Square, but just before the Foodmaster at the corner of Route 16. Still, if you aren't looking carefully, you'll cruise on by without even noticing. We wouldn't even have found it if it hadn't been for fellow Daily columnist Kate Peck, who gave us the heads up. If you're driving, we suggest parking at Foodmaster and walking back up Broadway.
Their day-to-day business is mostly a delivery service; order ahead and pick up your meal at one of a number of routine stops. Since there's no stop near Tufts, however, we've got to do it the old fashioned way. There's also a benefit to going to Guru's in person for take out. When you're getting delivery, you're confined to the lunch boxes. But as a walk-in, you get a little more leeway in your order. They have samosas (vegetarian or lamb) and mango lassi that you can add on to your meal.
The lunch specials switch daily, which guarantees that they're fresh. It also means that you never know what they have until you call, except that they'll have goat/lamb, chicken and vegetables. Just so we're clear, the vegetable course is really just a double-size portion of one of the veggie sides.
The only items they might pre-make are the samosas, which we saw coming out of a commercial size fridge. Still, judging from the cooking action we could see going on in the kitchen, we're pretty sure the Guru makes these too, only ahead of time.
On our first visit, the Guru wasn't in. Without Pushpin, the kitchen's well-known and loved commander-in-chief, keeping our orders straight seemed to be too much for the woman running the register. Do keep in mind that there are three options, tops. But who's complaining? This lunch-box system has given the greater Somerville area a second chance at Happy Meals.
The chicken dish of the day was a chicken tikka, though it was noticeably fresher and more properly stewed than the tikka masala you may have come to expect and certainly wasn't heavily spiced. Unfortunately, we haven't yet had a chance to try them on a day when they've had goat as an offer (goat = good), but the lamb curry was fantastic once we warmed it up again in a microwave.
Though it was at least 20 minutes from checkout to table, and we had walked through sub-20-degree whipping wind for at least five of those minutes, there were still parts of the bowl of curry that were most certainly, veritably, cold. Still, this whole incident is easily credited to the fact that it was just a hair before five o'clock - deep into the post-lunch customer slump for most restaurants, but before firing things up again for the take out dinner crowd.
We're thinking of it as an off day.
It sort of exemplifies the way Guru the Caterer holds down a homegrown, no frills-attached service - except the strangely modern Web site that, among other things, boasts itself as "divine Indian food for brilliant minds" (humorous in light of the fact that MIT is one of the delivery service's routine stops).
Winston Berkman is a sophomore majoring in international relations; Charlotte Bourdillon is a sophomore who has not declared a major. They can be reached at Winston.Berkman@tufts.edu and Charlotte.Bourdillon@tufts.edu, respectively.
