Bold but balanced Central Indian cuisine is the draw at this Voorhees strip mall star

For seekers of hauntingly complex sauces, there is one dish — the famously fiery Saoji curry simmered with goat — that is worth the drive to the Voorhees strip mall where Nagpuri Saoji serves up a rare taste of Central Indian cuisine.

But the sensation that lingered most in my imagination after my first visit to the restaurant was actually a memory of touch: the tactile pleasure of holding the pebbled surface of a warm sabudana fritter encrusted with tapioca pearls, then cracking the fryer-crisped baubles open to reveal steamy white centers of mashed potatoes laced with ginger, cilantro, and chilies. With a creamy pink chutney enriched with peanuts on the side, it was one of the most comforting starters I’ve nibbled this year.

For Swapna Sagdeo, the chef who co-owns this restaurant with husband Neeraj Sagdeo, the sabudanas offer a vivid portal to her childhood in Nagpur, India, where the fritters are a much-anticipated treat for children to snack on while adults fasted for religious holidays.

“Everybody [where I come from] has a childhood memory associated with it,” she said. “That is what we want to do here, to bring out that nostalgia.”

What distinguishes Sagdeo’s mission from so many other Indian restaurants in our area is her focus on the flavors of Central India. It’s a region that’s virtually unknown to many Americans who’ve long enjoyed the creamy curries and tandoor-roasted meats of Northern India and, especially over the past two decades, come to embrace the crispy dosas, coconut-kissed stews, and tamarind-tanged dishes of Southern India.

“Indian food in the U.S. is often represented through cuisines associated with cities and regions that have already established strong identities internationally, like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Hyderabad,” she said. “There’s so much culinary diversity beyond these places, and I think people from other regions want their food, culture, and identity to be recognized in their own right.”

Nagpur, the 13th largest city in India, is part of the state of Maharashtra and sits smack in the middle of the country — “like Kansas City,” Sagdeo said. Its culinary traditions are distinct, characterized by gravies spiced with earthy dried chilies; rustic flatbreads such as bakhri, made from grains like millet; and gram flour from dried chickpeas, which gets mashed with onions and spices into the traditional farmer’s lunch of zunka, which Nagpuri Saoji also serves.

Gram flour also factors into crispy pastry tubes called Nagpuri kothimbir vadi that get stuffed with well-spiced fistfuls of chopped cilantro. It’s an appetizer so rarely seen locally that one of Nagpuri’s customers made a point of stopping by our table on her way out to enthusiastically insist I try it. I bit into a freshly crisped order — it was like a hearty spring roll packed entirely with herbs — and was thrilled I followed her advice.

The namesake Saoji curry here is undoubtedly this restaurant’s primary draw. The Saoji style of cooking originated from the Halba Koshti community of weavers who migrated in the late 19th century from neighboring state Madhya Pradesh to work in the textile mills of Nagpur, where their fiery cooking, a local staple for millworkers, became widely popular.

The Sagdeo family’s rendition is an exercise in intricacy and balance, a blend of 27 different toasted spices, including multiple kinds of cumin and cardamom, poppy seeds, mace, star anise, cinnamon, fennel, bay leaves, a lichen known as blackstone flower, and two varieties of incendiary Bhiwapuri dried chilies. They’re all simmered into a fragrantly earthy chocolate-brown brew that is so famous for its tongue-scorching spice that I’ll admit to a little disappointment when Nagpuri’s standard rendition did not instantly set my lips ablaze.

“The one that we do is the mildest level we can go to,” concedes Sagdeo. “I prefer a ‘level zero’ myself, but we can go five levels up to ‘Nagpuri taste’ and that is what people eat back home.”

I’ll cautiously request one or two notches higher on my next visit. But what most impressed me was not so much its burn potential as how this curry made an effective canvas to amplify the natural flavors of whatever protein simmers inside it, like a prism. The chicken version of Saoji was noticeably lighter in body and flavor while the goat’s handle-like bones and tender meat infuse the sauce with a rustic, deeply magnetic savor.

The Sagdeos, who moved to South Jersey in 2011 to work in IT, initially launched their venture with weekend specials for subscribers out of a commissary kitchen in Atco in 2016 before landing in their current Voorhees restaurant space in late 2020. They opened a larger sibling restaurant by the same name with a bar in bustling Iselin, in North Jersey, in 2023. After closing their Voorhees location for year-long renovations and an expansion, they reopened this BYOB earlier this year with 80 seats.

The restaurant was fairly quiet during most of my visits, except during a special-event weekend buffet when both sides of the dining room were bursting with families. Regular Friday night karaoke sessions, when the crowd favors boisterous Bollywood tunes on the open mic, are also lively.

For maximum audience appeal, their menu also includes solid renditions of familiar dishes from other parts of India, including samosas (albeit spiced to their regional style with whole coriander seeds), chili-garlic chicken momo dumplings, creamy dal makhani, and tender lamb chops spiced with vivid red kashmiri chilies that arrive at the table in full sizzle on a cast-iron skillet.

You can skip the chicken tandoori quesadillas, a fusion dish created for the restaurant’s younger customers that isn’t worth it (unless you order it pressed between Indian chapati rather than the default flour tortillas). There are so many other more interesting dishes to consider instead, including a creamy methi curry flavored with fenugreek and filled with meaty, tender cashews.

Sagdeo’s family also has roots in the Southern coastal state of Goa, and I enjoyed several dishes typical of that region, including a pair of silver pomfret fish imported from India that were pan-fried whole in a zesty semolina crust. A vibrant green sauce called cafreal made from cilantro, mint, and chilies was fantastic with cubes of paneer cheese.

There were also several other Central Indian curries we enjoyed, including a deep red chili-based kolhapuri that we savored with vegetables. A creamy Malwani coconut curry from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra is tanged with the sour kokum fruit and is perfect with either chicken or fish. Patodi rassa, a Maharashtrian fritter made with chickpea flour, offered a satisfying vegetarian alternative to bask in that rich Saoji curry.

Misal pav was another Maharashtrian specialty I couldn’t get enough of, a brothy, well-spiced bowl of tomato-y curry steeped with bay leaves, coriander and three kinds of sprouted beans. Once you mix in the side dishes — crunchy farsan snacks, chopped red onions, and filament-thin strands of snappy chickpea pastry called sev — the broth thickened enough that it worked like a dip for the pillowy soft pav dinner rolls on the side.

With such boldly flavored dishes, sweets are an essential finale to the meal, and Nagpuri Saoji delivers them with the dramatic fanfare of dry-ice smoke, whether it’s a classic gulab jamun dusted with crushed pistachios, housemade mango kulfi ice cream, or, my favorite, cardamom-flavored shrikhand (hung yogurt) turned golden with saffron, which can also be served with puffed poori bhaji flatbreads on the side.

“It’s a dessert typically made for holidays, but nostalgic for people living here,” said Sagdeo. “Because it reminds you of family.”

1227 Haddonfield-Berlin Rd. Unit 3, Voorhees Township, N.J. 08043; 856-805-0339; nagpurisaojiusa.com

Lunch 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Monday; dinner 5 to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Monday. Closed Tuesdays.

Entrees, $14-$27.

BYOB.

Wheelchair accessible.

About 60% of menu can be made gluten-free, including all curries. All meats are halal.

Menu Highlights: sabudana weda, kothimbir vadi; paneer cafreal; misal pav; chili-garlic chicken momos; lamb chops; Saoji goat (or chicken); vegetable kolhapuri; chicken Nihari; chicken Malwani; cashew curry methi; patodi rassa; semolina-fried pomfret; zunka; shev baji kulfi; shrikhand.