Man, I love me some Urbanspoon. Just pick a general direction on the map, start poking at flags, and seeing what works.

For example, on Friday, we were heading in a generally westerly suburban direction, with a generally Indian mindset, and that's when I found Hopkins. I mean, I know where Hopkins is, and I know that Hopkins exists, but Hopkins is sort of kind of turning into an outpost of quirky restaurants. Pizza Luce just opened an outpost south of Knollwood, there's a Brazilian / Italian place called Samba, and there's this Curry 'N' Noodles, which mixes standard Indian, leaning a bit toward the Hyderabadi food that Kabobs serves, with pan-Asian noodle dishes and stir-fries.

The dining room is small - about a dozen tables. There's a patio that's about 2/3 the size of the dining room, but one of my long-standing life-rules is FUCK EATING OUTDOORS, so that doesn't impress me. There is parking, which is nice for that bit of Hopkins, but no wi-fi. Amenities out of the way, so how was the food?

The food was good. The vegetable pakora we ordered was less the random pile of deep-fried mostly onions you usually get, and instead were seven little balls of mixed vegetables, dredged in a spicy batter and deep-fried into individual deep-brown nuggets.

I had the nalli bakara nihari, which was described in the menu as "authentic Hyderabadi spicy sauce". What it ended up being was the fairly standard flavors of a ginger, tomato, and chile-based curry. That's not to say that it wasn't very good - it was, with lots of intense flavor, nicely stewed meat on the bone, etc. But one of my pet peeves of Twin Cities Indian food is the lack of variety in recipes, so I was hoping for something a bit farther outside the box.

Their rice is fabulous, though - really fragrant and floral and requiring the picking-out of cardamom pods. Also excellent were the onion kulcha, with actual crunchy bits of onion in the filling giving some nice texture.

Everything we had was generally packed to the gills with flavor, if not (in the case of Liz's blazing noodles) the promised heat. Prices were in the standard $10-$15 range of most sit-down Indian restaurants, and was pretty reasonable overall.

Will I be back? Probably. There's more on the menu I want to explore, and I think it's now one of the three closest Indian restaurants to where I live, in a direction I go fairly frequently. That makes it a solid choice for semi-regular visiting.