What is Namaste Indian Restaurant?
Namaste Indian Restaurant is the family-run Northern Indian storefront at 20851 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 102, in Grayhawk Plaza, the shopping center on the east side of Scottsdale Road just south of Thompson Peak Parkway in Grayhawk. It opened in early May 2021, and it was the first Indian restaurant in the center. The owner is Rahul Sahota, who cooks with his father, head chef Kamal Kumar; his mother, brother and sister run the front of house. Before opening, Sahota told What Now Phoenix that his family did all the cooking and that everyone who worked there was family. Five years on, the restaurant’s contact email is still his own name.
The room is small, nearly 2,000 square feet, with booths and tables, a patio on the sidewalk and a giant hand-drawn Taj Mahal mural on one wall. Phoenix Magazine’s Nikki Buchanan, visiting two months after opening, noted the murals, upholstered chairs and a crystal chandelier and said they put the place “a cut above its competitors.” The food is Northern Indian, built on a homemade masala base: samosas and onion bhaji to start, chicken tikka masala, kadai lamb, vindaloo, korma, biryani, and a set of house specials, achari masala, goat and coconut curries, that Buchanan said she was “already planning a trip back for.” Basmati rice comes with every main, and the garlic naan is the thing to mop with.
Who it is for: Grayhawk, DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch households who want Indian food without a drive to Tempe or Phoenix, golfers coming off Grayhawk across the parkway, and the delivery trade along the north end of Scottsdale Road, where its Uber Eats rating sits above 4.5 across more than a thousand orders. Nextdoor users named it a Neighborhood Favorite in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and it has held the top Yelp rating for Indian food in Scottsdale.
It is not a special-occasion room and does not pretend to be. Our verdict: the most consistent Indian cooking north of the 101, in a dining room run by the people who make it, at prices that have stayed reasonable.
Ordering at Namaste
Start with the fritters. The samosas, crisp-tender pastry pyramids around spiced potato and peas, and the onion bhaji, onion fritters battered in chickpea flour and billed on the menu as “India’s favorite monsoon snack,” were each $5.95 when Phoenix Magazine reviewed them in July 2021. Buchanan called the bhaji “remarkably like the blooming onions found in American restaurant chains except more exotic and worlds better,” and said she would happily spoon the sweet-sour tamarind sauce that comes with them on everything. Ask for extra sauce; it is the best thing on the table for the naan.
Then one red, one brown. The two mains the critic could not choose between were the chicken tikka masala, boneless chicken with onion and bell pepper in a lush, faintly spicy sauce, and the kadai lamb, the North Indian classic cooked in the wok-like kadai with garlic, ginger and whole spices, deeper and more complex than the tikka. Both were $15.95 in 2021; the menu has moved up since, as every menu has, and the current prices are on the online ordering page. Every main comes with basmati rice, and a basket of cilantro-strewn garlic naan was $3.50. The menu is large: vindaloo, korma, biryani, an asparagus soup, and three “extra special” curries, achari masala, goat and coconut.
Timing. Hours are 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, closed Monday, per the website; some map listings show a 9:30 close. Lunch on a weekday is the easiest seat. Friday and Saturday after 6 the room fills with families from the neighborhoods east of Scottsdale Road, and because the whole operation is one family, a full house means a slower kitchen; order the starters first and settle in. The patio faces the parking lot, which is fine from November through April and not in July.
Takeout and delivery. Online ordering runs through Clover on the restaurant’s site, and the delivery apps carry the full menu. Curries travel well, naan less so; if you are eating at home within ten minutes of Grayhawk Plaza, pick up and reheat the bread in a dry pan.
Getting there. Grayhawk Plaza has its own lot, with the restaurant between Chipotle and a frozen-yogurt shop on the Scottsdale Road frontage. From the 101, take Scottsdale Road north about two miles; from Pinnacle Peak, Thompson Peak Parkway drops you at the corner. There is no reservation system; call (480) 264-5499 for a group of more than four on a weekend night.
The Indian restaurant that North Scottsdale finally got
For most of the 2010s, Indian food in Scottsdale meant a few buffets along Shea and in the Airpark, and residents of the newer neighborhoods north of the 101, Grayhawk, DC Ranch, McDowell Mountain Ranch, drove south or ordered delivery from Phoenix. The Sahota family’s bet in 2021 was that a corridor with that many households and that little competition would support a family restaurant in a strip-center bay that had never held one. They were right, and the timing, opening into the back half of the pandemic with a takeout-heavy model and a small room, turned out to suit the moment.
The press record is short but clear. What Now Phoenix’s pre-opening report of April 20, 2021, supplied the facts: early May opening, Grayhawk Plaza’s first Indian restaurant, nearly 2,000 square feet, the Taj Mahal mural, Sahota in the kitchen with his father and the rest of the family in the dining room. Buchanan’s “First Dish” column ten weeks later supplied the verdict: she took “this sweet, family-run operation pretty darn seriously,” found the samosas “wonderful” and the bhaji “completely addictive,” and signed off, “Namaste, Namaste! Great to meet you!” After that the coverage moved to the review sites, where the restaurant has done better than most: a Nextdoor Neighborhood Favorite three years running, the top Yelp rating for Indian food in the city, and strong delivery numbers.
What the record does not say is the family’s own history, where Kamal Kumar cooked before Scottsdale, or whether the Sahotas had run restaurants elsewhere; the press we found never asked, and the restaurant’s website does not say. We also could not find a second published review. For a restaurant this well-rated, that silence is the usual fate of a small family room in a far-north shopping center, not a judgment.
How it fits the city: Scottsdale’s Indian dining map has filled in since 2021, with modern rooms on the Paradise Valley border and new openings up toward Jomax, and the Michelin and Beard attention that followed went to the ambitious ones. Namaste is the other kind of restaurant, the neighborhood kitchen that a district of golf-course subdivisions leans on for Tuesday dinner. The 2020s produced a lot of those in North Scottsdale; this is one of the few that is cooked by a single family.
Honest assessment: the room is plain, the kitchen slows down when the family is stretched on a Saturday, and the menu’s size means some dishes are better than others; stick to the tandoor-and-curry core and the fritters. The cooking is honest, the portions are generous and the welcome is real. If you live north of the 101 and want Indian food, this is the answer, and it has been since 2021.