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| Terra open for business! |
The new Terra International Cuisine is many things-- a raw bar, a vegan restaurant, a gourmet vegetarian restaurant, a pescetarian restaurant, a Kosher cafe--and all of them are new to Albany.
“It doesn’t exist anywhere else,” says Sonny Brar, Terra’s owner and operator. The restaurant opened in the former Townsend Park Bakery on Washington Avenue this winter, and held its official ribbon-cutting ceremony June 2.
The menu is devoted to international fare, with a focus on vegetarian cuisine and pescetarian, a diet that includes seafood, but not other kinds of animals. “Indian, South American, Italian, Chinese--we have flavors from all over the world,” says Brar.
Yesterday's ribbon cutting celebration featured popular dishes from the restaurant's exciting new menu, including Fried Codfish and Imperial Hearts of Palm Cakes. The celebration also included wine tastings from a new slate of kosher wines.
Brar is a veteran restaurateur; he started as a waiter at Sitar in 1995 and ultimately took over the highly successful Colonie restaurant. In 2008, he opened his own restaurant, Zaika, in Clifton Park, but in 2010, a construction project was hurting his business, and he was in the process of looking for a new location, when he was approached by a customer, now business partner, Howard Katz with a new proposition. Katz suggested opening a new Indian restaurant that served Kosher food.
“Now, we are the only Kosher restaurant from Muncie to Montreal,” Brar says. Brar and Katz hope to capture local traffic as well as travelers, “to create a way-station for travelers, and get them out of their mini-vans and give them some place to eat,” Brar explains.
If, along the way, they can create a kind of mini-UN at Terra, so much the better. “The goal of the restaurant is to provide healthy food to people from all different communities, no matter what their religious beliefs are.” Brar, who is Sikh, but notes that his wife is Brahmin and his business partner is Jewish.
“I am all about unity and peace in this world, and if I can create that, using food as a medium, why not?”
Many of the dishes on this menu will make use of the restaurant’s monumental brick oven, crafted from the blue stone quarried from the nearby Helderberg Escarpment.
Here are pictures from the ribbon-cutting celebration.
Here are pictures from the ribbon-cutting celebration.
The restaurant is near Central Avenue's Townsend Park. Townsend Park has been the site of increased busienss development as of late. Last year, two new restaurants, Umana Restaurant and Wine Bar, and Flavors of India opened on the park. Parkside Apartments, a new upscale apartment building whose beautiful units face the park, opened with much fanfare and fully leased apartments last summer. Last July, Central Avenue BID announced that the National Association of Realtors had awarded a grant of $2,200 from the Greater Capital Chapter of New York State Commercial Realtors to install outdoor lighting in Townsend Park, moving the needle even further in the right direction and hopefully attracting additional investment.
Terra is located at 238 Washington Avenue in Albany. For more information, please visit their website at http://www.terraalbany.com/.
