In our fair city, there are three viable take-out cuisines: pizza, Chinese food, and Indian take-away. Of the three, Indian is my favorite. After all, a day without curry is really just a day wasted. Maybe it's the subtle combination of flavors, maybe it's all that lovely sauce, maybe it's the endorphin rush from dishes in which chilis are close to the star ingredients. Or maybe it's just because Indian seems to be made for carryout. The low, slow cooking process by which many of the core dishes on Indian menus are made suffers not at all from a trip home in a take-out container for a night in front of the television with a curry and a good beer or two.

The new Shinwari Kabab House is a fine example of an Indian take-away and sit-down restaurant. It turns out flavorful food at good prices from a menu that owners Avtar Singh and Ibrahim Mohamed claim combines the best of Indian, Pakistani, and Afghan cuisines. The differences between the three styles of cooking are subtle. Naming conventions are a bit different from culture to culture. The spices in some dishes are significantly different. And, as you get farther and farther from India proper there is a greater emphasis on meat on the menu (thus, "kebab house"). What looks like butter chicken on one menu is going to be butter chicken (even if it's called chicken makhani) on another. For the most part.

Shinwari is a very young restaurant. Only open since May 14, the place has an ad hoc feeling to it. Much of the furniture and equipment is carried over from the late Ariana Kebab House, which inherited it from India House Vegetarian. The changes have mostly taken place through the combined expertise of two cooks, Singh and Mohamed, who between them have worked in Indian restaurants for a significant portion of their lives. There are still some kinks to work out in the menu, but none of them diminished my enjoyment of my first meal from Shinwari in the least.

On my maiden visit I tried a mix of familiar Indian favorites and sampled the kabab menu. I ordered butter chicken ($9.95), a kofta nargisi ($10.50), a seekh kabab ($11.95), and a generous assortment of most of the tandoori-baked breads on the menu ($1.95-$3.95). We thought that the butter chicken looked a little odd when we opened it up. And we were further perplexed when we opened up the kofta nargisi. Butter sauce is usually red-orange in color and gingery in smell. Malai kofta sauce is usually off-white with the scent of raisins, roasted cashews, and a whole host of spices. What we got was almost exactly the opposite of what we were expecting. The kofta sauce had clearly been put on the chicken, and the makhani sauce had been used to dress the "meatballs." The results were delicious, but still not what we were expecting.

I was willing to believe management's assertion that "nargisi" and "malai" are two distinctly different dishes. So, thinking that the makhani sauce might be nothing more than a regional cultural difference in recipes, I ordered it again on another visit. This time, the dish was a familiar and very good chicken makhani - chunks of tender chicken simmered in a tomato cream sauce incorporating liberal amounts of ginger, a bit of cumin and coriander, and a dusting of fresh cilantro that was the very essence of richness and decadence.

The chicken-based seekh kabab and reshmi kabab ($11.95) were quite good. The combination of ground chicken, herbs, and onions in the seekh kabab kept the meat moist and flavorful with a nice punch of both mint and coriander. The cream cheese marinade in which the chicken for the reshmi kabab rested before its trip into the tandoor rendered the meat as tender as soft butter while packing it with gingery savor. Both had an agreeably smoky flavor and just a bit of char from the intense heat of the 900 degree tandoor (bear in mind that pottery kilns tend to run only about 100 degrees hotter).

That same heat makes it possible to make some truly remarkable breads on the vertical walls of the tandoor. Dough is literally slapped onto the walls of the oven, where the intense heat cooks it through before the surface tension breaks, allowing it to fall into the blazing charcoal below. Breads like this, of which naan is a particularly good example, are nearly flat, have a wonderful chewiness to them, and the sort of deep browning that you expect from really good pizza dough. Brushed with ghee (clarified butter) or finished with garlic and cilantro, this is the ideal scoop for bits of kabab, or a sop for dipping directly into your companion's unguarded dinner.

Tandoori breads can also be quite interesting in their own right. A skillful baker, such as the one manning the tandoor at Shinwari, can stick some pretty remarkable things to the wall of his oven, particularly keema naan (bread stuffed with finely ground lamb) and shahi kulcha (naan stuffed with paneer, an Indian cheese), which seem to defy gravity and common sense as they cook. Either of these would be a perfect light lunch on their own, but together with, say, leftover makhani sauce, a bit of kebab, or a bowl of dal-like lentil soup ($2.99) they are a very special treat.

If the prospect of trying to decipher the differences between the various proteins and sauces is too much to contemplate (or if, like me, you are too much of a glutton to choose), you could drop by Shinwari for its daily lunch buffet ($6.99), or the dinner buffet offered Monday nights. With that selection at that price you'll be happy you made the trip up to South Clinton. You might be a bit sad, though, to realize that you are missing out on the very best side benefit of Indian take-away: leftovers waiting for midnight snacking or much-coveted lunches the next day.

Shinwari Kabab House

1009 S. Clinton Ave., 442-1140

Lunch buffet daily 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; Dinner Sun-Mon 5-9:30 p.m., Thu-Sat 5-10 p.m.