Aaoji

I am sorely dissapointed because this place has been closed for the past few months because the kitchen burnt down, and I tried calling them today to check when they will open back up and the phone is disconnected
This place is hands down the best place to have Indian food. As other reviewers said, the décor is not good, and the service is bad. The only reason they stayed in business was because of the food. You know when a place stays open for a long time despite it looking like crap, and they treat you like shit, because their food is great. This is that place
Not many people know this, but their chaat was great too. They will make it to order.
However, it burnt down, and their phone is disconnected, and I don;t know where to go now.

Simply the best. Me and my wife love indian food and have visited many in the NOVA area. Aaoji takes the cake not only for the delicious food but for the unbeatable prices too. Where else can you get a good quality dinner with chicken/​lamb, side dish, salad, rice, and dessert for just $ 4! Absolutely amazing! My favorite is the butter chicken and chick peas. My wife loves the paneer (cheese cubes with sauce). If you are looking for ambiance or a date night, this place is not for you. But if you are looking for great indian food at insanely low prices, Aaoji can’t be beat.

This by far is my go to place for good indian food for all occasions — dine-​in, take out, and catering! No other place comes close to their food quality and consistency.
The place is a no-​nonsense café — nothing fancy, but their food is always good! They do have the widest selection of Indian dessert in the DMV area!
And I have never been disappointed by their catering!

This is my go-​to quick and delicious dinner place. I usually get the «choose 3 entrée» option so that I have some leftover for lunch the next day. The butter chicken is my favorite, to scoop it up with a big piece of naan and some rice… ahhhh. bliss. I usually do take out, but it’s also enjoyable to eat there.
Love this place.

I stumbled across Aaoji looking for a place for a quick dinner near Dulles. It was a pleasant surprise. The décor is absolutely nothing to write home about, very much a hole-​in-​the-​wall feel, but the food was delicious and a great value. I think the other 3 and 4 star reviews are very much on the mark.

I come from spoiled San Francisco… So this review is probably harsh for Herndon, VA.
The atmosphere: situated in a little strip mall in Herndon, food is served with plastic trays/​folks/​knives. This place is certainly not known for it’s taking first dates :-).
We ordered a few dishes (saag gosht, baingan bartha — the eggplant dish, and dal makinni). Along with these dishes we got a side of rice and naan.
The naans weren’t hot. How do you serve luke warm naan? Lame, minus 1 star.
The baingan bartha was solid — 4 stars. The dal makinni was good as well, probably 3.5 stars.
I would come back, maybe the right solution here is to order take-​out and not sit around.

This is one of those proverbial holes-​in-​the-​wall most people would ignore if it weren’t for reviews from savvy Unilocalers. That’s what lured us inside. Their food is surprisingly good, freshly cooked and spicy. Plus, they have homemade pastries for sale. Order at the counter and they bring your food to you when it’s ready.
Ignore the smudged front window and disregard the upholstered chairs that are begging for a good cleaning. Grab your foam plate and plastic forks and enjoy! The butter chicken, spinach and garlic Naan were superb – each main dish came with a bit of fresh salad on the side. Pricing was a bit confusing, but we truly enjoyed this lunch. TIP: Using cash avoids confusion and mistakes at the register.
This place is not posing as anything but the local eatery it is, with really good Indian food for a reasonable price. «No frills» would be an accurate description. It is located right in the heart of Old Herndon with plenty of parking on the street or in the municipal lots.

The fresh naan bread almost pushed me to a 5 star review – you are probably thinking, meh, big deal, all Indian restaurants serve fresh naan bread. STOP!!! No, this is something else… they bring you your OWN HUGE piece of naan bread that is so piping hot that you have to hot potato it for a few minutes before you can eat it! YUMMM!!!
The food is what it is – nothing fancy, but definitely GRUBBIN!
Also, I am ridiculously happy to have guaranteed gulab jamun at every meal – helllllz yeah!!!
All this for about $ 7 – you can’t beat that with a bat! :D

Aaoji is a casual restaurant where a person pays at the counter, gets his food on a tray and then sits down wherever he likes. I come specifically to this place for the goat curry and the samosas and they have a great dessert bar if you like Indian desserts.
Service at this restaurant depends on who you get. There’s one guy who is always nice, quick and efficient. I was also stuck behind one customer being served by the slowest man alive. The line of customers giving him the evil eye did not spur him on to quicker action either.
Aaoji’s parent restaurant is Bombay Café in Fairfax. It’s much bigger and has the same stuff on the menu plus a buffet.

a fabulous spot in the back streets of Herndon adding a couple of innovations to your basic Indian lunch buffet…
innovation # 1: many diffeerent combo offerings — you can have lunch for as little as $ 4
innovation #2: the fully monty — which they serve you — includes a fabulous raita, salad and gulub jamun — a deepr fried dough ball wrapped in honey syrup which si one of the best desserts on the planet…
add to that the fact that they also have a full set of Indian sweets which they sell for $ 6.99 a pound and you have a fabulous place for lunch in Herndon.
A big thank you to the boy with the dragon tattoo Neal E for recommedning this on his fabulously named work of genius, the Paul M. list…

It was our first taste of November: October 14^th. Rainy and gray. A Rough Wednesday evening. We walked in. THe place had florescent lights, and the types of flags at used car parking lots draped across the ceiling. My wife thought it was just a snacks and sweets place. Not so I says and in we walk.
Plain location, MSNBC on the small panel tv. Friendly service at the counter where you order your food either for takeout or in dining. We ate in and got the combos. I got the spinach paneer, eggplant and potato casserole and chicken curry. Everything was most excellent and tasty and it cost me like 9 dollars for rice, salad, three dishes (above) a warm cuddly, soft and gooey biscuit like concoction doused in a sweet warm honey sauce (my wife thought it was like bread pudding and her face literally lit up like a 5 year old who has been given her first chocolate) and a soda.
I also ordered this gema jakeep, or something similar which looked like orange glistening sweet looking straws wrapped in pretzel like twists. They gave them to me for free (talk about Lagniappe) I have never had anything quite like it. They tasted like crispy sweet cakes and wax and had honey dripping out from the center. Amazingly alien and foreign stuff but still most excellent. My wife got the butter tofu and peas and chicken curry and the same combo except only two dishes instead of 3 for about 7 bucks. Total of 20 for a fine dining experience. She said the curry was too spicy but I am from New Orleans and could handle it fine (she;s japanese).
The dessert buffet is the most amazing selection. Definitely returning to try more of these multitude of sweets as well as the rest of the dining menu. The eggplant and potato casserole was the best thing. I highly reccomend it as a selection. Peace

Not a bad place to pick up a quick lunch. Their lunch specials are a pretty good deal. You can pick up a complete meal with drink for about 5 bucks or even cheaper if you don’t want raita, salad, or naan. The food is good but there isn’t a whole lot of it. If you don’t have time and want quick Indian food, this isn’t a bad choice. However, if you have time, for 10 bucks and some change, you can just go to the lunch buffet at Angeethi and eat until you puke.

You know what they carry sometimes? Fanta — in glass bottles — with sugar. Not HFCS — sugar. Oh… I am so moving INTO this joint!

Take it for what is it, and you won’t be disappointed. This is the Chipotle of the Indian food world. You don’t go into Chipotle expected world class Mexican cuisine, so please don’t come here expecting that of Indian food.
I usually get the combo’s, I find them to be the best value, not to mention how quick it is. Yes, they have more than the combo’s, but I found that if you frequent this place enough pretty much all the dishes eventually make their way onto the combo selection.
For a $ 5 combo you get rice (your choice of biriyani (think arros con pollo or whatever the «meat» of the day is) or white rice), one selection of entrée, a salad, raita (yogurt sauce), a naan, and dessert. You can’t even get that much food at McDonald’s for $ 5, and I promise you the quality of food here far surpasses McDonald’s. Having a large group over for dinner and don’t feel like cooking? Just call in for catering, they sell very reasonably priced food by the pound and don’t require more than 3 or 4 hours notice.
Someone mentioned the sweets not being very good here. If you enjoy Indian sweets, they’re good here. I have never thought of them as an acquired taste, but perhaps they are. I love them myself and get some every time I come, even if I get the combo which includes dessert. In fact I even stop into Aaoji on my way to the movies to pick up some sweets, MUCH tastier than popcorn and far less expensive (what? It’s the Indian in me, I can’t help it!)!

I don’t recommend this place for dessert, at all. Maybe Indian desserts are an acquired taste, who knows.
I came here after dinner at a local Thai spot, with my mouth all set for Indian after-​dinner treats. The building itself is set on a side road in what looked like Old Town Herndon– very beautiful location.
As soon as I opened the doors the overwhelming smell of syrup (which I later found out was the «curry» smell) hit me like a ton of bricks– it was hard to breathe. Some of their dishes offered set in metal pans, over heaters, behind a glass panel at the front counter (think Chinese short order in a mall)… and all of that food looked like it had been sitting for a while, you know, developed that film over it.
The people running the place didn’t seem too involved with the customers or with greeting people who came in, contrary to the place’s namesake. There were a couple tables seated with groups of 4.
The Beau and I, as stated, came here to try out dessert. The desserts were laid out on this flat table in the back, pretty much a self serve idea. Every other two trays had tongs for which to pick up the desserts with. If you go there for dessert, know that you get your own– they offer clear boxes for you to pick up, fill and they weigh at the counter where you pay.
We made the mistake of grabbing pretty much one of each thing, as they offered at least 15 – 20 different varieties of dessert (I recognised the Cham cham and barfi). I’ve never had Indian dessert food before, so perhaps I went a little crazy for my first time. After paying almost $ 13 for a VERY HEAVY box of sweets, we left, excited to try it all.
We first tried out the round, tan coloured ball (resembling a donut hole)… and were sorely disappointed. It was soggy and watery, not very sweet at all. The rest of the desserts followed suit and tasted the same. Watery, soggy, bland, just not right for dessert food. If you’ve never tried it GO EASY when picking out your desserts (the chocolate barfi was decent)… it gets expensive cos 99% of their desserts offered are weighed down by all the water or syrup in them.
Honestly, there was nothing positive at all about this place.

Aaoji is situated on one of the back streets of Old Town Herndon. I came across the place the other night — then looked it up on Unilocal — and determined that it was an Indian joint that I needed to survey.
So I bopped in for dinner this evening on the way home from work about 6:40 pm-​ish. Ordered the Lamb Vindaloo — spicy, and a side of Naan with Riatta sauce.
Dish came out in short order — while I was waiting, I was watching one of the smallest flat panel TV’s I can remember seeing — it was playing music video after music video of hot Indian babes — always together in some sort of dance troupe — prancing about to some pop music — and always making goo goo eyes at some stud who would come dancing into the video. Every single video was the same theme! Large group of scantily clad Indian babes getting down to some majorly choreographed funkadelic. Bollywood really lacks imagination!
The dish was served with a side of rice — so I dumped the Vindaloo and the rice onto the plate and mixed it all together — very tasty. The lamb was lean and tasty — and the sauce was extremely yummy — BUT not spicy enough. If it doesn’t make me sweat — it taint hot enough. The Naan and Riatta were also tasty.
As I was paying my bill, the gentleman running the place asked how my meal was — I told him I enjoyed it but would have liked the dish to be far spicier. He told me to ask for a spice level of «10» next time. Drools. Can’t wait to come back and experience a curry dish at a 10 spice level!

Most authentic North Indian place in the area — kids love chicken tikka masala, paneer and gulab jamuns. Love the goat dishes… Wish they would create a little bit more of an atmosphere and had not raised their prices from when they opened…

I’ve been here a few times and have been disappointed each time. The currys are bland, the chicken is nasty (huge chunks of fat and gristle mixed in with tough old chicken meat), and the pakoras taste like they are cooked in month old oil.
If that is authentic indian food, I want nothing to do with it…

Aaoji is a sister (assuming smaller) restaurant of Bambay Café. It’s one of those that you never see anything other than Indian, and Hindi is the common language.
Basically, if you are Indian, you would think this is common knowledge, but if you are anything else, white, black, yellow, red, green, blue, you would be surprised of their existence.
There are two reasons to visit the restaurant, one is for the take-​out, the other is the sweets. They make their Indian sweets fresh (either on site or is locally delivered) and there are about 10 – 15 kinds to choose from. Most of their offering the the soggy kind (the ones that are soaked in tons of syrup), and no variety of the flaky or dry ones. Not complaining, but would be nice to have the other ones as well.
Now, the hot bar. They have about 3 – 4 non-​veg and 4 veg dishes, along with white rice or rice with meat.
We usually get the food in the evening, 3 curry + rice + fresh made real naan + salad + sweet –du-​jour + can of soda for 10 bucks. We have never finish a single person portion by one person. I guarantee it will satisfy your stomach and have a smelly breath at the end of the journey.
The curry is top notched, heck even the vegetarian ones. I recommend in particular the lentil curry as a vegetarian selection and the butter chicken as the, well, chicken selection. If you don’t mind goat, they usually have fried rice with goat.
On the board behind the cashier there is a board that shows the price of everything else… my recommendation is to stick with the 3-​scoop-​of-​curry-​on-​rice because it seem more expensive with less variety.
So, Aaoji, please do come it ~

What a surprise inside Herndon!
Aaoji basically means ‘Welcome, please come in’, and this place does make you feel welcomed. Situated in a nice quiet area, the place serves fresh Indian cuisine. It’s not a place where you go out for a planned lunch, but a place where you sit back and enjoy food that tastes just like home.
Prices are cheap, and you take your food to your table. Once you are done eating, do buy some authentic north Indian sweets to eat later.
I was thoroughly impressed, and plan to go back soon with more people.