So you want to eat at Amaya but lacked the foresight to make a reservation two weeks ago? There is a solution. Show up before six and try for a seat at the bar. Those six precious stools are first-come, first-served, and perhaps luck will smile upon you, as she recently smiled upon me. It was already dark and the rush-hour traffic was thick along Bayview Avenue’s gourmet strip as I pushed open the door of the smart little restaurant. The empty room seemed poised for imminent action, polished and primed, with spirit lamps twink­ling on the linen-covered tables and a faint scent of spice in the air. And before I had finished my first curry martini (vodka and lime juice, muddled curry leaves, raw ginger and a dusting of garam masala), the place was stuffed with people—Leaside and Rosedale loud and jovial at the tables, an Indian family from Burlington beside me at the bar (“We’ve eaten everywhere, and this is the best naan we’ve found”), and two more couples perched on the windowsill, wishing we’d all eat more quickly. That night, the 40-seat restaurant served 115. Toronto has embraced Amaya’s “modern Indian” ethos with rare passion.

And it’s not just Amaya. All around town, it seems, our local version of the Indian restaurant, once trapped inside the tired old curry house template, is suddenly bursting free of cliché. Some places have ramped up service and ambience; others are pulling the cuisine in new and exciting directions. The one thing they all have in common is a wish to attract a well-heeled clientele from outside the South Asian community. Amaya does that in spades, with fresh, textured, contemporary cooking. Which is funny, considering that two years ago at Mantra (same owner, same chefs, pretty much the same menu), you couldn’t give it away. Located downtown, on Elm Street, the restaurant died after 18 months of customer-free evenings.

“It wasn’t about timing so much as location,” explains Hemant Bhagwani, Amaya’s co-owner. “The tourists didn’t come, and the lunchtime office crowd wanted a buffet. We failed miserably.” Bhagwani wasn’t used to failure. He left India in his teens for hotel school in Switzerland, then business school in Australia, and opened his first restaurant in Sydney when he was just 22 years old. In Dubai, he created international restaurants for glamorous hotels until he grew bored of working for others. He came to Canada in 2000, working as the sommelier at 360, then starting up a Hakka Chinese restaurant called Chor Bazaar in Brampton. He successfully opened Kama Sutra on Bayview in 2004, then sold it when someone offered a price he couldn’t turn down. “I knew I wanted to come back to Bayview one day.” His business partner and co-host, Derek Valleau, was ready for a place of his own after five years as general manager and sommelier at Crush.

Neither Bhagwani nor Valleau is in the house tonight. They’re both frantically driving around the neighbourhood, delivering tubs of food from Amaya Express, the takeout and home delivery business they opened down the street soon after Amaya’s debut last June. Offering similar fare, it too is an unexpected runaway success.

I’d never heard of an Indian restaurant owned by two sommeliers, but it explains why the wines on Amaya’s list match the cooking so beautifully. Oremus furmint, for example, a dry Hungarian white, is perfect with a bowl of julienned okra fried as crisply as frites and dusted with powdered mango. It’s equally good with murgh satrangi, moist chunks of chicken breast smothered in a vegetable brunoise with a slow-building green chili heat. And my neighbours at the bar are right: the breads are indeed exceptional, thanks to Brij Lal, a talented tandoor cook Bhagwani met in India and brought to Toronto. (They are even better at Amaya Express, where the kitchen has a charcoal-fired tandoor instead of the gas-fired version they have here.) Fresh textures, easy on the cream and ghee, quality ingredients, more items cooked à la minute than slowly braised—this isn’t a new cuisine, it’s how Indian families cook at home. We just aren’t used to it in our restaurants.

For decades, Toronto has been stuck in the rut of an old-fashioned, cheap and not particularly cheerful Indian restaurant scene. We have some good regional places in the western suburbs, but those of us who live in the city are restricted to a less interesting style of curry house. You know the places I mean. They sprang up all over the world in the late 20th century, opened by immigrants with no restaurant experience as a way of creating work for the whole family. They borrowed the generic menu that had first evolved in England 50 years ago—unrelated curries from all over the subcontinent with a bunch of northern Indian street food as appetizers. Ingredients were the cheapest available; spicing was as crude as the taste of the lager louts who called out for satanically hot vindaloo.

Elsewhere in the world, this paradigm has evolved into something more interesting. Amaya in London, England (no connec­tion to the Bayview restaurant), has earned a Michelin star for its imaginative cuisine and swish service; so have three other Indian restaurants there—Benares, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia and Tamarind. Cinnamon Club is just as smart and almost as expensive. Danny Meyer’s Tabla in New York applies the Indian spice palette to North American cooking. In Vancouver, Vikram Vij has carved out an enviable reputation as Canada’s best-known pioneer of modern Indian.