Nirvana Bistro & Bar

Meh. Over priced and not very tasty. My chicken was pink and flavorless. The food was brought out several minutes apart and drinks took forever. The food wasn’t bad, just not very good and over priced.

Okay, this place has one of the best vegetarian burgers I’ve had. Made from scratch in house.

definely dont go to nirvana if you are a vegan and want a delicious satisfying meal. I used to LOVE this place when they were an indian restaurant. there used to be a full and fabulous vegan menu, but no more.
went there with a friend after they changed the menu. I really wanted to like the new menu as much as I had loved the old one. we ordered the only two vegan items on the menu, neither of which were inexpensive. both items were just barely ok, bland and boring, and not even close to enough food. looked like they were trying for the upscale minimalist plate look. we both left hungry and went to eat somewhere else afterward. blech. definitely will not be going back.

I came here on my birthday, it was raining all day, and this was a nice reprieve from that. I enjoyed the fish and chips and it was super awesome! The décor is relaxed and everything is nice to look at. I loved how they served the checks, in old books that they hollowed out in the middle a place to put the stuff when they drop off the check (I’ve never seen another place do anything like this).
I even thought the bathroom was amazing. If you ever get the chance to go to Vashon Island, be sure to eat here!

This place has its problems but the folks who own it are lovely, community minded people. Their manager is smart and thoughtful, too. The bar is the high point with great bartenders and an inventive bar menu. Try the Old Vashoned. Excellent!

Wow. I was on a motorcycle ride with friends and needed to get food. After walking up and down the main strip and not feeling the bar or shack food places, we found this gem. And, I am glad we did.
The food here is amazing with flavor! I highly recommend The Weary Traveler burger. My group was there for the lunch menu and everyone was ecstatic about their food, handing their meals around for everyone to taste. Their libations were just as tasty. Desert wasn’t quite up to the same ‘holy crap’ level, but still very pleasant and satisfying.

Bleh. A-​board outside reads Modern Cuisine, something about being the «Best in the Northwest» perhaps or similar. Yeah, RIGHT!
Modern, no. Diner, yes. Reuben was 15 $ (which is absurd) and I’m assuming, given the quality, everything was from some discount wholesaler. Bread was dry, sandwich had little meat. Nothing was good. Salad was not dressed or topped with anything. Just spring mix out of a bag. No chopped vegetables, croutons or parmesan.
Horrible presentation and the restaurant (like another review states) is filled with Ikea, but not in a good way. Like when you open the magazine and everything looks adorable, but this was anything but cute. It was all ridiculous. Curtains were wrinkled, tables were chipped. Place smelled like mop water. Seriously, gross.
For the price, this place should be A LOT BETTER!
Also, if there is party of six or more, the server should know to bring separate checks or at least ask. Even the most basic POS system will accommodate this. We spent 15 minutes or more just trying to figure out what we owed and get the hell out of there. Being in the industry, knowing what your table prefers, BY ASKING, always brings kudos. Don’t just drop of the check and leave it to us. It’s your job.
Also, its much more effective to have a coffee pot or thermos. It wastes A LOT of time to take someone’s coffee cup away and refill it back at the server station. Seriously, backwards.
EFFICIENCY AND QUALITY are key in this industry.

Holy amazeballs this place is spectacular. NOTE: IT IS NO LONGER INDIAN FOOD. It is American food.
The table of four of us were all passing our food around to one another. I’ve never had a burger so good that it needed to be passed around an entire table, and in this instance we had two — The Weary Trader and Classic. Great salad, not too dressed up. Less amazeballs but still good were the mini ribs and chicken wings. Dessert was grand, mostly, though the lava cake was pointedly sparing on the lava.
Justin was a great server, personable and good natured. He accepted our praise and excited constructive criticisms kindly. I ordered a bitters and soda, told him he could be creative, he was. I hated it, but rather than complain I asked him what bitters he’d used, which he responded to by bringing the bottles so I could see them. When he realized I’d asked because there was definitely one in there I didn’t like, he quietly made me another.
The place is spacious, atmosphere is beautiful, and I want that pump organ. Seriously. Don’t even think about it. It’s mine.

Went back to Nirvana this weekend to find there is a new chef there. While the food was fine before, it sometimes seemed the chef was trying his darndest to come up with the most avant garde things he could think of. Blow-​torched Caesar salad? Really doesn’t even sound good to me. We stopped going for a while because it seemed the experimental element of the cuisine was becoming more important than the food tasting good.
In any case, I was pleased to see that the new menu has more small plate options. I really prefer and enjoy ordering 2 or 3 small items rather than concentrating on one taste for an entire meal. The wine prices seemed to have been lowered a bit as well. Nirvana also now serves breakfast on Saturday and Sunday. I think the new chef is off to a great start for sure! For example, the charcuterie plate was prepared with all locally-​sourced cheeses, sausages and other items and was very good.
My only quibble at this point is service in the bar can be interminably slow depending on who is working. The bartender who served us during dinner was great but when we returned for dessert after walking around the Strawberry Festival for a while, we were given dessert menus by a different bartender who made sure to let us know how swamped he was. Apparently he was so swamped that he couldn’t return to take our order. I really was looking forward to the white chocolate raspberry brownie with raspberry sorbet, but I hate feeling like one big inconvenience so we left.
The owners are lovely — they seem very earnest about making a go of the restaurant and bend over backwards to accommodate requests, etc.

We were visiting Vashon Island for the afternoon and needed a place for an early dinner. We walked up and down the main street looking at all the menus and settled on Nirvana. We are very happy we did. We had an incredible burger — very different and tasty. The fish and chips were not too bready and the sauce was home made — really good. The fish tacos were also great. And we had an appetizer that highlighted local meet, cheese and vegetables from local farms. And the waiter couldn’t have been more pleasant. The indian restaurant of the old days is no longer here in any way. Completely new place, very nice inside and great food. A real find.

It wasn’t long ago that a place like Nirvana would have felt out of place on Vashon, but then the Dairy Queen closed and the Hardware Store (restaurant) opened and the way was paved for new venues offering much better ambiance, food, and drinks. To me, Nirvana is a welcome addition to Vashon’s once lazy and boring restaurant scene (if you can call it a scene). If this place were in Seattle I could quibble a bit more, but Nirvana brings such a solid, diverse menu and dining experience to the island that it’s hard to criticize. The menu has something for everyone, the flavors and preparation are good, and the service is friendly. It also has a very nice little bar. All in all, if you’re looking for a nice meal out on Vashon Island, Nirvana is worth checking out.

The atmosphere was pleasant and the bartender was very nice but the drinks just were not good. I appreciate what this spot is attempting and feel the potential is there but the drinks just missed their mark. I felt like I was drinking muddled wood chips through a straw.
Lastly, this is not a criticism but a suggestion… If Nirvana was ¹⁄₅^th the size you could get a cool little cocktail scene going. Cheers.
–Tacoma Pessimist

After waiting six months to visit the latest incarnation of an «Indian» restaurant in this location we were very pleasantly surprised to learn it isn’t Indian Cuisine in the slightest. Don’t get me wrong, I love Indian food but the last two businesses that were here figuratively and literally left a bad taste in our mouth.
We went for the all you can eat Sunday brunch buffet. Delicious and homemade biscuits and gravy, cheese blintzes, sausage, bacon, even bangers and mashes! along with fresh fruit, Roaseterie coffee, and a perfect mimosa. All for under $ 65 for the three of us.
Checked out the dinner menu and it looks enticing.
We’ll be back to check it out… and soon.

I have been to the old Nirvana and now the new, reincarnated Nirvana and I must say that this is the best they’ve been yet. I come to Seattle/​Vashon for work quite often and I absolutely have to eat at this place every time!
The owners are friendly and always come over to say hello. I love that they personally check in with their patrons and seem to care a great deal about the service they provide.
The chef is wonderful and I’ve heard he has won awards for his exceptional cooking– No surprise there! Every dish is a work of art. The portions are great and this place is wonderful for a family outing or a date night.
Be sure to try their new drinks menu as well. They have re-​done the bar and there are usually people in there watching sports on the TV’s. Great touch for us football fans!

I can’t imagine anyone returning for a second meal…
If you would like to have an expensive, poor quality, bad-​tasting meal with poor service, then this place is for you. If not, basically any other place on Vashon Island is better (May’s Kitchen being easily the best, Snapdragon is also good).
This place has recently been «reincarnated» into a pretentious, soul-​less, expensive «modern cuisine» restaurant. I guess that’s what «Libations» means?
The food was so bad (and expensive), that I nearly got sick. No, not sick as in food poisoning, but the flu. I had rubbery chicken with roasted potatoes that were mush like they had been cooked several days earlier and microwaved before serving it. The whole dish is served sizzling, for no apparent reason, and smoke filled the room and burned the food. The menu looks like its been put together by searching on Google for 20 minutes.
The service was equally as bad. Pretentious, non-​existent service.

Nope!
I am a big supporter of local businesses but this place just wasn’t very good. First, they were out of everything, a classic dying restaurant. No corned beef for the Rubin, no blue cheese for the salad, no heat for the soup, wilted greens for the salad. Soggy bread on the bottom of the turkey Rubin. OK fries, overpriced wine.
No way I’d go back for a $ 50 lunch that included a single entrée, a bowl of soup, a single glass of wine, no dessert and a microscopic wilted salad.
Decent waiter though.
But pass on this one.

I had a five-​star rating on this one before the reopening. Their original chef was more authentic Indian than you will find in the indian-​populated bellevue. All my friends — a russian girl, two north indians, two south indians, one vegetarian, and one obnoxiously picky person — all of them were satisfied.
I went there again later, and a new chef had been brought in. He had some new-​age experimental cuisine. Wasn’t horrible exactly, but my sister was disappointed. We did give him feedback and he was very gallant in listening to her go on and on with her suggestions.
To find Indian food on Vashon is a stretch in itself, and to have found that guy was like hitting Gold! I hope the new chef has got his act together, and makes me upgrade back to a full five stars!

I wish that Nirvana could rate more than one star but the sad state of affairs in this restaurant just doesn’t cut it.
First of all they just reopened after a remodel with a new menu. Just signifying that it is the day after reopening night. The new menu is ambitious but the décor trendy and dark.
Needless to say we entered with high hopes.
They were out of one of their 6 or so wines and had no suitable alternative. Three different cocktails were ordered and took maybe 30 minutes to get to our table.
We ordered the caesar salad, the vegetable stir fry, the clams and the Mac and cheese. These also took a long time to reach our table. It was almost nine o’clock as well, not even busy so there was no logical explaination for the wait.
The food was a joke. The caesar salad is described in the menu as being «served tableside» they mean that shoved into a wine glass is a very small salad that your waiter will dump onto a plate for you. No actual tableside preparation, they just dump it on a plate in front of you.
The mac and cheese is runny and the pigs stomach they put in it is not the right choice. It mentions that it is served with «broccolini» which is one overly steamed stem of wilted green. Its actually depressing.
The clams were steamed well but the sauce was disgusting. All four of us tried a little and promptly reached for our (luke warm) water. There were five whole cloves of garlic in the sauce which was odd since the sauce had no garlic taste. The cloves were also rock hard which was puzzling.
Have you ever had a stir fry TV dinner by healthy choice? That’s what the stir fry was exactly like. Not a single defining characteristic. Utterly bland.
The three cocktails ordered were of differing qualities. The Margarita was disgusting (also passed around and deemed undrinkable by all) the champagne and gin cocktail refreshing and the fruity jolly rancher too sugary.
I had been to Nirvana before and actually enjoyed it. After the remodel I’ve got to say, they need seriously help.

From what I know about reincarnation, it seems how you do in your present life determines what you will be reincarnated as in the next life. If you have a good life now, it was because you were good in your previous life. If you’re good now, you will be even better in the next life. That may be oversimplifying it, or it may be plain ignorance, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
As an Indian restaurant, Nirvana was really good. I’ll admit, I hadn’t had much Indian food before I ate theirs, but I had enough to know that what I was eating was some good, good stuff. It was a great menu with a little bit of everything and I truly looked forward to the times I would eat there. A part of me really misses it, but I know that sometimes change is for the best.
Especially when you live on a small island.
In a location where who knows how many restaurants have popped up and closed their doors, only to fade from memory slightly faster than they were even open, this is a tough place to run a restaurant. But Rohit and Shivali know what they are doing, and they know when to mix things up.
If the restaurant biz is «survival of the fittest», we may very well be looking at our own Bear Grylls — and they are going to give every other restaurant on this rock a run for their money. If I were one of the «competition», I would be very, very scared.
My wife and I were invited to join them on the opening night after their remodel/​reincarnation where the new look, new bar, and new menu were debuted. From the moment you walk in the door, the atmosphere perfectly captures the ambiance of the historic building. The hard wood floors, high ceilings, and exposed duct work are only part of it. The light fixtures, pictures on the wall, and the new bar go a long way to really set the stage for what’s about to come.
The wait staff and servers are very friendly and conscientious about their work. Small details that I won’t waste time explaining reveal that if they are this intentional about even the smallest details, then that philosophy most likely trickles up to the bigger ones.
The menu has a great assortment of different dishes within a great price range. I am convinced that the only person who wouldn’t find something to eat on this menu probably doesn’t like food to begin with.
I’ll be honest, I wish there were more than just two Indian dishes on there, but I understand that you can only have so much, and in the name of cultural diversity of the cuisine, it makes sense.
We ordered the Mac and Cheese Extreme for the kids (four cheeses, applewood smoked pork belly, and roasted broccolini). My wife had the Kobe Beef Burger (1/​3lb of waygu beef, Jack Daniels carmelized onions, tillamook smoked cheddar cheese, pub roll, chipotle mayo, and rosemary sea salt fries), and I had the Tandoori Chicken.
As the menu states, «Our food is made from scratch, to order, and organic when possible. Good food takes time and lots of love so relax, indulge, and enjoy!» This isn’t fast food folks, so if you’re in a hurry you should probably just keep going to the ferry and grab some crap on the mainland. Otherwise, set your watches to island time and learn to be still. It doesn’t take an obscenely long amount of time for the food — in fact, I don’t think it takes much longer than any other sit-​down restaurant — but it is a great opportunity to try one of their specialty cocktails. My wife went for the «Rohito» — a rose-​infused mojito, named after the patriarch of the restaurant, Rohit. (There is also a cocktail named for Shivali which sounds really good too)
Once the food came, it was delivered piping hot so you know it wasn’t just sitting under a heat lamp in the back kitchen waiting for someone to deliver it. The presentation was very tasteful and the portions were quite large. A great show that what you are about to eat is truly special.
Of course I had to try a little bit of everyone’s.
The mac and cheese was amazing — hands down the best I’ve ever had. Truly a gourmet treat. The only suggestion I would give was around the pieces of pork belly. They are quite large (which normally I would like) and chewy, so I think trimming the fat off the edges and perhaps making them smaller would be nice. Other than that, the dish itself was exquisite. Did I just use the word «exquisite» to define mac and cheese? Yes. Yes I did!
My wife’s burger was one of the best burgers I’ve ever had. The bun was amazing and the hamburger was very tender and cooked to perfection. Amazing. Very well a contender for the best burger on the island.
My tandoori chicken was also extremely delicious and a huge portion that I couldn’t finish, but was welcomed as leftovers the next day.
All in all, Nirvana just got a surge of energy that could very well propel them to the spot as the top restaurant on Vashon. Do yourself a favor and check them out!

The breakfast wasn’t bad, not the best I’ve had, and the prices were «okay.» I’ve come to expect paying a few bucks extra on Vashon Island, if you don’t, don’t come here.
The complaint I have, is with one young busser, with longer dark hair, who I could hear talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone, than bitching to our waiter.
My girlfriend and I were the first ever to have breakfast served by their cooks as of 9÷22÷12, this morning… that’s what the owner or head chef told us, anyway.
I do give credit to our young waiter, I could tell he was nervous and not that experienced, but he really did seem to care, and tries, I’m sure, after some time, he’ll become an excellent waiter.
When I was a teen, I worked in the food service as a busser, and waiter, I know how it is, and tip my hat off to anybody who does a good job at it…
I do believe they need to work on their breakfast selection, was only 7 or 8 options, if I remember right, all for about 9 to 11 bucks, give or take.
I do like it better than the hardware store almost across the street, that place is a huge rip off. I honestly have no idea why The Hardware Store is such a popular spot!