Every “best of” list claiming to name the beste indiaas restaurant eindhoven has to offer tends to repeat the same three or four assumptions. Some of them are outdated, some were never true to begin with, and a couple only survive because nobody’s bothered to actually check. Before trusting the next ranking that shows up in a search, it’s worth taking a closer look at where these assumptions come from and whether they hold up.
Myth 1: “Best” Means the Spiciest Menu
A lot of ranking criteria quietly assume that heat level is the measure of authenticity, as if a restaurant serving milder regional dishes is somehow less “real” than one that pushes chilli count for its own sake. Dhol & Soul’s own positioning pushes back on this directly, describing their mission as putting “the real India” on the plate instead of a flattened, one-note version of it.
Regional Indian food varies by technique, souring agent, and spice blend far more than by raw heat. A Bengali fish curry built on mustard oil and a Mangalorean prawn curry built on coconut and red chilli can sit at similar spice levels and still taste like they come from entirely different countries. Treating spice level as the deciding factor misses most of what actually makes a dish distinct, and it’s a shortcut a lot of “best of” lists lean on because it’s easy to measure, not because it’s accurate.
Myth 2: Every Indian Restaurant in the City Serves the Same Menu
This one used to be closer to true than it is now. Dhol & Soul markets itself as Eindhoven’s first Indian restaurant built specifically around regional variety rather than a standard curry-house shortlist, moving beyond the handful of dishes that dominate most Indian menus abroad.
Whether or not it fully lives up to that positioning is something worth judging in person, but the claim itself is a meaningfully different starting point from most competitors in the city. Most menus repeat five or six dishes with minor variations in naming. A menu built around naming actual regions, Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, on the same page is a different proposition entirely, and it changes what a “best of” comparison should even be measuring.
Myth 3: “Authentic” Is Just Marketing Language
“Authentic” gets printed on so many restaurant windows that it’s stopped meaning much on its own. Nearly every Indian restaurant in every European city uses the word somewhere on its signage or menu, which means the word itself carries almost no information anymore.
What’s worth checking instead is whether a menu actually names its regions, or just uses “authentic” as decoration sitting next to a familiar shortlist. Dhol & Soul’s menu structure leans into specificity here, tying dishes to particular Indian states rather than presenting a generic pan-Indian blend under one umbrella term. That’s a more concrete signal than the word “authentic” printed anywhere, and it’s a far easier thing for a diner to verify simply by reading the menu closely before ordering.
Myth 4: You Need to Already Know Indian Food Well to Order Confidently
This assumption keeps a lot of first-time visitors away from restaurants like this one, and it’s probably the most damaging myth on this list simply because it stops people from walking in at all.
In practice, most regional-focused kitchens expect to explain the menu, not assume familiarity with it. If a restaurant’s whole premise is introducing dishes people haven’t tried before, staff being able to walk a table through unfamiliar names isn’t optional, it’s part of the actual experience being sold. Asking questions at the table shouldn’t feel like admitting ignorance. It’s closer to the entire point of a menu built this way.
Myth 5: Reservations Don’t Matter for a Weeknight Dinner
Smaller regional Indian restaurants tend to run limited seating compared to larger, more generic curry houses, and weeknights aren’t automatically quiet anymore once a place builds a following.
Dhol & Soul takes bookings through an online reservation widget, with WhatsApp available for anyone who’d rather ask a quick question before committing to a table. Walking in without checking isn’t a reliable plan on a Friday or Saturday, and increasingly it isn’t a safe assumption midweek either. A two-minute booking avoids the alternative, which is showing up and being told to come back later.
So What Actually Makes a Restaurant “Best” in This Category?
Probably not spice level, and probably not how many times “authentic” appears on the menu. The more useful markers are whether dishes are tied to real regions instead of a vague blend, whether the kitchen is willing to explain unfamiliar names rather than hide behind them, and whether vegetarian dishes get the same care as everything else on the menu rather than being treated as an afterthought.
Judged against that list rather than the usual shortcuts most rankings rely on, Dhol & Soul’s positioning holds up better than most of the generic “best of” write-ups floating around online. That’s not the same as saying every dish will land for every diner. It simply means the criteria most lists use to decide “best” are worth questioning before accepting any ranking at face value.
Visiting to Judge for Yourself
Dhol & Soul is located at Willemstraat 61, Eindhoven, open daily from 4:30pm to 10pm. Reservations run through their online booking widget, and questions before booking can go straight to WhatsApp rather than waiting on a call.
For a fuller sense of the thinking behind the menu before visiting, it’s worth reading through what the restaurant says about its own approach rather than taking any single “best of” list at face value, this one included. At the end of the day, no blog post, this one or any other, should be the deciding factor. The only real way to settle whether a place deserves the “best” label is to sit down and order something you’ve never tried before.
