Takeaway usually gets treated as a single event. You order, you eat, it is gone. But Indian food is unusually suited to being ordered once and eaten across several days, and most people never take advantage of it because they order exactly enough for tonight.
A bit of planning changes that. The right indian takeaway amsterdam order can cover dinner tonight, lunch tomorrow, and a second dinner after that, often for less effort and less money than ordering three separate times. Here is how the arithmetic works.
Why Indian food does this better than most
Two reasons, and both come down to how the food is cooked.
The first is that a lot of Indian cooking is slow cooking. Dishes built over hours, in liquid, with spices worked deep into the base. That kind of food does not degrade in the fridge the way delicate, freshly assembled food does. It holds, and in several cases it improves.
The second is that the food is designed to be portioned flexibly. A gravy and some rice is dinner tonight; the same gravy with fresh bread is lunch tomorrow; the last of it folded through a fresh batch of rice is a third meal. Nothing is locked into a single serving the way a plated European main is.
The dishes to build the batch around
Not everything qualifies. The dishes that reward batch ordering are the slow cooked, liquid based ones, and the Rasoi menu has plenty.
Dal Makhni at 15,50 is the anchor. Black lentils and kidney beans slow cooked with butter and cream, and it is genuinely better on day two once the spices have settled further into the beans. Order it one size larger than tonight needs and you have bought two meals.
Butter Chicken at 23,50 and Malai Kofta at 19,25 both hold well, because the sauce is the dish and reduced gravies keep their character in the fridge. Chicken Dum Biryani at 22,50 reheats better than almost anything, since it was cooked sealed in a pot to begin with and carries its own moisture.
These are the dishes you scale up. They are working for you for three days, not one evening.
What to keep for tonight only
The other half of a smart order is the stuff you eat immediately and do not try to stretch.
Anything from the tandoor. Afghani Chicken Tikka at 13,50, the various kebabs, the signature Tandoori Pomfret at 13,95. These are dry, grilled dishes whose texture is the point, and they neither travel nor reheat well. Order one for tonight, eat it tonight, and do not plan around it.
The same goes for breads. Roomali Roti at 6,50 and the stuffed naans are a now food. Plain Butter Roti at 3,75 reheats acceptably if you must, but fresh is where bread lives.
So the structure is a large batch of the slow cooked dishes plus a small amount of something fresh and grilled for the first night only.
A worked example
Say you order a Dal Makhni one size up, a Chicken Dum Biryani, one Afghani Chicken Tikka and two plain breads.
Tonight you eat the tikka, some of the dal, a portion of the biryani and the bread. That is a proper dinner with a grilled element while it is still crisp.
Tomorrow the remaining dal becomes lunch with rice, or folded into the leftover biryani. The day after, whatever biryani is left is a quick dinner that reheats in minutes and tastes, if anything, more settled than it did on night one.
One order, three meals, and only the tikka was time sensitive.
The family version
If you are feeding children across the week, the kids section helps here too.
Dal Tadka and Rice at 7,95 and Chicken Curry and Rice at 8,95 are sized for children and both reheat cleanly, which makes them useful to have in the fridge for a midweek evening when nobody wants to cook. Ordering a couple of these alongside the adult batch gives you ready meals for the children as well.
A Raita at 4,50 keeps for a day or two and makes any reheated spiced dish friendlier for a hesitant eater.
Making the order worth the trip
One practical note on how you get the food.
Collection gives you the freshest version of the tandoor items, which matters for the one dish you are eating tonight. If you are near enough, that is the better route, and for anyone searching for an indian takeaway close to me in the south of the city, Maasstraat is a short run from both Zuidas and De Pijp.
For a larger batch order, delivery through the restaurant’s own site reaches further than the apps do, which is useful when you are deliberately ordering big to cover several days.
The shift in how you think about it
The change is small but it adds up. Instead of ordering exactly enough for one meal and doing it three times across a week, you order once, deliberately large on the dishes that keep, and you have eaten well for three days.
It costs less than three separate orders, it saves two evenings of deciding what to eat, and with Indian food specifically, the leftovers are often the best part. Most cuisines you tolerate reheated. This one you look forward to.