Butter chicken, naan bread and beef vindaloo. They're all dishes we've become accustomed to seeing on an Indian restaurant menu.
So why does this new Indian restaurant not have any of these or other favourite Punjabi dishes?
Well, it's quite simple - Rasam, on Childers Street, is a South Indian restaurant, not a North Indian one.
"One of the things most people know is chicken tikka, or paneer tikka, vindaloo, that kind of food," co-owner Ranga Tiruman says.
"We don't do that kind of food. There is a huge difference between the type of spices North India uses and the type of spices South India uses.
"North Indian food is rich in terms of creams and tomatoes and in South India, a lot of things are a bit mellowed down, in terms of fat and there's not much oil. I don't want to make any comparisons, but South Indian food is very palatable to your stomach.
"And also South Indian food, especially what we do, 90 per cent of our food is gluten-free. North India is wheat-based, South India is rice-based. So if you look at our menu, there are only two, three items which are wheat-based, most of them are gluten-free."
The restaurant is really a result of the owners - Tiruman and his wife Aparna Rangarajan as well as Uday Vasiraju and his wife Gayathri Srinivasan - seeing a need that they wanted to fill.
They still all have nine-to-five jobs, with Tiruman and Vasiraju almost directly opposite the restaurant at the Department of Education. The pair's families have been friends for three decades, with their children growing up together.
But with their children now grown, they decided they wanted to try their hands at something else. Having cooked for catering and voluntary services before, the restaurant was the next logical step.
"One of the advantages, I would say, is for us we are not relying entirely on the food business, because we all have our own IT jobs and everyone's working in other professions," Tiruman says.
"For us, this is more of a passion, and that is what keeps us doing everything fresh, without compromising anything. Because if we were just doing good business, then we would have to make some compromises because our livelihood depends on it."
Rasam has only been open for three months and has already been bringing in crowds searching for South Indian food - something which is harder to find in the capital than its northern counterpart. Particularly when it comes to vegetarian South Indian food.
"A lot of Indians will not go and eat somewhere where they serve meat. So that's why we want to start like a vegetarian-only place, where we don't even have egg in this place," Tiruman says.
But one of the largest draw cards is those wanting to enjoy a traditional thali - with people often leaving a positive review on post-it notes stuck to the display cabinet.
The Saturday lunch offering has at least 14 different food offerings, all laid out as a feast.
"It's usually the traditional lunch served in India on a banana leaf," Tiruman says.
"We are not able to get the full banana leaves here in Canberra, but we do something similar, where we provide all the items, we just don't provide the banana leaf. And we have a lot of people coming in and enjoying the family atmosphere."
