Tandoor Clay Ovens For Indian and Middle Eastern Restaurants

Gas clay tandoor ovens for Indian, Pakistani, Afghan and Middle Eastern restaurants, caterers and hotel kitchens. We have sold and serviced tandoors from our warehouse in Rahway, New Jersey for over twenty years, and we stock the wear parts — burners, gas safety valves, thermocouples, baffle plates, lava rock and repair clay — rather than ordering them in when something fails.

Choosing a size

A tandoor is sized by how much wall it gives you, because that is what limits how much bread you can have going at once. Buy for your busiest hour, not your average one.

• 32 inch — the size most US Indian restaurants settle on, and the one we sell the most of. Enough wall to keep naan continuous through a dinner rush while skewers cook alongside.
• 30 inch — the same oven a size down. Choose it when the cookline will not take the 32, rather than to save money.
• 34 inch — for high-volume kitchens and banquet operations, where bread and skewers both run flat out.
• 28 inch — a smaller dining room, or a second oven dedicated to bread.
• Catering — built to travel to events and to work outside a fixed kitchen.

If you are between two sizes, the larger one is usually the right call. A tandoor that is keeping up at peak is running comfortably; one that is at its limit is where service backs up.

How a tandoor works

A tandoor does not cook with flame. The burner heats the clay body until the clay itself is the heat source, and food cooks against radiant heat off the wall. That is why naan bakes stuck to the side and why a thin chicken tikka comes off in minutes. It is also why thermal mass and insulation matter more than a burner's rating: a heavy, well-insulated clay body recovers between batches, and a thin one cools every time the mouth opens.

Before you order

A commercial gas tandoor must sit under a Type I commercial exhaust hood in accordance with the International Mechanical Code and NFPA 96, and the gas connection must be made by a licensed installer under NFPA 54. Observe the clearances to combustible material in the manual and in your local code. Tandoors ship by freight only — they are too heavy and too fragile for UPS or FedEx — so book a liftgate if you have no loading dock, and measure your doorways against the crated dimensions before delivery day. Call us if you want help sizing a hood or checking a gas line before you buy.

Certification

Tandoors reached the US market for years as an import category with no gas listing and no sanitation listing, and restaurant owners often discovered it at inspection rather than at purchase. In January 2009 Shaan became the first tandoor oven in the world to earn both ETL certification for gas safety and ETL Sanitation certification. Shaan tandoors carry the ETL Listed Mark to ANSI Z83.11 and the cETL Listed Mark to CAN/CSA-1.8 for gas safety, and the ETL Sanitation Listed Mark to NSF/ANSI 4 — searchable in Intertek's Directory of Listed Products under Tandoori Oven Ltd or Nishi Enterprise Inc. The gas listing answers the fire marshal; the sanitation listing answers the health department.