Tandoori describes Indian food — usually chicken, lamb, or flatbread — cooked in a tandoor, a deep clay oven that gets extremely hot. The meat is first left sitting in yogurt mixed with spices, often for hours, and then cooked fast against the hot clay wall, so the outside gets a little charred while the inside stays soft. Classic tandoori chicken comes out red or orange on the outside; that colour is from spices and, honestly, often from food colouring too, not from the fire. Grammatically it usually sits in front of the noun: tandoori chicken, tandoori prawns, a tandoori oven. It can also be a noun for the dish itself ('we ordered a tandoori') or for the oven, though in Taiwan you will mostly meet it on menus as the adjective. One useful thing to know: because tandoori cooking is dry-heat, a tandoori dish is not a curry — there is no sauce. Learners who assume all Indian restaurant food is 'curry' get surprised when the plate arrives with no gravy on it. And note that naan bread is also tandoori food, even though people think of the word as meaning meat.