Allen Desi News — July 16, 2026
🍛 Panj Tara brings north Indian cuisine to Allen
Panj Tara, a north Indian restaurant, is now open in Allen, Texas, offering a menu of classic Indian dishes to the city's growing South Asian community and beyond. The restaurant serves chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, shahi paneer, butter naan, and other north Indian staples, according to its website. Community Impact reported on the opening as part of a March 2026 roundup of five recent business and restaurant updates in Allen, placing it alongside other new commercial arrivals in the city.
Allen sits in Collin County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro and home to a large and professionally established Indian-American community. Over the past decade, the northern DFW suburbs — Allen, Plano, Frisco, McKinney — have seen significant South Asian population growth tied to the region's technology and healthcare employment sectors. Indian restaurants have expanded alongside that growth, and Panj Tara's opening reflects continued demand for quality north Indian cuisine at the local level.
For Indian families in Allen, a neighborhood restaurant offering butter chicken and biryani without a long drive to Plano or Dallas is a practical convenience and a point of community connection. The restaurant's menu covers the north Indian canon that diaspora diners know well, from tikka masala to paneer preparations to freshly baked bread, making it a natural fit for family meals and casual dining occasions.
Allen's dining landscape has diversified substantially in recent years, with the arrival of international cuisines across the city. Panj Tara's opening is part of that broader trend, reflecting a city that is growing not just in population but in the commercial and cultural offerings available to its residents. For the South Asian community in particular, a new local Indian restaurant is both a practical amenity and a signal that the community's presence and preferences are recognized in the city's commercial ecosystem. [1]
Aishwarya Thatikonda, Indian engineer, among those killed in Allen mall shooting
Aishwarya Thatikonda, a 27-year-old Indian engineer who lived in McKinney, Texas, was among the eight people killed in the May 6, 2023, mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall in Allen. The BBC reported on her background in the days following the attack. She had been at the mall with a friend; her friend was wounded in the shooting but survived.
Thatikonda had come to the United States to pursue her education and career. She earned a civil engineering degree in India in 2018, then received a master's degree in construction management from Eastern Michigan University in 2020. At the time of her death, she had been working for a Dallas-based contracting firm for approximately two years on a US work visa. She was 27 years old and was less than a week away from her 28th birthday.
Her family, aided by the Telugu Association of North America, made arrangements to repatriate her remains to India. The Telugu Association's involvement reflected the South Asian community's collective grief over the loss of a young professional who represented a path many in the diaspora recognize: educated in India, graduate school in the United States, building a career in the Dallas area.
The Allen mall shooting killed eight people in total and wounded seven more. Among the other victims were a South Korean-American family — parents Cho Kyu Song and Kang Shin Young and their three-year-old son James Cho, with a six-year-old sibling as the only surviving family member. The attack was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Texas history and shook Allen, a suburban city long known for its safety and family-oriented character.
Aishwarya Thatikonda is remembered by her family and by the Indian-American community in North Texas as a young woman whose life and potential were cut short far too soon. Her name remains part of how the community marks the losses of May 6, 2023. [6]
Sources: [1] Community Impact · [6] BBC