North Indian Restaurant Panj Tara Opens in Allen; Community Remembers Aishwarya Thatikonda
Allen, Texas, has welcomed a north Indian cuisine offering with the opening of Panj Tara restaurant, bringing dishes such as chicken tikka masala and butter chicken to the city. The update comes alongside the ongoing community memory of Aishwarya Thatikonda, an Indian engineer killed in the May 2023 mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets, a loss that deeply affected the Indian-American community in the Dallas area.
🍛 Panj Tara Brings North Indian Cuisine to Allen's Restaurant Scene
A round-up of business and restaurant updates in Allen, Texas, published by Community Impact on March 6, 2026, highlighted the arrival of north Indian cuisine through a restaurant called Panj Tara. The article, written by Mary Katherine Shapiro, noted that Panj Tara offers a menu that includes chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, shahi paneer, and butter naan, among other dishes, according to the restaurant's website. These are staples of north Indian cooking, bringing flavors familiar to the South Asian diaspora and increasingly enjoyed by a broader dining public in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The article was part of a round-up covering five businesses and restaurants either open or opening soon in Allen. Also featured in the same update was The Melting Pot, a Florida-based fondue dining chain founded in 1975 that operates more than 90 locations across North America and is also opening in Allen. The north Indian cuisine offering from Panj Tara adds to Allen's growing and diverse restaurant landscape, with the city attracting both established national chains and independently operated dining establishments. For Allen's South Asian residents, the availability of familiar north Indian dishes at a local restaurant represents a welcome addition to the community's dining options within the broader Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. [1]
Aishwarya Thatikonda, Indian Engineer from McKinney, Among Eight Killed in Allen Mall Shooting
Aishwarya Thatikonda, an Indian engineer who lived in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, was among the eight people who died in the mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall near Dallas, Texas, on a Saturday in May 2023, as reported by the BBC. According to a family representative cited in the BBC's reporting, she was less than a week away from celebrating her 28th birthday at the time of her death. Thatikonda was at the Allen mall with a friend when the shooting took place; her friend was wounded in the attack. Her LinkedIn profile, as described in the report, showed that she graduated with an undergraduate degree in civil engineering in India in 2018, and then earned a master's degree in construction management from Eastern Michigan University in the United States in 2020. For the two years before her death, she had been working for a Dallas-based contracting firm on a US work visa. Following her death, her family made plans to repatriate her remains to India with the help of the Telugu Association of North America. Seven people were injured in the shooting, some with multiple gunshot wounds. The loss of Thatikonda was mourned by the Indian-American community in the Dallas area and by those who knew her. [4]
Sources: [1] Community Impact · [4] BBC