Stop! Don’t eat that garlic naan before dipping it into curry!

Boston - Sitting at Shan-A-Punjab, a 36-seat modern Indian restaurant in Brookline at 1 p.m., Xiangjian Wu, an accountant graduate student at Boston University, gazed at the flat “garlic bread” before him.

Mr. Wu stood up, spooned some chicken tikka masala to his plate, and then returned and grabbed a piece of bread.

“Delicious bread! But it tastes even better with curry,” Mr. Wu said, enjoying his $8 lunch buffet and the surrounding Indian popular songs.

The garlic bread, or “naan,” is a classic Asian food which, with various styles, prevails in Central and South Asia. Here at Shan-A-Punjab, the Indian naan, which looked like a smaller and thinner piece of pizza with inner stuff but not top ingredients, was one of the restaurant’s best sellers.

“It’s just made with wheat flour, oil and some garlic,” said Inder Breet, an Indian native from Punjabi and a server at Shan-A-Punjab. He said naans were made by hand and then baked on clay ovens.

Crispy on the surface but soft inside, naans are not free delicacies that buffet customers can pick as they like.

“One person, one free naan,” Mr. Breet said, printing a carry-out order sheet and then hurrying to direct four customers to their seats. According to the menu, buffet customers have to pay $3.95 for each extra garlic naan.

But the rule is invalid with home delivery or when customers come at dinner time, which starts at 3 p.m., ends at 10 p.m. In both circumstances, no buffet or free naans are served, customers can only make an order with a menu.

On the menu of Shan-A-Punjab, there are 16 kinds of breads, among which nine kinds of naans are listed.

According to the restaurant’s manager, Maneep Singh, the daily sale of naans could reach 240 pieces, which was due to customer volumes.

Kashmir Singh, another server at Shan-A-Punjab said the restaurant served nearly 200 customers a day. He said each group of dinner customers ordered at least one naan.

But he said the garlic naan alone accounted for over 20% of the daily sale.

“We sell garlic naans too much,” Kashmir Singh said, adding that people liked the garlic flavor.

For Manager Singh, tasty naan was not the only reason why Shan-A-Punjab has succeeded. Started in 2013 with a $10, 000 monthly rent, the restaurant continued for more than three years because it “makes modern but not traditional Indian food and uses good but not cheap ingredients.”