THE KAPOORS: A PASSAGE FROM INDIA

“Indian food is incomparable, unsurpassable,” Kapal Dev Kapoor says.

Before us on the table is ample, vivid evidence of the reasonableness of that proposition: little pyramid-shaped samosa pastries, filled with lamb so delicate and finely ground that it’s almost a pate; thick wheels of sliced lotus root in a dense, sourish sauce the color of dark amber; whole green serrano chilis, fiery but full of flavor, in a deep yellow sauce as thick as clotted cream; ivory-hued lentils, braised with long strings of saffron and string-like strips of ginger and garnished with caramelized onions; a firm-textured, rich pilaf of rice with onions, peas, and plump sultanas; miniature chick-pea-flour dumplings in spicy yogurt; flatbread stuffed with pureed cauliflower. . . .

The restaurant is Akbar in Encino, brother to the original Akbar in Marina del Rey. Kapoor is the co-proprietor, with Arvind Patel, of the two establishments--which, incidentally, serve what is probably the best and most varied Indian cuisine in California.

Kapoor is also, though, a 60-year-old lifelong veteran of the Indian restaurant trade--a man who has opened, by his own estimate, more than 30 eating places in his native country (at least some of which he still retains an interest in), and who displays an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history and romance--and business--of Indian food. His late brother, K. D. Kapoor, with whom he worked frequently, was a true pioneer in the field, in fact, as founding partner of the Embassy Restaurant in Delhi in 1949--the first European-style restaurant to serve serious Indian food, Kapoor says--and later of the highly successful Gaylord’s chain. (The Gaylord’s that opened in New York in the early 1970s--L.A. got its Gaylord’s only this year--was the first authentic Indian restaurant in America, Kapoor believes.)

Kapal Kapoor’s Southern California restaurant ventures came about more or less by accident: He came to the United States as a tourist in 1977, and happened to run into Arvind Patel, a former regular customer at one of his restaurants in Baroda. Though his own business was stone quarrying, Patel offered to invest in a restaurant if Kapoor could find one here. He happened upon the year-old-and-rapidly-failing Akbar in the Marina, and made the deal.

(The family traditions continue here, by the way: Kapoor’s son Akhil manages the Marina Akbar, with the assistance of another son, Avinash; and K. D. Kapoor’s son Anil manages the Encino restaurant with Patel’s son Umesh.)

The specialty at Akbar is what Kapoor calls Moghlai cuisine--cooking based on the culinary traditions of India’s Mogul Empire (1526-1803). The very name “Akbar,” in fact, honors that empire’s most famous and enlightened ruler, who, the restaurants’ menus declare, “lived daringly--at the table as well as in battle.” But though the seat of Mogul power was Agra (and later Delhi) in the north of India, Kapoor says, the cuisine of the Mogul court was selective and eclectic, taking the best from many parts of the subcontinent, and even from nearby Persia--much as China’s Mandarin cuisine is a collection of dishes from many regions, not a true regional cooking style itself.

The heart of the Akbar menus (which are identical for now, but will diverge a bit in the future) is a large selection of meat, fish and chicken dishes, and a variety of flatbreads plain and fancy, cooked in the tandoor --a wood-burning, beehive-shaped clay oven that generates intense heat. “Tandoors didn’t exist in restaurants until the late 1940s,” Kapoor notes. “They were communal ovens, outdoors. Each street or neighborhood had one, and everybody shared it. In the Indian climate, it would have been too hot to have one in your own house even if you could have afforded it.”

The tandoor reached Delhi (and eventually the rest of India--not to mention the San Fernando Valley and a number of other unlikely venues) only after the partition of India--which accompanied independence from British rule in 1947--when refugees from the newly created state of West Pakistan (now simply Pakistan) brought their culinary traditions to the city. Within a year or so, an immigrant restaurateur from the so-called Northwest Frontier, one Peshawar Lal, had opened the Khyber Restaurant at Kashmir Gate in Delhi. Around the same time, a former waiter of his opened the Moti Mahal (“Pearl Palace”) nearby--and it was this establishment that really popularized tandoori cooking among the Indian population.

There’s much, much more to Indian cuisine than tandoori cooking, of course--and much, much more, for that matter, than even the Akbar menus can begin to hint at. Kapoor’s eyes positively glow as he talks about other dishes he knows and loves: paper-thin chapatis, wheat-flour crepes whose dough is tossed in the air like pizza, then wrapped around well-seasoned little beef or lamb kebabs (“so tasty that imagination is out”); roasted Japanese eggplant stuffed with a pungent masala of mixed spices; a typical North Indian dish of cornmeal paratha bread with mustard greens in “white butter” (butter with high fat content, as opposed to clarified ghee ); a pomfret (a flat, sole-like fish extremely popular in India), cooked by a chef in Hyderabad so that the bones literally melt inside it. . . .

He talks about dhungar , the North Indian method of “smoking” food by adding charcoal soaked in ghee and dried spices to the cooking pot for 10 minutes or so, or sealing a deep spoon filled with red-hot oil in which garlic or cumin sizzles into the pot--but suspended above the food itself. He hints at ancient cooking methods that he and his superb executive chef, Kashav Dutt Panday, are beginning to introduce at the Akbars--”ways that make the spices open up so much .” (He also stresses that good Indian food needs no pungent condiments: “When the chutney and pickles come out, the chef feels he has failed.”)

“There is so much to Indian cuisine,” Kapoor continues, “that you cannot imagine it. It comes from 1,100 years of the impact of different civilizations--Vedic, Persian, Mogul, British. We could put on our menus chicken prepared a hundred different ways, vegetables made two hundred ways. Do you know that during the Mogul Empire, the cuisine became so specialized that certain chefs cooked only one dish for all their lives, over and over again, perfectly. Then, on their deathbeds, they would pass their secrets on to their son. And if they didn’t have a son, the recipe would be lost.”

Indeed, the loss of Indian culinary tradition is something that worries Kapoor very much. Part of the problem, he admits, is simply that the tradition was largely oral--that there were virtually no Indian cookbooks until modern times.

The other part of the problem, however, is contemporary--and common to many cuisines other than Indian: “The Western system has brought us too many shortcuts,” Kapoor complains. “We are making a hoax of the whole thing. Instead of perfecting our own food system, we are destroying it. The taste is gone, the smell is gone, the pleasure is gone. . . .”

Kapoor hesitates to speak ill of his competitors--at least on the record--but it’s clear that he doesn’t think much of most of the other Indian restaurants in town. (One notable exception: Tandoor in Orange, where both he and his nephew say they have eaten some very good dishes.) “Look,” he says, “L.A. is a town where people have appreciation for these arts that we practice, enjoyment of these tastes. I haven’t come across very many cities in the world like this. I just wish that other Indian restaurants here would give the right food to their customers. The client wants to ‘go to India’ and eat that food when he comes to you--and you come from India and give him the same food he eats here. That is not correct.”

Akbar, 17049 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 905-5129.