RESTAURANT REVIEW : Madhu’s: Vegetarian Doesn’t Mean Austere

Many people think vegetarians are people who eat their vegetables and therefore take in mass quantities of vitamins. Indian vegetarians, though, seem mostly to eat grain. Nothing entirely wrong in that, of course. Every civilization has been based on grain, precisely because grains are so nutritious.

However, they haven’t got much but B vitamins in them. Add a heavy use of butterfat, and you get a vegetarian cuisine that is not at all like eating your vegetables. Eating Indian vegetarian food is like living sinfully on buttered rice and bread pudding, only with a lentil thrown in here and there.

Some years ago, the most sinful and delicious Indian vegetarian place in Los Angeles was Dasa Prakash, run by a family that owns a restaurant chain in India. It disappeared after a while, but recently Madhu’s Dasa Prakash opened in Cerritos, in what seems to be the middle of a jet-setting Indian population.

Madhu’s is fairly plain, decorated mostly with fabrics printed with religious art and texts in the handsome alphabet of the Telugu language. It has a surprisingly large menu, though.

Surprising until you realize that it’s nearly all variations on a couple of ideas: pancakes (sometimes made from lentils), fritters and butter-rich steamed rice or cream of wheat, doctored if you wish with a couple of sauces. There’s usually a snappy lentil sauce called sambar , and always a couple of chutneys: sweetened tomato, faintly toasty coconut and lentil/cilantro with a dash of hot pepper.

That’s about it. That’s what there is, and it’s easy to take, particularly since Madhu’s, unlike some other Indian vegetarian places, has no objection to onions. For instance the masala dosai , a large thin crepe stuffed with potato, is richly flavored with buttery fried onions. The crepe, incidentally, is not as crisp as in other Indian restaurants’ masala dosais , but they’ll make it crisp if you ask for a “paper” masala dosai .

What else? Vadais are dense, fried, doughnut-shaped lentil balls, except that masala vadai is more like a chewy-crunchy falafel. Bondas are spherical fried things. Mangalore bonda is slightly puffy fried semolina balls mixed with some sliced hot pepper, potato bonda a surprisingly elegant deep-fried golf ball of mashed potato. Pakodas and bajjias are crispy fritters of onions, lentils or cashews in lentil or wheat batter.

Then there are grain entrees ceremoniously unmolded at your table from little stainless-steel pots. Uppuma is cream of wheat mixed with onions, green chiles and the odd lentil, and lots of butter.

My favorite is the very richest and most indefensible dish of all, with the daunting name bisi bele huli anna : It’s a rich, stewy thing of rice with some lentils in it, drowning in butter and cardamom. My least favorite is cabbage pathral , a chewy and slightly scorched lentil pancake with cabbage in it.

Madhu’s Dasa Prakash has probably gotten off to a faster start than the management expected. The one waiter can scarcely keep up with the orders and some items on the menu are not exactly available yet, particularly in the dessert section.

And though they always have fresh-made limeade, they’ve never had fresh orange juice that I’ve seen. And we need that orange juice, for our vitamins.

Madhu’s Dasa Prakash, 11321 E. 183rd St., Cerritos; (213) 924-0879. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Beer and wine. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$16.