Bombay Grill Offers Fast Food With a Touch of Sophistication
The Bombay Grill is as simple as can be. It’s in a busy Santa Monica Boulevard mall, and you eat fast-food style from plastic containers and foam cups. But the food, which mostly represents Northern India, is sophisticated and prepared with a concern for quality and freshness.
There is wonderful sag , for instance, in which the pureed spinach, combined with cubes of homemade Indian cheese, is spiced to surprising intensity. Chicken tikka masala consists of tandoor-grilled chicken chunks afloat in a brilliant sauce that is concocted to order, not ladled from a jar. A lushly flavored lamb curry is one of the most popular items, deservedly so.
It’s because of the tandoor-grilled meats that the restaurant is called a grill. The kitchen is in full view, so you can watch chef-owner B. Sada Siva Rao deftly manipulate big skewers of chicken and lamb, colored a zesty orange from their marinade. His chicken roll is a clever concept. It’s a sort of Indian tostada, with tandoor-baked naan bread as the base. The naan is topped with lettuce, cucumber, tomato and a liberal amount of chicken tikka . Spicy-sweet green chutney and cooling yogurt raita come on the side. It all adds up to a filling lunch for a modest $4.45.
Why the restaurant is named after Bombay is hard to guess. Rao and his wife, Vani, are not from that west-coast metropolis but from Vijayawada in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Recently, Rao has started to serve the South Indian dosa , a large “pancake” made from a slightly sour fermented rice and lentil batter. When filled with spiced turmeric-colored potatoes, it’s called a masala dosa . Rao also makes an onion dosa , but I liked the potato ones better. The potatoes themselves are so good I could eat a plateful without the pancake wrapper.
I was enthralled by the rava dosa , a lacy net of batter sprinkled with toasty cumin seeds and diced vegetables. Rava is the Hindi word for semolina. All of the dosas come with sambar , a thick lentil soup, for dipping. And Rao may pop an idli --soft, steamed white cakes, like the dosas , made from fermented batter--into the sambar.
The restaurant’s combination plates offer an amazing assortment of food. The tandoori chicken plate, for example, includes four pieces of succulent chicken, a large helping of rice, lentils, a vegetable, raita and naan for just $4.99. The lamb curry combination is $6.50.
When the restaurant opened, Rao offered several desserts. Unfortunately, the demand was so slight that he dropped them. Nevertheless, if you ask, he might just have something sweet around. One time, Rao had a marvelous batch of doodh halwa , a light milk custard splashily colored with saffron and sprinkled with cardamom and pistachios. On another visit, when I had time to wait, he put together a luxurious rice pudding, bristling with costly saffron threads. Beverages include milky tea generously seasoned with cardamom. But note: You may see a glass of water that contains a whole lemon and a dash of turmeric on the counter. This is not a drink; it’s an Indian air freshener.
Bombay Grill, 7306 W. Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles . (213) 874-3366. Open daily from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. American Express accepted. Catering and take-out available. Parking available.