RESTAURANT REVIEW : East Indian Tradition Goes West

On the curry-colored wall next to me, a woman’s mouth dribbles blood. Standing over her, in an attitude of triumph, is her savior, a dark-bearded man utterly drenched in blood. Variations on this scene and a few others, equally sensational, are hung about the room at jaunty angles. Across the back wall is a long pictorial banner proclaiming “The Power of Love Destroys the Dirty Dozen.”

“If only it were so,” we sigh.

We’re at the new East India Grill, surrounded by Indian movie posters and listening to Indian film music interspersed with innocuous rock ‘n’ roll and the Gipsy Kings.

The main dining room, where we’re seated, is a mezzanine at the back of the restaurant. Downstairs, there’s a bar with a few tables looking out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and also a small side dining room. The tables and chairs are dark wood, but the place mats and napkins are festive primary colors in alternating arrangements. The china is black. Visually, this is a tastefully lively place with a different, more downtown feel than the original East India Grill on La Brea Avenue, but with the same fun, hip, post-neo-Colonial spirit.

Loosely, East India Grill is to Indian food what Rebecca’s is to Mexican food, what Cha Cha Cha and all its clones are to Caribbean cooking. Traditional ingredients are repackaged, often with an eclectic California style. For example: Parmesan naan , succulent Mexican shrimp cooked in the tandoor, crisp chicken drumettes.

The menu, unlike many other Indian restaurants, is not a la carte; all entrees come with raita and dal and basmati rice, the underpinnings of many Indian meals. The good part about this is that you can go in there without really knowing about Indian food and have a fairly authentic experience. On the other hand, I am not so keen on having to concentrate on only one main dish. I like passing bowls and plates around the table so that everybody tastes a variety of foods. Our waiter, a cheerful transplanted Brit, caught on to this, so by my second visit, he served us centrally placed bowls of rice, raita , dal and curry, and passed out plates to fill as we liked.

Indian food lovers will recognize all but the most eclectic items on the menu. You won’t, for instance, see fried calamari on the average Indian menu--still, East India’s version is crisp and mildly spicy, though not, as the menu says, “The best in town.” (It might, however, be the most fluorescent.)

Curried mussels were a lovely surprise: eight fat, gently cooked green mussels in a delicious pale yellow creamy sauce. The so-called Wings From Hell, spicy chicken wings, were average bar food. An appetizer of whole fried trout was nice enough, moist and crispy, but didn’t hold a candle to those mussels.

The naan , in all its unusual permutations--Parmesan, garlic-basil, onion-cilantro, chicken--comes to the table looking like flat, long, bubbly tongues of bread hanging from plates. Like everything else that came from the tandoor at this East India Grill, the naan is often a bit overdone.

Tandoori shrimp were deliciously spiced and unfortunately overcooked, so that their promised succulence was lost. A lamb kebab, marinated in a yogurt-cashew marinade, was also, for the most part, dry. Of all the Tandoori Vengeance dishes we tried, the chicken was the only one that really made us sit up and take notice: It was flavorful, moist and luridly colored.

In the Curry War category, you choose your meat or vegetable and the spice factor. We loved a fiery green coconut curry with lamb, and the smoky eggplant flavor of a medium-heat bharta . (The hot, by the way, was not all that hot; only the Wings From Hell made me grope for my water glass.)

Aloo gobhi , a dry potato and cauliflower curry with ginger, had a good steeped-in spicy depth. A hot shrimp vindaloo was completely forgettable, as was sagwala , a spinach curry we ordered with paneer , Indian homemade cheese.

On a Saturday night, business is brisk upstairs in the mezzanine. There are families with kids, and dates--a fairly young crowd, a few East Indians. Frankly, the restaurant is a bit understaffed, and the service is not as smooth and attentive as it might have been if the waiters weren’t overwhelmed. Naan and chile sauce finally arrived toward the end of dinner. On a slower night midweek, however, we’ve no complaints.

East India Grill, 318 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 917-6644. Lunch, dinner daily. Full bar. Evening valet parking. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $24 to $48.