Fire and Spice

Island Spice Shri Lankan Cuisine is a pocket-size restaurant hidden in a corner of a deserted West L.A. mini-mall, an unexpected bit of the exotic on a singularly unexotic stretch of carnicerias and futon stores between the Santa Monica Freeway and MGM.

Island Spice is decorated with travel posters and Sri Lankan doodads. One corner of the minuscule place is taken up by a dusty display of imported Sri Lankan groceries, canned vegetables and curry pastes and jars of treacle and such. A bamboo curtain separates the kitchen from the dining room, and you can sometimes hear the cook hum as she goes about her work. In some odd way, Island Spice feels like home.

Each time I’ve been to Island Spice, the neighborhood homeless man shuffles in with a flower for the owner, who smiles and fetches him a cup of tea. Other restaurateurs might worry that business could be affected; the owner worries that the man’s coat isn’t warm enough for a chilly December night.

Sri Lanka is an island off the southern tip of India, right on the trade routes, a moderate distance from Southeast Asia, home to more national influences than perhaps any other country in Asia: Indian, Arab, Dutch, Portuguese, British. Some people categorize the food as a fiery, more meat-oriented South Indian cuisine--it seemed that way at Hollywood’s late Siri Lanka Curry House--but at Island Spice, the cooking seems closer to a tropical marriage of Indian and Muslim cooking: no pork, no alcohol, plenty of burnt onions and curries and flat breads . . . not that different, in fact, from other Muslim-inflected South East Asian cuisines.

Island Spice is the land of turmeric, food stained a brilliant yellow with the fragrant spice: the soupy shrimp curry isso , slightly bitter with toasted chile and full of large, firm shrimp; curried cashews, so tender and vegetable-like that they rather resemble lima beans; fried curried eggplant, chewy and delicious and gritty with spice; curried potatoes, like a refined version of breakfast potatoes, hot with chile, draped with blackened strings of fried onion.

Toward the end of the week, Island Spice serves yellow rice, coconut-fragrant, with the potatoes, the eggplant, and a serving of the restaurant’s intricately spiced, incendiary chicken curry; on Wednesdays, there is savory, richly sweet ghee rice with the same accompaniments, maybe the best single combination the restaurant serves. The Sri Lankan noodles called stringhoppers, chewy, little webs of rice vermicelli, each the size of a White Castle hamburger patty, are served with a dollop of the potato curry and another of grated, schoolbus-yellow coconut, the sort of thing you expect Sri Lankan moms might send off with their kids for lunch. Kortha rotie is a strange dish--Muslim-style flat-bread cut up and stir-fried with onion and egg into a sort of Sri Lankan matzo brei.

The primary condiment here seems to be lunumiris , a paste made from fiery chiles and pounded dried fish, whose gamy saltiness seems to be to Sri Lankan cooking what the fish sauce nuoc mam is to Vietnamese cuisine, heightened by blast-furnace chile heat. Island Spice will serve lunumiris with practically anything--the menu warns “only for the brave”--but the condiment is perhaps at its best with the wonderfully fluffy steamed rice flour/coconut cake pittu , a jellyroll-shaped cake that has a fermented pungency of its own.

Kitul sundaes, topped with a numbingly sweet drizzle of coconut treacle and cashew brittle, is the sort of thing best appreciated by the palate of a 7-year-old; chocolate biscuit pudding bears an uncanny resemblance to unbaked chocolate-cake batter spread on a cracker: Mom cuisine, par excellence.

Island Spice Shri Lankan Cuisine

3520 Overland Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 838-1054. Open Tues.-Sun. 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 10:30 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $10 to $16.