Dimple Dining

So far in 1994 I have eaten a kangaroo filet with fried eggplant, a scoop of black-truffle ice cream, and an eel salad that resembled a Louise Nevelson. But one of the oddest dishes may well have been the seafood curry at Indra, a mini-mall Thai-Chinese restaurant a few blocks down from Glendale High.

The curry came on a large, superheated terra-cotta platter, streaked with dun-colored sauce, decorated with an assortment of chessman-size clay fetishes that resembled primitive nuclear cooling towers. When a waitress first set it down on the table, it was difficult to decide whether to look for the food or to figure out how to gamble with the thing--I sort of instinctively looked for a pair of dice. Each cooling tower concealed a dimple on the platter, sort of a half-golf-ball indentation. In the dimples, extremely minimal, slightly overcooked portions of mixed shellfish--a shrimp, half a mussel, a scrap of squid--seethed in tiny puddles of coconut curry. You would probably find the sauce extremely spicy if you could manage to spoon out more than a few drops at a time.

Indra has pretty much everything you look for in a neighborhood Thai restaurant, which is to say fairly good chicken-coconut soup, a few oddball regional dishes that will impress your friends, and an owner who looks the other way when you bring your own beer. The clientele seems to be about half Thai, half other (this eastern edge of Glendale is as rich in Armenians and Cubans as it is in youngish would-be Ozzies and Harriets), meaning that most of the cooking is not only authentic but accessible. There is a wide assortment of homemade Thai desserts, including alarming-looking green coconut things and fresh Thai dessert crepes whenever somebody feels like making them. If you live in the area, Indra even delivers.

Green-papaya salad is spicy and fresh; Indian-curry noodles are rich; stuffed chicken wings are fried crisp in their coating of eggy batter. There is an intense, herbal smoked-pork-innard soup with rice-noodle sheets wrapped into tight candle shapes that rivals the best Malaysian-Chinese noodle soups; it’s called “noodle sheet, browny soup.” There are crisp, luscious mussel omelets fried with taro and chile, and there are overcooked stir-fried beef dishes of every description.

But essentially, Indra, a clean, basic place decorated with travel posters and dominated by a glass-front hot-food counter that sits just inside the front door functions as a Thai curry house, a steam-table takeout joint where for a few dollars you get a plate of rice and a stew or two to ladle over it. This style of restaurant is common in Bangkok, but fairly rare here--and Indra has the best Thai curry house food I’ve had since Renoo’s burned down in the ’92 riots.

Here you’ll find chicken legs simmered in a thick peanut-butter curry, fish balls in a yellow curry, slices of catfish fried with chile and Thai basil, crumbles of ground pork that have been fried crisp with chile. Sometimes there is har mok , coconut-moistened seafood steamed in a little bamboo basket, which may be prettier than it is delicious but is worth getting anyway.

If strips of beef in a brick-colored coconut curry or chicken in a bamboo-shoot curry are tougher than usual, it is because they have given their all to the sauce, which after all has to flavor a vast quantity of rice . . . sometimes it seems as if the curries here act more as condiments than as dishes in their own right. If you listen to the government guys who put together the food-group pyramid, meat is supposed to be a condiment anyway.

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* Indra Restaurant

517 S. Verdugo Road, Glendale, (818) 247-3176. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout and delivery. Lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$15.