Momo Land

The first thing you are likely to learn about Tibetan cooking is the peculiar taste of yak-butter tea, described in what seems like one recent adventure-travel book out of three: a sour-salt brew caloric enough to sustain a Himalayan trekker, with an eye-watering pungency and a taste as controversial as durian. If Wine Spectator ever opened up a Katmandu bureau, they’d probably fly teams of bibbers into Lhasa to do taste tests of the stuff.

You may have personally encountered a meat dumpling called momo , sold toward the fringes of Tibetan culture fairs at stands that sometimes lie between crafts counters and the booths featuring CD recordings of chanting Gyuto monks. Momo is to a Tibetan festival what Indian fry bread is to a state fair.

Tibetan cooking is not soon likely to replace Thai food in California shopping malls. For one thing, the authentic cuisine is by necessity somewhat limited, as very few green vegetables will grow on Tibet’s high plateau, and spices and seasonings are costly import items. The staple dishes of Tibetan cooking--a porridge made from the toasted barley flour tsampa and, of course, the high-calorie yak-butter tea--have a certain high-mountain appeal that may translate less readily to California’s coastal-desert climate than does, say, Tibetan-style Buddhism. (Then again, the only Tibetan restaurant I’d been to until last week was located next to the McDonald’s in a mall basement in the surfers’ resort Manly Beach, just outside Sydney, Australia.)

What seems to be the only Tibetan restaurant in Southern California sits in a West Los Angeles mini-mall, close by the gleaming office buildings of the new Olympic business corridor, where it shares parking-lot space with a soul food restaurant, a Mrs. Fields and a takeout fajitas joint. A portrait of the Dalai Lama sits high on a wall at Taste of Tibet, and a weaving depicting the holy city of Lhasa covers most of the restaurant’s rear. Taste of Tibet does serve that Tibetan tea, presumably made with cow’s butter in place of the yak stuff, though they’ve been out of it every time I’ve been by.

At first glance, Taste of Tibet seems as much like a no-MSG $1 Chinese takeout place as it does like anything: steam-table filled with fried rice and kung pao chicken, a guy behind the counter stir-frying things like “snow-land beef” and vermicelli in a superheated wok. You can get two dishes with rice or fried “Lhasa noodles” on a paper plate for $4.55 and wash it down with Diet Coke or Snapple.

Tibetan food, at least Tibetan food as served at Taste of Tibet, is terrific stuff, homely, gently spiced, the perfect thing to eat on a rainy spring afternoon. There is a swell “mountain-style” salad of chilled glass noodles with shredded vegetables and a healthy slug of chile paste, cool and refreshing. Tanthuk noodles, handmade postage stamps of pasta in a bland broth with tofu, chicken and vegetables, are a little chewy, kind of comforting. ( Thupka noodles, closer to overcooked spaghetti, are less appealing.) Tibetan-style meat sausage, shot through with rice vermicelli, seasoned with something like pie spice, is cut into chunks and simmered with vegetables and dried chiles, practically bursting out of its taut natural casing, and becomes almost a stew.

Probably the most exotic thing here is the Tibetan New Year’s dish daysi , rice cooked with butter, yellow raisins and the tiny, sugary root vegetable joma , imported from Tibet. Joma resembles a microscopic yam and gives the daysi something of the elusive coconut sweetness of the Malaysian rice dish nasi lemak . That is to say, it doesn’t seem exotic at all--or at least not as exotic as yak butter.

Basically, though, the strategy here is to order as many momos as you can hold. These thick-walled steamed dumplings, served hot enough to raise a blister on your lip, are stuffed with cheese, or a crunchy, gingery mix of greens cut into tiny dice, or the standard filling of beef minced with scallion and radish. Daysi may be doozy, but momo’s the merrier.

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Where to Go

Taste of Tibet, 11110 Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 473-7311. Open daily for lunch and dinner. No alcohol. Cash only. Lot parking. Takeout. Catering. Dinner for two, food only, $9 to $12.

What to Get

Daysi , momo , Tibetan-style meat sausage.