Veg Mahal

Ever since the Northern Indian restaurant Chameli opened in Rosemead a couple of years ago, the place has been sort of an open secret among vegetarians. Come on a Friday evening, and you’ll see Chinese Buddhist vegetarians from the neighborhood, Muslims of every stripe, the Hollywood hip crowd and a strong cross-section of the local Indian community at what might be the fanciest meatless restaurant this side of San Francisco’s Greens.

Chameli may be too grand for its own good, a marble palace with brass fountains and elegant banquettes, big art on the walls and sinuous sitar music on the sound system. (When Indians open restaurants strictly for themselves, they’ll usually pop brassy Indian film music into the CD player instead.)

The front room at Chameli, though less well-stocked than it was a couple of years ago, is sort of a one-stop Indian cultural center, with a wall of Indian-themed novels and sociology tracts, a small selection of music cassettes, a dozen racksful of gauzy saris and embroidered purses and bright, watered-silk pajamas that look something like what you might hope to find at a high-end duty-free shop in the Bombay airport.

A glass deli counter holds a modest assortment of fried Indian sweets and carrot fudge. Where most Indian vegetarian restaurants are modest places, with hand-scrawled specials on the walls, Chameli strives to be nothing less than an institution, and if you haven’t been here in a while it is easy to forget how inexpensive, how accessible, this place really is.

The North Indian menu may not be large or exotic--it is, in fact, basically the left-hand side of the one at your local tandoori joint, the page without the meat dishes--but the usual dishes are done with unusual care. Even a basic dish like mattar paneer , pureed peas with freshly made cheese, is likely to be the beneficiary of intricate spicing, the kind where you suspect a dish is seasoned with cardamom, fenugreek and asafoetida, but all you can experience is multiple waves of flavor in your mouth.

You might as well start with some bread: tandoori-baked naan , singed from the intense heat of the clay oven, flecked with garlic, fresh cheese, or finely minced ginger; the whole-wheat flatbread paratha stuffed with curried potatoes or an unusual Kashmir-style filling of chopped nuts and maraschino cherries; chewy, deep-fried puffs of the yogurt-laced bhatura that taste like great Navaho fry bread.

You’ll find the usual masses of curried lentils, the spinach-spiked fritters pakora , unspectacular potato samosas and an ordinary rendition of the creamy mixed vegetable dish navratan .

The chef here, though, seems unafraid of letting his vegetables taste like vegetables. The natural sweetness of pumpkin, petha , is brought out with a buttery, slightly tart tomato sauce; bell peppers, bhara mirchi , are simply baked with a mild stuffing of potatoes and peas; pureed baked eggplant, bhartha , has a subtle, appealing bitterness under its blanket of tomatoes and herbs, making it almost closer to an appealing Indian inflection on the Sicilian antipasto standard caponata than like the stuff you find at your neighborhood curry shop.

Bhindi , curried okra, is spectacular here, smoky from a dollop of charred tomatoes, tinted with ground pomegranate, firm as stir-fried asparagus and as pungently green, the vegetable’s natural sliminess tamed into something of a sauce thickener. Shahi paneer , something like loose curds of ricotta stewed with a mild, sweet tomato sauce, may be the one Punjabi dish the late cottage-cheese-and-catsup lover Richard Nixon might have enjoyed.

Chameli’s mustard-green version of saag , a stew that seems to call for great, khaki glops of creamed spinach in most northern Indian restaurants, is as vivid, as intensely flavored as any Deep South dish of boiled collards--and as in Alabama, the classic accompaniment to the greens is cornbread, in this case a flat, chewy disk of coarsely ground corn called makki roti , real Punjabi soul food.

If you want to stay on this tangent, try the lobhia , black-eyed peas, which taste like what a gifted Dothan grandmother might serve on New Year’s Day if a prankster had taken the fatback out of her pot and dosed the peas with turmeric and cardamom instead.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where to Go

Chameli, 8752 Valley Blvd., Rosemead, (818) 280-1947. Open for lunch and dinner Wednesday through Monday. Closed Tuesday. All major credit cards accepted. Beer and wine. Buffet lunch. Lot parking in rear. Dinner for two, food only, $16 to $18.

What to Get: Alu chat, saag, bhindi, lobhia, makki roti, Kashmiri paratha.