Appe to Know You

For a while in the late ‘80s, everybody I knew used to go to the Siri Lanka Curry House, a bright, fragrant restaurant in a Hollywood mini-mall that served what was probably the best South Asian food in this part of the county: fierce, complexly seasoned curries and exotic Sri Lankan starches nobody in the neighborhood had ever seen before--lacy bowl-shaped pancakes called appes ; steamed, coffee-can-size logs of rice and freshly scraped coconut known as pittu ; loose-woven noodle nets called string hoppers; rounds of coconut-scented flat bread called roti . If you remembered to call a day in advance, you could even have the festival dish lampries , elaborate basmati-rice dumplings steamed in banana leaves and served with a four-meat stew.

The place was close to dubbing studios and producers’ offices and such, so in addition to the gatherings of Sri Lankans digging into vast plates of yellow rice with their fingers, you could also count on seeing at least a few tables of industry guys at lunchtime, taking a break from the Caesar salad at the Columbia Bar and Grill. It was also cheap enough for long-haired copy shop dudes, and had enough vegetarian--though ghee -intensive--dishes to satisfy the musician crowd.

A few years ago, the woman who owned the Curry House moved back to Sri Lanka, and the couple of restaurants that attempted to take its place were never quite good enough. Despair reigned heavily on the land--other than requests for really authentic Chinese restaurants on the Westside (there are none), I have probably gotten more letters asking about Sri Lankan restaurants than about any other thing.

But now there is Chamika Sri Lankan Restaurant, owned by a guy who used to cook at Sri Lanka Curry House, in a building in the heart of old Hollywood once occupied by a hot dog stand called Big Weenies Are Better. It’s small, this place--three or four tables wedged into a room nearly as vast as the back seat of a Camry, with a tall bronze statue in one corner and a stack of Sri Lankan weeklies in another, lace curtains in the windows, fado -influenced Sri Lankan ballads crackling from a tape player in the kitchen.

Meals start with a basket of Sri Lankan pappadum , delicate lentil-flour wafers seasoned lightly with asafetida and served with a green chile sambal and a chile sauce that tastes a little like amped-up ketchup. You might as well try a vaguely Dutch-influenced fritter from the “Nick Nack” page of the menu, too: soft, rolled-pancake curry puffs, perhaps, or the fried, cabbage-stuffed dough marbles called cutlets.

Even the beverages are a little exotic here: Sri Lankan iced coffee with the sweet intensity of the White Russians you probably used to drink freshman year; frappeed “mango delight” smoothies that taste like the pungent essence of that fruit; “banana delight” smoothies that seem to be--but aren’t--flavored with a shot of dark rum.

You can order any number of curries with rice: a gentle coconut curry in which softened cashews appear almost as succulent vegetables, an incredibly rich pumpkin curry with the peculiar bite of mustard, an eggplant curry cooked down to an intense sort of jam. But a Sri Lankan meal here usually starts with a choice of starches, a pastry or a rice concoction that you can use as an edible utensil to scoop up sauced dishes, flavor with a bit of violently chile’d coconut sambal, or use as sort of a bowl.

Chamika only makes appes on weekends, but you should try them if you get a chance. These coffee-filter-shaped crepes are crisp at the edges, sweetened with coconut, and taper down to a thick, sour pancake-like base on the bottom that may or may not have an egg fried into it, and which you can daub with pungent, cardamom-scented red chicken curry, a greenish lamb curry gritty with spice, or the legendary well-toasted black beef curry for which Sri Lankan chefs are famous.

String hoppers, which look a little like goldfish nets made out of pale, floppy rice noodles instead of nylon, come 10 to an order with the same choice of curries. Pittu are rich, steamed cylinders of coconut rice served with a little pitcher of coconut milk and the curries; rotis are griddled pupusa -size rounds of bread, spiked with coconut, crisp skin giving way to a chewy, sweet interior porous enough to soak up a tablespoonful of sauce.

Most of the food is sold from a takeout window out front, but on a weekend afternoon, the dining room is packed with Sri Lankans, dragging string hoppers through curry sauces, tearing into the big appes , skillfully molding biryani into wet marbles of rice and popping it into their mouths with the sort of explosive motion you might have practiced with peas when you were a kid. If you’re at all inclined to like South Asian food, this is the real stuff, and it’s a lot closer than London or Colombo.

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What to Get

Vegetable cutlets; appe ; string hoppers; yellow rice; cashew curry.

Where to Go

Chamika Catering (Sri Lankan Restaurant), 1717 N. Wilcox Ave., Hollywood, (213) 466-8960. Open Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 9 p.m. No alcohol. Cash only. Validated lot parking. Takeout, delivery and catering. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$16.