Much More Than the Usual Fast-Food Fare

The giant plastic wiener on top of the Hamburger Hut makes it pretty clear that this San Pedro establishment started life as a hot dog joint. It doesn’t sell franks anymore, but the leap from hot dogs to hamburgers isn’t the longest in the world, and you can certainly get a respectable burger there now. You can even get a reasonably authentic Philadelphia cheesesteak.

In keeping with the weird logic of restaurants in our part of the world, though, the Hamburger Hut is primarily an Indian restaurant. In fact, it’s a pretty good Indian restaurant.

A man named Deepak Arora bought the place two years ago and runs it with the help of his daughter and son-in-law. Perhaps Arora kept the name “Hamburger Hut” because he didn’t want to scare off any of the regulars. Possibly he just enjoys (as I do) the irony of an Indian restaurant that’s named after America’s own beefy hamburger and sports a wiener on its roof.

Whatever. Curry or no curry, the Hamburger Hut is still a real fast-food joint type of place, complete with a tile-topped counter, a few clunky tables, a handful of plants and one map of Catalina Island incongruously gracing the wall next to the front door. As you’d expect, this is as far as you can get from a fancy restaurant. The Indian dishes are served in plastic bowls with plastic knives and forks.

They cook most things on the grill behind the counter, but the home-style Indian dishes, and the wonderful basmati rice that accompanies them, are prepared in a tiny kitchen in the back. One of the best of the Indian items is a Mughlai-style lamb curry. It’s enormous chunks of trim, tender meat in a moderately spicy brown gravy, aromatic from a subtle masala of cumin, cardamom, cloves and garlic.

The lamb curry is simply delicious served on the basmati rice pilaf, which is perfectly cooked here. The kitchen uses a small home-type rice cooker rather than the giant kettles that our larger Indian restaurants tend to cook their rice in. As a result, the pilaf comes out with an appealing, non-sticky texture.

In fact, the restaurant’s very smallness seems to be one reason for the consistent quality of its food. The kitchen makes only five or six Indian dishes on any given day, and each is seasoned with a different masala. This is almost never the case in big Indian restaurants.

You can start a meal with a couple of samosas, flaky pastry pyramids stuffed with a spicy mixture of mashed potatoes and peas and served with a good mango chutney. Often there’s saag, a dish of spinach stewed to a delicate softness and flavored with lemon juice and fragrant crushed garlic.

There are several chicken dishes. Chicken makhni is a curry made with huge pieces of boneless chicken and a good deal of yogurt. Keema chicken curry is ground chicken in a rich sauce, and the predominating flavors are ginger and garlic.

The only Indian dish here I don’t personally care for is the stewed eggplant, which is served with naan bread and salad. For one thing, the naan is actually just grilled pita, since the Hamburger Hut is too small to have a real tandoor oven, which is what you need for making proper naan. For another, the eggplant strikes me as bland and oily, and perhaps even cooked a bit too long.

I’ve saved the best Indian dish for last, though from a casual read of the menu you wouldn’t suspect it was Indian at all. It’s the falafel.

As we all know, falafel is that Arab snack of deep-fried balls of ground garbanzos or other beans. What the Hamburger Hut makes is purely Indian, though; its proper name is bhaji. The deep-fried bean cakes are a deep green inside from all the cilantro and parsley they contain. With this “falafel,” the pita bread works perfectly.

If you come for American fast food, you’ll do all right too. The Philadelphia cheesesteak is made with lots of chopped steak, provolone cheese and onions, though the doughy bun is just average. The burgers are good, if not very distinctive. For an extra 75 cents, you can get especially ripe slices of fresh avocado on a burger.

The only real items to avoid here are the watery, insipid shakes and malts. You might expect a place called the Hamburger Hut to deliver in that category but, hey, this isn’t just any hamburger hut.

BE THERE

Hamburger Hut, 824 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro. (310) 832-4813. Open 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays. Parking in rear. No alcohol. Cash only. Takeout. Lunch for two, $12-$17.

What to Get: Samosas, falafel, lamb curry, chicken keema curry, saag.