The Meat of the Matter

Unless you happen to find yourself on Artesia’s Pioneer Boulevard, don’t expect many surprises at one of our local Indian restaurants. India Cook House in Irvine may not surprise either, but the food is fresh, the service is courteous, and the kitchen is happy to deliver the heat, upon request.

Like the majority of our Indian restaurants, this one also specializes in the meat-rich, heavily sauced dishes of northern India, as well as meats cooked in the tandoor, or cylindrical clay oven.

I should also mention that this is one of the most cheerful, attractive Indian restaurants around. The dining room is decorated with embroidered Indian paintings, and walls are strung with festive colored lights. Tables set in red and white give the restaurant a holiday feeling year round.

The lunch buffet, a fixture at O.C. Indian restaurants, is incredibly generous at a mere $6.50: five vegetable dishes, salad, tandoori chicken, a curry dish, hot naan and a fine, fluffy pillau rice.

Dinners are a more formal affair. Once you are seated, the waiters supply you with a plate of baked pappadum, those crisp, spicy lentil flour wafers, and a trio of delicious chutneys--tamarind, mango and cilantro--to enjoy them with.

Perfect with the pappadum, the chutneys also work well with appetizers, here composed exclusively of savory deep-fried pastries. The best one is onion bhaji, shredded onions coated in a turmeric-yellow lentil batter. Think of puffy, Indian-inflected onion rings, ratcheted up a dimension or two in flavor.

Too bad my vegetable samosa, a deep-fried pastry triangle filled with a spiced potato and pea mixture, wasn’t properly fresh. For something really substantial, I recommend keema samosa. It’s another pastry triangle stuffed with a dense minced lamb and pea mixture--and brother, is it ever filling.

The next step should be to order a whole slew of things from the tandoor. Meats aren’t the only dishes cooked in the blistering hot oven; the tandoor’s sides are also used to make a variety of terrific breads, all of which are brought to the table steaming. The chefs slap the dough directly onto the sides of the cylinder, where it cooks at great speed.

I always order several of the breads, the better to scoop up sauces or to wrap around chunks of sizzling broiled meats. My favorite, paratha, is a round, delicately layered whole-wheat bread with a buttery top crust. Another great choice is onion kulcha, essentially naan (plain leavened bread) stuffed with onions and brushed with butter and fresh mint.

Tandoori meats are the restaurant’s real drawing card, though, because the intricate spicing comes through with every bite. This restaurant makes an excellent tandoori chicken, moist and fragrant that doesn’t overdo the traditional red food coloring. Seekh kebab is a homemade minced lamb sausage, and the one at India Cook House is very tender and tasty, intensely flavored by garlic.

Tandoori fish is chunked mahi-mahi marinated in garlic and herbs, served smothered with sizzling onions. Mahi-mahi, incidentally, is used because of its firm flesh; most fish simply fall apart in the high heat of a clay oven.

I even liked tandoori shrimp here, mildly scented with ginger, garlic and lemon.

After the tandoori course, there are several chicken, lamb and vegetable dishes to try. Malai kofta are mock meatballs made from garbanzo beans and minced vegetables, adrift in a rich, pale orange cream sauce. They are at once seductively heavy and indulgent, and, eaten with the sauce, easily more caloric than real meatballs.

Channa masala is garbanzo beans stewed in a fragrant tomato- and onion-based sauce. We asked the kitchen to turn on the jets for this dish, and the result was as fiery an Indian delicacy as I’ve had anywhere of late. I also like the way this kitchen prepares bhindi masala, or spiced sauteed okra. Most local Indian restaurants simply serve their okra in an insipid curry sauce. Here, the vegetable is sauteed to crispness with chopped onion, tomato, garlic and cilantro.

Meats cooked in sauce here tend to taste slightly similar. One that stands apart is chicken vindaloo, a dish from the former Portuguese enclave of Goa. This version is a blistering hot stew of chicken, potato, and a vinegar sauce laced with red chili. (You can also have the vindaloo made with lamb.)

There is something on the menu called India Cook House Exotic Dish, which turns out to be nothing more than a workmanlike combination of stewed lamb and chicken in a spicy tomato sauce.

Karahi gosht, on the other hand, is a nice plate of cubed boneless lamb that has been sauteed with diced onion, green bell pepper, ginger and garlic in a wok-like metal skillet.

And chicken palak is pieces of chicken cooked in a perfectly fine creamed spinach, served in a bronze casserole dish.

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Indian desserts can be cloying, but that is not the case here. The restaurant’s best dessert is gulab jamun, warm, gold-colored cheese balls in a light syrup. They literally melt in the mouth.

Kulfi is really a deliciously rich frozen ice milk made from pistachios, almonds, sugar and milk. The components are boiled slowly for several hours until the mixture is extra thick, and then frozen. There is also a creamy kheer, a heavily reduced rice pudding flavored with almonds, raisins and lots of cardamom.

No surprises, perhaps, but no complaints either.

India Cook House is moderately priced. Appetizers are $2.75 to $5.95. Tandoori specialties are $6.95 to $12. Main dishes are $6.95 to $17.95. Breads are $1.50 to $2.75. Desserts are $2.50 to $2.75.

BE THERE

India Cook House, 14130 Culver Drive, Irvine. (949) 857-4858. Open 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., 5-10 p.m. daily. All major cards.