An Expanding Universe
The latest trend in new york’s restaurant world is Indian food--not the usual tandoori or Moghul cooking, but Indian cuisine addressed by serious chefs in sleek bistro-like settings. The most innovative is Tabla, where chef Floyd Cardoz plays off traditional Indian flavors and spices to create a dazzling contemporary menu.
This trend isn’t new to Los Angeles. A decade ago, Neela Paniz opened Bombay Cafe with partner David Chaparro in a West L.A. mini-mall. Although her cooking didn’t go as far as some New York chefs are now taking Indian cuisine, her fresh regional cooking was far from the usual steam-table Indian buffet. Every day, Paniz offered a dozen different chutneys. She focused on savories and snacks complemented with tandoori items. She served a trio of her homemade chutneys with deep-fried samosa wrappers, for dipping like chips. And understanding that Californians must eat salads, she created one of tandoori chicken, mushrooms and paneer cheese tossed with greens. The Westside lined up to eat Bombay’s vivid street food.
Five months ago, the casual cafe moved south into larger quarters at Pico Boulevard and Bundy Avenue. The new Bombay Cafe looks almost exactly the same, except that it’s doubled in size, with a long bar where you can sit and have chat (Indian snacks) or sip exotic cocktails, like a Mumbai Martini.
What’s good? The triangular Gujerati-style samosas, stuffed with gently spiced, turmeric-stained potatoes, peas and black cumin seed, delicious when dipped in the puckery tamarind chutney. The machchi pakoras, morsels of fluffy white fish cloaked in a light batter and deep-fried. Bhel puri, puffed rice tossed with diced potatoes, crispy chickpea flour noodles with cilantro and chutneys. Uttapam, a semolina pancake decorated with tomato slices, chile and cilantro--terrific with a snowy fresh coconut and chile chutney.
I love the succulent, opulently spiced Sindhi chicken, cooked until its very bones are infused with coriander, cayenne and dried mango powder, and the palak paneer, homemade farmer’s cheese in a slurry of spinach scented with cumin, ginger and garlic. The tandoori items are much better than average, too.
Bombay Cafe’s menu doesn’t take the liberties with tradition that New York’s new wave of Indian restaurants does. Maybe it requires someone like Tabla’s chef, who is not Indian, to riff on India’s exceptionally varied cuisine. Still, Paniz and Chaparro were about to open Malabar, an intriguing blend of Indian and Mexican cuisines, in L.A.’s Craft and Folk Art Museum before the museum unexpectedly closed last year.
One Friday afternoon, the cafe is filled with people marking the end of the week. The Indian woman to my left orders and explains each dish to her girlfriend as it arrives. “What’s that sweet-sour taste?” her friend asks. It’s tamarind, she’s told. She’s a quick enough study to recognize the flavor in the next dish, sev puri, mounds of crackers, potatoes and chutney buried under a haystack of gold chickpea noodles.
At lunch, most people have thali, one of the scaled-down feasts on a tray. The most popular is the tandoor-cooked chicken or lamb kebab, which comes with a green salad, bowl of dal (lentils) and the tandoor-cooked flatbread called naan. For dessert, I almost always order kheer, the creamy rice pudding heady with cardamom, or one of the kulfi (Indian ice creams)--ginger or mango. The carrot halwa is a wonderfully rich pudding of spiced carrots, slivered almonds and golden raisins.
“India is very large and our kitchen is very small,” read the menu at the original Bombay Cafe. Now that the kitchen--and the restaurant--are just a bit larger, I’m hoping Paniz will add some enticing new items to the menu.
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BOMBAY CAFE
CUISINE: Indian. AMBIENCE: Simple, cheerful cafe with wooden chairs, pale yellow walls and a bar where you can have chat, or Indian snacks. BEST DISHES: samosas, fish pakoras, sev puri, uttapam, Sindhi chicken, tandoori chicken, kheer. DRINK PICK: Mumbai Martini. FACTS: 12021 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles; (310) 473-3388. Lunch Tuesday through Friday; dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Appetizers, $5 to $9; specialties, $7 to $16; lunch thalis, $7 to $10. Corkage $7. Valet parking.