The Heat Out of the Kitchen : Sweetness and lightness vie with spicy in dishes at Canard de Bombay. You get to dial up the temperature.

Canard de Bombay has a sort of Wall of Endurance. It puts up a six-star plaque in your name when you’ve eaten a super-hot six-star curry 12 times (dishes on the regular menu only go up to four stars), and you can bump it up to eight or 10 stars according to a complex formula that looks as if you’d have to eat here a total of 56 times to earn a 10-star plaque.

Very hot curries are Canard de Bombay’s claim to fame. Some people will remember this restaurant in its Studio City incarnation, or the Beverly Hills location in the early ‘80s, perhaps even the original Canard de Bombay in London before that. (C de B still shows a few marks of an English curry shop, such as dishes named dhansak and Madras curry.)

Though the place may be famous for its four-star phal, heat is only one part of what’s going on here. Owner Saad Ghazi has quite a few bees in his bonnet, as you discover from the lengthy introduction to his menu. Properly constructed curries, he evidently believes, are good for everything from medical complaints to a sense of disharmony with the universe.

Low-Fat Turkey Meatballs,

Ginseng Ginger Ale

He’s also into reducing fat, so this might be the only Indian restaurant around that makes its meatballs from ground turkey and uses low-fat coconut milk. It offers ginseng ginger ale instead of Kingfisher beer and has shelves of Indian and Western health foods and organic beauty treatments, along with Ghazi’s own spice mixes and a few wildly out-of-place British condiments.

Perhaps because of these interests, the dishes on Ghazi’s 188-item menu are idiosyncratic, to say the least. They tend to be light (there’s little or no oil in them), not terribly aromatic and faintly sweet--an odd background to massive doses of hot peppers. To some people, myself included, the result scarcely seems like Indian food at all, but it’s undeniably distinctive.

The menu is organized by preparation--you just pick which main ingredient you want in a given sauce. The lamb version of rogon is mild and relatively rich, though you’d never mistake it for the usual buttery Indian roghan josh; the (slightly) dominant flavors are garlic and tomato. Likewise, you can detect some extra onion in kofta dupiaza, but not that much.

Ceylon is the dish made with low-fat coconut milk. Tried at its basic two-star level of heat (that is, just detectably hot), it mainly gives the impression of mild sweetness, with a poetic aftertaste of chiles and sweet fennel. It’s much more impressive at four stars (most dishes can be boosted a star or two above their basic heat level), because the coconut milk gets to play against the pepperiness.

I found pathia (two stars) rather like the Ceylon curry except for the absence of thin coconut milk. The vindaloo (three stars) is hotter but in somewhat the same style, and it includes potatoes and a whiff of fennel.

As for phal, it’s slightly bitter from spices, even less aromatic than most other curries here and, needless to say, quite hot. I remember sweating from the scalp after one mouthful of phal back at the old Beverly Hills Canard de Bombay. Perhaps I’ve just grown habituated to chiles over the years. Here I definitely felt a metabolic jolt, but it no longer seemed apocalyptic. Of course, there’s still that six-star phal to try.

The place has a tandoori menu, and the best item appears to be tandoori chicken, a fairly moist and flavorful chicken breast. The spicing makes it a little bitter. The boneless chicken tikka, though far more moist and tender, is much more bitter.

You can get these dishes on a dinner with soup, salad or samosas for an appetizer. The salad is the usual sort with a ranch dressing, but soup is either dal (plain yellow lentil) or mulligatawny (here, a red lentil soup with a dose of hot pepper). The samosas are made with unleavened dough (possibly whole wheat, from the look of it), so they are chewy, rather than puffy, envelopes filled with either turkey or potatoes. There are some regular Indian side dishes--sag aloo, various fried vegetables--and fresh breads.

Bottom line: If you share Ghazi’s health ideas or want to get a plaque on the wall, go to Canard de Bombay. If not, well, just say you did and had the phal.

BE THERE

Canard de Bombay, 4101 Lankershim Blvd., Universal City; (818) 752-2879; fax, (818) 752-0814. Lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday; dinner, 4-10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. No alcohol. Parking lot. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $14 to $38.

What to Get: mulligatawny soup, lamb Ceylon, (four stars), mixed vegetable vindaloo, tandoori chicken.