Entwined in coconut and spice

When you feel like a string hopper, you need a Sri Lankan restaurant.

A good place to look has always been Tarzana -- it’s had at least three of them over the years. One, located across the street from a Burger King, defied the Home of the Whopper by sporting its own sign reading “Home of the Hopper.”

You understand that boast the first time you have a string hopper, because it really is a delicacy: a doily of steamed vermicelli made from rice and coconut flours, moistened with a thin yellow coconut-scented sauce. It serves as a lacy foil for Sri Lanka’s distinctive curries. (No hopping is involved -- “hopper” is just how the English heard the Sinhalese word for the dish, appa.)

Tarzana’s latest Sri Lankan place is the Curry Bowl, a mini-mall storefront with downstairs seating for about eight (most customers come for takeout). Recently it more than tripled that by opening a small upstairs dining room decorated with nothing but some grass matting and a display of Ceylon tea.

The lunch buffet is a good way to sample a cuisine similar to India’s but resolutely distinct, in love with eggs, earthy toasted flavors and especially coconut, which shows up all over the place. You’re likely to find two kinds of yellow ice, one with blackened bits of cinnamon stick in it, then a couple of curries made with spices toasted to one or another shade of brown.

The beef curry will be darker and with a citrusy note of cardamom, the chicken lighter and scented with coconut. Then there’ll probably be peas, carrots and cashews stewed in coconut milk, possibly potato made reddish with ground chiles and, finally, a cold relish of chopped eggplant, onions and green chiles, all fried very, very brown.

By the way, this buffet (served till 2:30 p.m.) will run you a whopping $4.29.

At dinner, ignore the paper menu, because not everything it lists will be available. Instead, check the two whiteboards. There you’re likely to find biriyani, a big plate of coconut rice mixed with a rather hot beef, chicken or fish curry. It comes with more lightly spiced mixed vegetables, some eggplant stewed sweet and very brown and a hard-boiled egg. Rice with curry is similar to biriyani, but the portion is smaller, the curry comes on top of the rice, along with some pureed split peas, and there’s no egg.

The Curry Bowl is fond of fitting an egg into your dinner. A godamba meal is simply a curry served with a big plate of fried flatbread, but one piece of godamba will be folded into a packet enclosing an egg before frying, making it like a rather leathery version of the Tunisian brik a l’oeuf. Godamba is close to the opposite end of the delicacy spectrum from string hoppers, but even hoppers come with a hard-boiled egg, sitting in the bowl of coconut sauce.

The excellent kottu roti is a dry curry of your choice of meat mixed with carrots, hot peppers, bits of egg and chopped flatbread. The effect is much like hash, with curry flavorings and roti bread in place of diced potatoes. On Sundays, you can get the Sri Lankan breakfast dish pittu, a coconut-flavored starch in a rice-like shape, with the same toppings as string hoppers.

A counter display holds various snacks or appetizers known as short eats, and they’re a surprising mix. Buns of risen dough come with beef, chicken or fish fillings; Chinese rolls are crunchy spring rolls -- breaded before frying -- with slightly peppery fillings. (The sauce that comes with them may look like ketchup but it’s hot, like a cocktail sauce.) Those brick-like things are meat, fish or vegetables wrapped in roti bread and toasted on the griddle. On weekends you may find a rather European-tasting bun containing a hard-boiled egg wrapped in bacon.

It’s at dessert that Sri Lankan food is least like Indian. There are no concoctions of solidified milk in syrup, not even a rice pudding. Instead, you may find jaggery cake, crumbly and not too sweet, with the mellow, molasses-like flavor of unrefined palm sugar; Sri Lankan curries are hotter than Indian, and this is considered the thing to eat if one has proved too much for you.

There may be love cake, like an American spice cake with a hint of coconut, and there’ll definitely be watalappan, a luscious, walnut-brown custard flavored with jaggery and coconut. Just in case the hoppers, curries and biriyanis didn’t satisfy your coconut needs.

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Curry Bowl

Location: 19662 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana; (818) 609-7683.

Price: Short eats, 65 cents to $1; main dishes, $6.50 to $8.50, desserts, $1 to $1.75; lunch buffet, $4.29.

Best dishes: Beef buns, string hoppers, rice and beef curry, chicken biriyani, kottu roti, jaggery cake, watalappan.

Details: Open 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday. No alcohol. Small parking lot. MasterCard and Visa.