A peacock on the boulevard

If location is everything, then most L.A. restaurants should be severely in trouble. Unless that pretty new bistro or charming trattoria is just around the corner, you’re not going to spot it while you’re whizzing down Pico Boulevard or passing by high above on the freeway. In a sense, every restaurant in L.A. is a destination restaurant, because you have to make an effort to go, armed with a MapQuest printout or your faithful Thomas guide.

Our best restaurants are sometimes in the most surprising locations. John Sedlar’s St. Estephe, which stands out in memory as one of the most interesting restaurants L.A. has ever seen, was in a Manhattan Beach shopping mall cheek by jowl with a Coco’s. Patina never had a particularly illustrious location, at least not until the recent move to Walt Disney Concert Hall, but people intent on indulging in truffles and foie gras found their way there anyway.

Even Masa Takayama, now the toast of Manhattan with Masa, his new restaurant in the Time-Warner Center, started out in a mid-Wilshire strip mall with Ginza Sushiko. And if you were one of the lucky few who discovered it early on, bravo, or brava, as the case may be.

We’ve turned going out to dinner into a treasure hunt. Angelenos love to surprise friends with their latest discovery, the more obscure and unconventional the location the better.

Here’s a budding star to add to your address book: Tamarin.

Aside from Bombay Cafe in West Los Angeles and Tantra in Silver Lake, which is more about the lounge and the decor than the food, Indian restaurants in Los Angeles are pretty formulaic, so similar they could be working from the same photocopied menu. Los Angeles still has room for a contemporary Indian restaurant that doesn’t play it entirely safe.

Enter Tamarin, an unlikely peacock located in an Olympic Boulevard strip mall in Beverly Hills, just west of Doheny, and next door to a Quizno’s sub shop. Don’t let the location put you off. Chef-owner Uma Singh has turned a nondescript storefront into a comfortable contemporary space that shrugs off the tired cliches of Indian restaurant decor. She cooked at Nizam in Westwood for years (where she was also an owner), and she must have been designing Tamarin in her head all the while.

The walls are cream Venetian plaster, polished to look like stone. Beneath the high ceiling, tables are arranged in a slight arc, which opens up the room. And to one side, a stone pillar streaming with water gurgles soothingly. Singh has hung a massive old palace door bristling with metal studs on the wall like a startling oversized painting. Another wall is decorated with an intricately carved wooden window from Rajasthan weathered to the color of driftwood.

Singh dubs her cuisine modern Indian with European accents. It isn’t so much that she’s cooking fusion, but that she’s bringing elements from one style of cuisine into the other. Her dishes tend to be lighter than the Indian food we usually see in L.A., without sacrificing flavor. Her spices are fresh and brilliant, her colors vivid.

As a first course she might serve a roasted eggplant salad on arugula leaves, laced with extra virgin olive oil, and dotted with nuggets of goat cheese and pecans. It’s arranged on a fashionable square white porcelain plate in an attractive pattern that weaves together color and shapes with an artist’s eye. At the same time, you can order something as familiar and traditional as samosas. Hers come two ways, stuffed with either potatoes and peas or spinach and cheese. Served piping hot and golden, without a speck of grease, they’re some of the best I’ve had in L.A. Somehow whenever I go to Tamarin, we order more, because the first order seems to disappear in a flash.

Even as humble a dish as chat, a snack of thin, freshly fried crepes (the Indian equivalent of tortilla chips), potatoes and chick peas embroidered with cool yogurt and tart tamarind sauce, is artful here, looking like a miniature Jackson Pollock. But Singh also knows when to keep it simple, as in her fried calamari infused with the taste of ginger, chile and pomegranate seeds accompanied to the party by a svelte lime and cilantro sauce.

Tamarin is a small jewel of a place, with an appealing little wine list and gracious service from, most nights, a staff of one or at most two. One night we walk in to find half a dozen occupied tables and a harried waitress rushing from one table to the next. When she comes to take our order, I suddenly realize, it’s the chef. She’s given her one waiter the night off because she didn’t think it would be busy. So there she is running back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. Good thing she’s wearing the white athletic shoes she usually dons with her white chef’s jacket.

A modern aesthetic

The food, though, doesn’t suffer a bit. We go on a vegetable kick, ordering up eggplant bharta (roasted mashed eggplant), crispy okra and pickled mushrooms. The bharta is smooth and smoky, lightened with fresh tomato and served with a stark cucumber raita. Okra takes on a more exotic aspect when Singh sautes the fresh vegetable and tosses it with ginger and a squirt of lime. She introduces heirloom tomatoes to mushrooms marinated in fenugreek and mustard seed. I’d be perfectly happy with just these vegetable dishes and a plate of fluffy biryani made with slender long grain basmati rice. Perfumed with whole spices, hers comes in vegetable, shrimp, chicken or lamb variations.

Familiar dishes like chicken tikka masala benefit from her subtle spicing. That’s what gives the tomato sauce cloaking the clay-oven-cooked chicken its haunting flavor. And when she simmers chicken in masses of spinach, the result is surprisingly delicate -- enough to make a lifelong devotee of anyone who thinks of the green as Popeye fodder. She’s equally deft with lamb, producing a Portuguese lamb vindaloo that doesn’t take the top off your head, but isn’t a wimp either. A splash of vinegar adds a note of intrigue to the sauce. But my favorite lamb dish may be the Kashmiri lamb, boned leg of lamb simmered in an intricate blend of spices with a dollop of yogurt. The result is a thick, savory sauce redolent of lamb and complex enough to challenge any French saucier.

And if I had to choose one seafood dish, it would be the shrimp moiley, for its coconut sauce infused with a pinch of cumin and ginger and mingled with the exotic taste of curry leaves. The only disappointing dish I had at Tamarin was a messy Bombay wrap, rolled up burrito style with a lamb filling.

Sometimes when I’ve eaten in Indian restaurants, I’ve had the impression that, with the exception of meats from the tandoor, everything was brown. Uma Singh brings a modern esthetic to Tamarin’s kitchen that shows off the textures and colors of her ingredients.

Leave room for dessert

She follows through with the desserts, too, offering a lovely plate of three confections: a rice pudding infused with saffron, a silky French-style creme caramel and a sweet dumpling soaked in rosewater-scented syrup. No matter how full you are, don’t skip dessert. You can at least have some ice cream made from boiled-down milk in the Indian style. Try the pistachio -- fabulous -- and the icy fresh coconut. The talented Ms. Singh has put together the elements of an appealing restaurant: elegant, pared-down decor, a modern sensibility and careful hands-on cooking -- all with a warm, personal touch that makes Tamarin worth seeking out.

*

Tamarin

Rating: **

Location: 9162 W. Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills; (310) 777-0360

Ambience: Gracious and serene contemporary Indian restaurant tucked in the corner of a strip mall

Service: Considerate and professional

Price: Dinner starters, $4 to $8; entrees, $12 to $17; vegetable dishes and biryani, $8 to $13; desserts, $4 to $6; complete lunch, $8 to $12

Best dishes: Samosas, eggplant bharta, chicken tikka masala, chicken with spinach, shrimp moiley, Kashmiri lamb, biryani, dal, rice pudding.

Wine list: Small but selections work well with Indian food. Corkage $5 to $8

Best table: Beside the stone pillar with water running down it

Special features: Weekday lunch buffet, $9.95

Details: Open for lunch, Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; for dinner daily from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.