The Boston Phoenix
March 5 - 12, 1998

[Dining Out]

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Southern comfort

Two restaurants -- a veteran and a newcomer -- showcase the food of Southern India

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

Himalaya
95 Mass Ave, Boston; (617) 267-6644
Open Mon-Fri, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat and Sun, 11 a.m.-midnight
All major credit cards
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

Bombay Mahal
458 Moody Street, Waltham; (781) 893-9988
Open for lunch Mon-Sat, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
(Sun brunch, noon-3 p.m.); for dinner daily, 5-10 p.m.
All major credit cards
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access; some tables up a few steps

As long as this city has had Indian restaurants, it has had critics carping that all our Indian cuisine comes from the North. The complaint is understandable -- imagine going out to eat in India, only to discover that an "American" menu invariably meant New England food.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for sticking with a winner. Tandoori lamb and chicken tikka, after all, aren't exactly scrod and pot roast. In the last year or two, Southern Indian food has been staking out territory on Indian menus in Boston and Cambridge, and -- welcome as more choice is -- I have to admit I find the food less interesting than the Northern curries to which we've become accustomed. For the most part, Southern Indian food I've eaten is blander and drier (by which I mean less sweet, not less saucy) than its Northern counterparts. It's also more vegetarian, which limits the palette of ingredients but might make it easier to agree on dinner.

There are always exceptions, of course. Some Southern Indian dishes, like the wildly oversized crêpes called dosai, are crowd-pleasers, and in the right hands the food can have real verve. At the recently opened Himalaya, for instance, the food of the South has energy and freshness. Bombay Mahal, a stalwart in Waltham that has been serving this cuisine for some years, is serviceable but less sparkling.

Located near the south end of Waltham's Indian Row (a/k/a Moody Street), Bombay Mahal isn't much to look at from the outside; like most of its neighbors, it's a wide storefront with an overhead sign flat against the building. The interior, whose aesthetic might be described as suburban pleasant, isn't distinctive either, until you notice the little filigreed brass knobs that have been painstakingly nailed to the underside of the railing next to your table. We found the place quiet, but then again, 9 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday isn't usually the peak time for dining in the hinterlands.

In its treatment of the standards of the Northern repertoire, Bombay Mahal is workmanlike and a bit uninspired. The pakoras (chicken and whitefish, battered and fried) were more dense than light, accompanied on the nonvegetarian appetizer platter ($6.95) by chunks of tandoori lamb and chicken that had dried out a little by the time they reached the table. An order of chicken tikka masala ($9.75), maybe the most popular Indian dish of all, had a pleasingly smooth red-ochre color but a flavor and texture that seemed overly homogenized.

The Southern Indian cooking here is certainly more interesting, if not more ambitious. Uttapam ($5.95) is a pancake of rice flour topped with finely diced onions and tomatoes and bell peppers; the texture of the pancake, a little like that of Ethiopian bread, is spongy and pocked with holes, usually a sign of a sourdough batter. (The effect is also a little like that of a potato pancake.) A small dish of coconut chutney, thick and just barely sweet, came on the side.

Dosai are the most striking staple of South Indian cookery: a giant tangy pancake, like a thinner and crunchier version of the uttapam, is rolled crêpe-style around one of a number of fillings. We tried "paper masala dosai" ($5.95), in which the dosa itself, with a crisp texture and distinctive sourdough tang, was more interesting than the mild potato-chunk stew rolled inside. These dosai were wonderfully long, maybe 18 inches, stretching past either edge of the plate.

Chicken xacuti (pronounced zacooti) is chunks of both white and dark chicken meat in a smooth, sweet sauce whose flavor, traditionally, comes from tamarind and coconut. Glossy and deep brown, the xacuti here ($9.75) is stylish-looking, with bits of fresh cilantro strewn decoratively on top of the sauce. The sauce itself was a bit monotone, though: it was hard to taste anything but the sweet-tart tamarind.

The difference in xacutis seems emblematic of the difference between Himalaya and Bombay Mahal. Himalaya opened last fall on the Back Bay site of the former Ginger Bistro (née Wild Ginger Bistro), and it has the unmistakable feel of a restaurant that's at the top of its game. The xacuti here, for instance, isn't just a sweet brown sauce; it has real depth, with a discernible coconut taste and a rougher, more satisfying texture.

Himalaya is a tony, very pleasant space -- no surprise, given the location -- with a solid crowd and, at times, rather involved service. Our waiter actually shook his head as we ordered paani poori ($5.95), informing us that it was a dish "for kids." Young at heart, we ordered it anyway; the platter consists of about 10 miniature poori breads (poori is the whole-wheat bread that puffs up like a balloon when cooked) and a dish of "spicy mint water." Unlike their bigger siblings, the mini-pooris are served crispy; they look like two-inch-wide UFOs with a hole in the top. The ritual, as our waiter indulged us by demonstrating, is to fill each of the pooris with several spoonfuls of mint water (really a broth version of the mint-cilantro sauce that accompanies most Indian meals), then top it off with a dollop of tamarind sauce and pop the whole thing in the mouth. It's a neat-looking dish, but our waiter was right: it's more about fun than flavor, and after the novelty wore off we didn't even finish the plate.

The "Himalaya mix platter" ($7.95), on the other hand, was very much about flavor. Both the ground-meat kabob and the tandoori-cooked chicken chunks were moist and had a well-flavored outer crust. (Meat cooked in the tandoor, the traditional Indian clay oven, is marinated first in a mixture of yogurt and spices, with a bit of red dye thrown in for that brilliant red color.)

Uttapam at Himalaya ($5.95, chicken; $4.95, vegetarian) isn't too different from the Bombay Mahal version, crisp around the perimeter and spongy at the center. Saag paneer, the spinach-with-farm-cheese dish that anchors the vegetarian side of most Northern Indian menus, had a brighter taste than you often encounter, with a distinct flavor of fresh spinach. The paneer -- a soft, cubed white farm cheese -- was almost totally flavorless, but then again I've never been able to discern a flavor in paneer that didn't come from the surrounding sauce.

Himalaya had one additional surprise in store at the end of the meal. Kulfi, a kind of modified ice cream (it's heavy on milk, which gives it a thick, sliceable texture), was served under a pink rosewater sauce and with a tangle of very long pink noodles. Yes, it seemed off-putting at first -- noodles with ice cream? -- but turned out, once we'd cut the noodles down to manageable length, to be one of the more interestingly textured desserts we'd had in a while. And our waiter didn't even hassle us for ordering kid stuff.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.


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