Diva Indian Bistro

A new Indian joint as precious as its name

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Diva Indian Bistro 246 Elm Street (Davis Square), Somerville Open daily, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. AE, MC, Visa No liquor (617) 629-4963 Street-level access

Indian restaurants are often the funky colonizers of hip downscale neighborhoods such as Central Square and the East Fenway, so it comes as a surprise to see an Indian restaurant pushing the limits of chic in an already gentrified area. Diva opened last month on a corner of Davis Square in a high-ceilinged space that would seem impressive in the Back Bay, never mind two doors down from Buck A Book. The booths are striped, with embroidered throw cushions for accent; the chandeliers sweep down in billows of beige fabric; and the bar -- which does not actually serve any drinks -- glows from its translucent backlit wall, illuminating rows of clear and cobalt goblets. It looks like a photograph in a travel magazine.

The kitchen has a pedigree to fit the design. Diva is owned by the Singh-Pabla family, an intricate network whose flagship is the excellent Kashmir, on Newbury Street. They're gearing up to open another place this summer, an Indian-French fusion restaurant downtown, and Diva is clearly a rest stop on the road to big-time swankiness.

Foodwise, however, it's nothing unusual: a buck or two more than you might expect to pay for Indian food, but then you don't usually eat curry in surroundings like these. Dinner starts with free papadums and two relishes to dip them in. In keeping with the general atmosphere of the place, the papadums come in a trendy wire basket, the accompanying relishes -- tamarind sauce and onion chutney -- in two copper dishes placed in a quirky brass rack.

We worked our way through a non-vegetarian appetizer sampler ($9.95) -- as is often the case, the tandoori meats were slightly dry, the kefta (ground-meat sausage) mild. A potato pakora, a triangular fried dumpling, was stuffed with a nicely aromatic mix of spices. The best part of the appetizer platter, I thought, was on the side: an excellent little dipping bowl of light, fresh mint chutney.

Oh yes. We interrupt this broadcast to point out that Diva has the best lassi I have ever had. Lassi ($3.25) is the yogurt-based drink that you order to cut the heat when a restaurant does not (as unfortunately is the case here) serve beer. The mango version comes with a big slice of mango stuck on the rim of the glass, and the salted version is a stylish -- and not very salty -- white beverage absolutely swimming in crushed mint. The salted lassi can be a bit of an acquired taste, but with this version it's awfully easy to acquire.

With a couple of exceptions, almost every Indian restaurant in the city has the same entrée menu, and Diva is not one of the exceptions. There are a few southern Indian dishes, as a nod to current fashion, but they're just window-dressing on a northern Indian foundation.

Here we tried a couple of standards: a buttery, rich chicken tikka masala ($11.95); decent enough saag paneer, the popular spinach curry with chunks of farmer cheese ($10.95). All the curries come with rice, and if you order enough the rice comes in a nifty copper-lidded pot. The only dish we tried from the southern Indian menu was the masala dosa ($8.50), a tangy rolled pancake stuffed with potato chunks. Though the scale of the thing was impressive -- it was easily a foot long -- I found the texture a little more stiff and chewy than I usually like.

People worry a lot about the heat level of Indian food -- will it burn my mouth? -- but my experience is that Indian restaurants around Boston err on the side of mildness. In the world of Indian spiciness, the great test piece is lamb vindaloo: the Goan vindaloo sauce is all vinegar and tomato and heat, and the fat in the lamb keeps it lingering in the mouth. But lamb vindaloo here ($11.95), even ordered "spicy," didn't exactly force us to reach for the water glass. This is great news if you like your food mild, but if you believe -- as I do -- that a nice consistent chili heat is part of the pleasure of Indian food, you're in for a middle-of-the-road experience.

Diva's cousin Kashmir serves a really wonderful sizzling rack of tandoori lamb; it's a pricey dish, but delicious. We ordered the closest thing we could find at Diva: a lamb-chop special called "barrara lamb" (at $17.95, the most expensive thing on the menu). It was pretty great -- three thick chops arrived sizzling on a pewter platter, with sliced onions and a piece of naan bread. We cut through the seared outside of each chop to find the lamb tender inside, and gratifyingly rare -- an excellent piece of meat, and very much the sort of showpiece you'd expect in flashy surroundings like these.

As mentioned, there are no alcoholic drinks at Diva, but there are a few desserts. We had a coconut sorbet ($4.95), served cutely in half a coconut, and also kulfi ($3.50), the rich "Indian ice cream" of rosewater and frozen milk. The ice cream protruded, curiously, upward from the plate in a sort of slanted cone shape, like the dummy fingers used to display rings at jewelry counters. It was quirky, but in a good way.

The service was quirky in a not-so-good way. I admit the service at Indian restaurants sometimes weirds me out, especially when the waiters are obsequious to the point where you wonder if there's something going on. Here, the hospitality was pretty much confined to the greeting from the hostess and the frequent attentions of the water guy, whose dedication to his job amazed us. But the rest of the operation was rockier. On both visits, one person took our order, another delivered the food, and then both took turns ignoring us. Once we didn't get an appetizer, which later appeared on the bill (it was quietly removed); and we ate our dessert on a conspicuously unwiped table scattered with bits of meat and rice. The service isn't bad enough to be insulting, but in a restaurant this nice, charging $12 for a dish of chicken tikka, you notice it. I've heard the lunch buffet ($6.95 weekdays, $9.95 weekends) is excellent, and you can skip the being-waited-on part entirely.

I checked on the name, by the way: it does not, as you might think, have to do with anyone's attitude. "Diva" is a type of candle.

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

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