As the number of our Indian residents continues to grow, restaurants serving the varied cuisine of India open apace. Two of the newest ones are Ras Raj, soon to be called Tamana, An Indian Bistro, and Samosa Factory. Both offer a change from the dominant, typical north-Indian style cuisine.
Ras Raj is housed in a little green shack formerly home to A Bite of India, and the owners have already applied for a name change. When you enter, you pass a glass case stocked with various spiced noodles, lentils and nuts, known as farsan in many parts of India and sold here at $6.95 a pound. Try a bag of masala kaju, spiced, roasted cashews. You may never eat them plain again.
There are also homemade desserts in the case: barfi, fudgy milk sweets; ras gullah, Bengali cheese balls in sweet cream sauce; and several others. Indians eat these when they drink chai, a spiced milk tea sold on nearly every street in the subcontinent. In the middle of the afternoon, you'll probably see people from our local Indian community here, indulging in a sweet and some tea.
But Ras Raj is really the only restaurant in the city that serves an extensive menu of south Indian dishes: dosa, foot-long, fermented rice-flour crepes with savory fillings; idli sambar, rice cakes and lentil broth, the mainstay of the south Indian diet; and uttapam, a semolina pancake that tastes like Cream of Wheat gone ethnic.
This isn't strictly a south Indian restaurant. The menu section called Chat Corner, for instance, has a distinct Bombay (today called Mumbai) feel.
Chat is the Hindi word for "snacks," and many of the chat here are similar to what you'd eat on an Indian beach. Pani puri, for instance, is a basket full of wheat flour crisps; cubes of spicy potato; channa or garbanzo beans; and a sweet-spicy garlic sauce. Use yellow lentils, rice puffs and sev, tiny, crisp noodles from west India, and poof: You've got the snack called bhel puri.
The menu is gigantic, with veg and non-veg fare ranging from chhole bhatura, spiced garbanzo beans on top of puffy fried bread, to undhiyu, literally "upside down" in the Gujurati language, for the way it is prepared, a glorious casserole of eggplant, peppers, potatoes, lentil fritters and several other components.
If you're not sure about what to order, there is a bountiful lunch buffet for only $7.95 that offers dishes from the four Indian compass points.
Meanwhile on the Westside, Samosa Factory, a small, hard-to-spot storefront across from a car dealership, is putting a fresh spin on well-worn, north-Indian fare. The owners, a semi-retired couple from Delhi, are transplants from Washington, D.C., where he was an investment banker and she a nutritionist.
This is a simple place, where Indian crafts compete with pictures of food for wall space. Behind the counter, I spotted a copy of Madhur Jaffrey's A Taste of India, one of the foremost Indian cookbooks. I took this for an encouraging sign, and I was right. The food here is homey, delicious and made to order.
What I didn't know going in is that it tends to be mild, so if you like the heat, ask and ye shall receive. The restaurant takes its name from the samosa, a deep-fried pastry triangle stuffed with spiced potatoes and peas. These samosas, lamb, chicken, beef or traditional vegetarian versions, come with zippy cilantro chutney. They are tasty, but at $3.50 for two and $4.50 for the meat versions, a tad pricey.
Don't expect fancy crockery, either. Food is served in Styrofoam cups, just as it is in simple restaurants in Mother India. The best deal is probably the lunch combo, where you get a vegetable dish like saag or mustard greens; a plain naan, Indian flat bread; rice and pea pullao, a dish of dal, or curried lentils; the cooling yogurt sauce raita; a chopped tomato and cucumber salad; and two chuntneys.
The non-veg combo substitutes chicken curry for the vegetable dish, but either way, it is a sumptuous, complete meal.
Another dish that looked terrific here, but which I did not taste, was the chicken wrap, essentially tandoori (clay oven) chicken in a fresh-baked bread with sauce and vegetables; a bargain at $4.95 because the sandwich is huge. I do give high marks to the rich lamb curry; chicken tikka masala, barbecued cubes of chicken in a tomato, yogurt and onion gravy; and the homemade fruitcake for dessert.
Strawberry lassi, sort of a yogurt-based milk shake, makes it all go down so much easier.