Jonathan Golds Review of Indian Restaurants in La
You'd exist happy too if you were getting Mayura'south biryani.; Credit: Photos by Anne Fishbein
Jammed into a strip mall, sharing a parking lot with a doughnut parlor, a kebab house and a check-cashing emporium, Mayura may be the last place you would expect to find a fine Indian restaurant. But merely up the road from the Culver City hamburger stands and Thai restaurants that draw lunching studio workers, not far from divey Indian snack shops, grocery stores and inexpensive vegetarian joints only nowhere near anyplace you might stop for loftier-quality regional Indian cuisine, there is Mayura. On a Fri night, packed with students and the studio crowd, likewise every bit three-generation Indian families, Mayura jams. Women in bright saris gesture with scraps of dosa, small children dash betwixt tables, a flat screen in the corner flashes impossibly saturated Bollywood clips — it's a scene from Cochin, or at least Artesia's Little India neighborhood, merely a few hundred yards from sound stages and slick office buildings.
The diverse schools of south Indian cooking form one of the great cuisines of the world: more often than not vegetarian, intricately spiced, and laced with the flavors of tamarind and kokosnoot, black pepper and cloves, onion, ginger and fermented grains. In big parts of Africa and East Asia, "Indian" food is automatically causeless to be s Indian, and dishes similar avial, iddly and utthapam are equally common equally French fries. Even in Fifty.A.'due south Indian restaurants, y'all are almost every bit likely to see the lentil doughnuts called vada every bit y'all are tandoori craven, and in Artesia's Little India neighborhood the restaurants and snack shops compete on the size of their masala dosa, thin crepes rolled effectually spiced potatoes — some are every bit long and big around as Louisville Sluggers. (Mayura's dosas are as adept equally you're going to see this side of Artesia's Pioneer Boulevard. I similar the one chosen "ghee roast," crisp and saturated with butter, which comes to the table shaped into a kind of gilt-brown dunce cap — there seems to be no stop to the dosa, which if unrolled might extend every bit far as a roll of newspaper towels.)
Mayura specializes in the cooking of Kerala, the strip of southern India that touches the Arabian Ocean, a cosmopolitan region, shaped by a thousand years of spice trading, whose food is influenced past Nayar Hindus, Muslims, Syrian Christians and even an aboriginal customs of Jews. Kerala, sometimes called the Spice Coast, is famous for Malabar black pepper — perhaps the all-time in the world — cinnamon, cardamom and curry leaves, bananas and coconuts. Even if yous have eaten in other local southern Indian restaurants, places serving the famous dishes of Hyderabad and Andhar Pradesh, a lot of the food may exist new to you: appam, saucer-shaped rice-flour pancakes as pure-white as fried snow; complexly spiced fish curry with undernotes of tamarind and garlic; ven pongal, a peppery concoction of rice lashed with cumin, cashews and ungodly amounts of melted butter. You probably have seen avial, a Kerala-manner dish of julienne vegetables sautéed with coconut, which has made it onto many local Indian menus, but Mayura's version is specially good, luscious but still slightly crunchy, as useful equally a condiment equally it is satisfying as a main dish.
Equally an Indian restaurant on the Westside, Mayura is a full-service institution, not serving booze but not objecting when yous bring in your ain, and preparing the usual plates of chicken tikka and lamb korma but cooking them in a separate kitchen so that vegetarians need non fright the errant scrap of flesh in their bisi bele bath. Mayura's cooking is halal, compliant with Islamic dietary laws, and the menu includes Pakistani meat dishes like nehari and haleem, too equally special iftar, postfast buffets during Ramadan (and special Muslim dishes on Fridays), although posters to the message boards at the Muslim food site Zabihah.com complain that the dining room is dotted with Hindu idols. While the eating house specializes in s Indian cooking, a lot of the food seems to come up from the n — the channa bhatura, practically the keepsake of Punjabi vegetarian cooking, is actually ane of the better versions in town, the intense spicing of the chickpea stew balanced past the banal, supple oiliness of the puffy rounds of deep-fried staff of life.
For the most part, though, the dullest cooking in the restaurant tends to be the modified versions of gravy-intensive northern Indian dishes: a gunky chicken tikka masala, fresh Indian cheese swamped in brown goo, lifeless cauliflower cooked with potatoes.
There are certain things yous tin predict almost a meal here. Your tabular array will go littered with little stainless-steel bowls of rasam, a thin, tart curry that seems to come up equally a additive with well-nigh everything in the restaurant, and almost as many bowls of tart mango chutney, shredded-coconut chutney and raita. Y'all will discover that most of the Indians crumble bits of pappadam onto their rice, a crunchy starch-on-starch effect, before they spoon over a curry. You volition, in fact, end up eating a lot of starch: the vada lentil doughnuts; the steamed fermented-rice capsules chosen iddly; the enormous fermented-rice pancakes called utthapam, which almost resemble deep-dish pizza when y'all get them topped with vegetables and cheese. If they happen to be offering the special Kerala-way biryani — your best bet is on weekends — order information technology without question. The fluffiness of the rice and the sharpness of the spicing are superb.
Mayura, 10406 Venice Blvd., Culver Urban center, (310) 559-9644 or www.mayurarestaurant.com. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-10 p.g. No alcohol. Takeout, delivery and catering. Lot parking. Amex, MC, V. Dinner for 2, food simply, $16-$thirty. Recommended dishes: appam with Kerala fish curry; ven pongal; avial; utthapam.
Source: https://www.laweekly.com/mayuras-flavors-of-kerala/
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