Welcome to All India Cafe

Tucked in a small storefront on Fair Oaks Avenue, just off Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, All India Cafe may be difficult to spot from the road. But to strollers ambling by, the enticing scent of fresh-ground spices wafting out the door makes this casual little cafe hard to resist.
    The chef-owner is Santokh Singh, former chef at Bombay Cafe in Santa Monica. From the small open kitchen, Singh is turning out vibrant homemade chutneys, crisp golden samosas, enticing Indian street snacks and dishes like Bombay chicken (poached in spices, then sautéed in mango powder and Chile, so the flavor goes all the way to the bone) and lamb frankies (sort of an Indian burrito filled with a complexly spiced lamb masala). His bhel puri a snack of puffed rice., potatoes, onions and crisp broken noodles tossed with chutneys and lime, is terrific-sour and hot and crisp all at the same time. I like the tikka masala, too, tender morsels of tandoor-cooked chicken in a sumptuous sauce of tomato and yogurt perfumed with ginger and fenugreek leaves. That dish alone is enough to make me want to eat my way through the rest of the menu.
    For dessert, he makes a fabulous kulfi, Indian ice cream flavored with pistachios and cardamom, and a startlingly delicious fresh ginger ice cream. Oh, and a wonderful soupy rice pudding infused with green cardamom.
    If only I lived a little closer.

Some diners like it hot, hot, hot
Dining out with Merrill Shindler - Cheers!

I am married to a woman who shrieks and gasps when confronted with spicy food. In restaurants where dishes have a penchant for being hot, she has me taste the food first. The problem is that I have a ridiculously high tolerance for things peppery.
So as a rule, I'll taste something, tell her it's not so spicy' and then watch as she runs around the room like some sort of cartoon character with smoke coming out of its extremities while it sucks down gallons of water. My wife may not like her dishes hot, but I sure do. Variety may be the spice of life, but for me spice gives variety to food.
Perhaps because the weather been so unseasonably hot I've been in the mood for some serious spice. And I found it, in two of our most reliably spicy cuisines - the always fiery pillar and post of Indian and Mexican.

All India Cafe
    The All India Cafe, which sits south of Colorado in the midst of Old Town Pasadena, is an optimistically named enterprise with dishes that touch on many regions of India, though I suspect including dishes from all of India would involve creating an encyclopedic menu, marking cooking of Gujarat from Saraswat and of Haryana from Rajasthan.
    But many of the major regions are covered here - the Mogul cooking of the north, the vegetarian cooking of the south, the panirs and dals, of the east, and the sweet dishes of the west.
    The various puns appear an the appetizer section of the menu, which has enough distinctive dishes to make a meal of nothing but appetizers (along with some breads and condiments) a perfectly decent notion. Puri usually refers to whole wheat puffed bread . But in this case, it seems to mean any bread that's been puffed.
    Sev puri is a rather madcap mix of crunchy wafers mixed with onions, potatoes, noodles, chutney and cilantro - a sort of Indian bridge mix. Bhel puri is similar, with the addition of puffed rice and lime juice.
    The puris go well aloo tikki, a potato pancake flavored with onions and tamarind sauce. There's also uttapam, a dish that's ubiquitous in the markets of Bombay, a griddle cake of creamed wheat, flavored with tomatoes, onions and cilantro.

Photo by CHERYL HIMMELSTEIN
ALL INDIA CAFE is run by, from left, Lakhvir, Santoh and Gurdial Singh.

Old India hands will know their way around the various tandooris, the multitude of vegetarian dishes (the kabuli cholay from the Pun jab takes chickpeas to a surprisingly high level of incarnation), and the sundry thali (combinations served in small bowls). [....]

Like Jozu and Yujean Kang's, Pasadena's All India Cafe does wondrous things with eggplant, a vegetable that has been cultivated in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. Take the "eggplant salad" at Pasadena's All India Cafe, so easy to overlook among the alluring samosas, pakoras, and tandoori specialties. As the menu explains, it is "sautéed Japanese eggplant topped with a seasoned tomato sauce and ginger yogurt." But however you imagine that might taste, it doesn't prepare you for the mouth-warming, head-spinning sting of ginger and garlic and the richness of the tomato sauce with its musky kari leaves. Ginger and tomato also figure in the smoky baigan bharta, a puree of tandoor-charred eggplant-no less delicious, but different. And so the menu goes, surprising us even with so mundane a food as puréed spinach, which, studded with potatoes or the fresh homemade cheese called paneer, would captivate the most rebellious child. Such is the magic of spices. Eating the food of sorcerer Santokh Singh at his new café, you understand why Indian cooking is as much alchemy as art.

All India Cafe's carrot, raisin, and almond pudding (above) and Samosas (below).

    The only comparable Indian restaurant in the city is the Westside's Bombay Cafe, where Singh was chef for seven years. He cooks more curries here-"the home-style dishes you can cat every day," he explains-and he prefers a "normal" heat level so that fire doesn't extinguish flavor. After all, it isn't it scared mouth you want to remember front an Indian meal but the way the tastes and textures play off one another, and ordering wisely takes some thought. One day our waiter (most likely one of Singh's relatives, as it is a family-run business) was quick to note that we'd chosen "everything dry, nothing wet," a mistake quickly rectified with chicken makhni robed in a saffron tomato sauce so good that we carne close to scrapping over the last drop. Hot from the tan door, naan sprinkled with garlic and coriander is a must, and, though fresh chutneys of coconut, mango, tomato, tamarind, and mint arrive with various dishes, even an extra order never seems to be enough. To drink? Indian beers, Alderbrook Gewurztraminer or Chardonnay, spiced and iced Indian tea, and various yogurt-based lassis.
    As At Bombay Cafe, the favorite starters are the Indian street-food snacks. You eat sev poori in one bite, picking up a crisp homemade cracker heaped with Chutney-laced potatoes, coriander, and crisp chick-pea-flour noodles. Bhelpoori is the same idea but with puffed basmati rice. Shrimp pakora with a gossamer rice coating and potato- and pea-filled samosas are notably light. And there are interesting pancakes-the cream-of-wheat with uttapam with a lively medley of tomatoes and onions; the crisp potato-filled masala dosa (made with rice and lentil flour), a ideal in itself with a bowl of lentil soup. Everyone falls for the lamb "frankie" a terrific tortilla-wrapped lamb masala.
    The tandorri meats (lamb boti kebab is irresistible) are predictably first-rate. But the sleeper is Singh's Bombay chicken, poached with a dozen or so spices, then sautéed with several more (including powdered sun-dried green mango added at the last moment) that penetrate the meat to the bone.
    We'd be reciting a different nursery rhyme if Mary Jane had tasted the creamy rice pudding scented with green cardamom and, for variety's sake, the warm pudding of grated carrot, raisins, and almonds. We'd all cry for the mango, ginger, or pistachio kulfi (Indian ice cream) that so deliciously cools the throat.

Bombay Cafe, an insanely popular restaurant in a Westside mini-mall, changed the way a lot of Angelenos think about Indian cuisine. Some food guys even think Bombay Cafe did for Indian food what Spago did for Mediterranean Cooking: modernized it, intensified the flavors, introduced California-style ingredient fetishes to a cuisine traditionally, more involved with the complexity of spicing than with the provenance of the vegetables. Bombay Cafe's cooking is undeniably lighter than what you find at the ghee-soaked "authentic" places in Artesia and Cerritos. Many people though there are in consider it the few Indians among the best Indian restaurant in Los Angeles.
    Now there is All India Cafe, a new Bombay Cafe spinoff in the most restaurant-intensive corner of old Town Pasadena a spare, handsome storefront decorated with Indian textiles and plants. Ali India Cafe is already crowded most of the time, with engineering executives afternoons and date-night couples in the evening; the $4.95 lunch specials sometimes see lines snaking out the door.
    The conceit here is that the restaurant Serves dishes from each of the regions of India - tandoori meats from the north and dosas front the south; Gujarati salads and Bombay-style uttapam - filtered through the soft-focus lens of the All India kitchen and washed with sweet chutneys and herb. But Indian cooking is one of the most intensely regional on earth, and expecting a chef to master the dishes of all the country Is regions is like expecting a European chef to be equally fluent with peppery Sicilian pastas and sott Belgian senpfeffer and bouillabaisse.
    Masala dosa, for example, probably the best-known of the vegetarian dishes of South India and the house specialty of every Indian sweet shop in town, is kind of a washout here. The fermented-rice crepe, the dosa, should be thin as a sheet of parchment, with a pressed sheen and a definite crackle, but All India's version is as stodgy , is a Bisquick hotcake; the spiced potato filling is pallid; the lentil sambhar, which is to south Indian pancakes what maple syrup is to American ones, is soothing and hearty rather than thin and ferociously spiced. The masala dosa isn't bad at All India - if you've never had a proper version of the dish it might strike you as a brilliant take on the form of a veggie burrito - but it has few of the textural contrasts that make masala dosa potentially one of the world's greatest dishes.
    Bhel Puri, the famous Gujarati snack of toasted grains, comes across here more or less as an exotically spiced CrisPix Mix tossed with chutney, cilantro and chopped onion; sev puri throws a handful of Wheat Thins into the Mix. The famous Punjabi dish of puréed spinach with fresh Indian cheese seemed wan, without the developed flavor that can sometimes send the dish over the top. (Shahi paneer, on the other hand, the same cheese cooked in a gentle sauce of spices and peanut butter, is swell.)
    Tandoor-baked breads, various naans and parathas and chapatis, have been limp and bland, something I might not have noticed if I hadn't been eating a lot lately at Muslim restaurants specializing in the clay-oven breads, which are best when they are crisp and sizzling with smoky flavor. Tandoor-cooked meats were mostly mushy, overmarinated, though for some reason they seemed to come out better on the tandoori combination plate than they did individually, and the lamb, moist and crusted with spice, is really fine.
    But All India is usually at its best when you bring the fewest preconceptions to the table, when the food least resembles its regional roots. The restaurant s signature dish is probably the "frankie," a Bombay street snack that Bombay Cafe brought to California and perfected - sort of a thick flour tortilla with an egg sizzled onto it, wrapped around a filling of sweet, tamarind - laced lamb, stewed chicken or fried cauliflower. A frankie and a bottle of beer you couldn't ask for a better lunch. I like the Bombay chicken, which could break through as an Indian - spiced analogue to, say, kung - pao chicken without the nuts. Tikka masala, boneless bits of chicken drowned in fenugreek - flavored cream, is the sort of thing a Chasen's chef might have come up with on a good day in 1956.
    It's a pleasant place to be, the All India Cafe, the sitar music low enough to talk over, the service prompt, the general vibe relaxed . (The waiters are great with kids - you try explaining to a 2-year-old that garlic naan is really, just pizza.) in addition to the thick, sweet lassis you might expect at any decent Indian restaurant, there are sharp homemade lemonade, pungent Indian iced tea, and big bottles of Taj Mahal beer, which has a smokiness you might associate with a decent Islay Scotch. All India understands.

More Than Currying Favor
Chef Santokh Singh has surfaced in Pasadena, where he is reworking his magic at the All India Cafe.

COUNTER INTELLIGENCE

BY CHARLES PERRY - L.A. TIMES STAFF WRITER

Sometimes, you've just got to rave. An inconspicuous Pasadena spot with the nothing name All India Cafe is one of the two best Indian restaurants to open in years.
    In the last eight years, to be exact, because the other was Bombay Cafe over on the Westside in Sawtelle, where All India's chef, Santokh Singh, used to work. So the news here is really the same news as at Bombay Cafe (the menus are just about identical): Instead of the heavy, repetitiously spiced Mughlai curries served in most Indian restaurants, All India has light, crunchy snacks and brightly flavored dishes you can actually tell apart.
    This is a modest place - despite several visits, I have no memory at all of what it looks like - but the food is classy. At most of our Indian restaurants, you'd never know that saffron is a traditional Indian spice, but All India is generous with it. The buttery tomato sauce on the chicken makhni had so much saffron aroma I found myself vaguely thinking of it as a French or Italian seafood dish.
    You definitely want to start with appetizers here. The two snappiest ones build on crisp little wafers topped with potato chunks mixed with a couple of chutneys (tamarind flavor predominating). Sev puri crowns this with orange fried vermicelli made from chickpea flour, bhel puii with a mound of puffed rice. Sev puri is handsomer and wins in the crunchiness category, but bhel puri seems to be the one people can't stop eating.
    The other appetizers (apart from the only mildly interesting potato pancakes called aloo tikki and uttapam, a sort of chewy South Indian pizza served with coconut chutney) are the familiar potato - stuffed samosa and deep - fried vegetable pakoras. The onion pakora is a good one, though. Think of Tony Roma's fried onions accompanied by a sweet tomato sauce spiked with turmeric.
    There are tandoori entrees, naturally, and they're good and charcoaly (the chicken tikka particularly so, and for once the tandoori chicken is not dyed red with beet juice). There's a spice - crusted shish kebab and a tandoori platter with three kinds of meat. You can get chicken on a thali platter, that shiny metal Indian TV dinner tray, with lentils, cucumber salad, vegetables and tandoori bread.
But this is one place where the non - tandoori entrees are even more tempting. The "frankies," for instance: curried lamb, chicken or cauliflower, rolled up in a flour tortilla, burrito fashion, and garnished with crisp, brightly colored chunks of pickled carrots and cauliflower.
    Tikka masala is one of several dishes that are cooked in the tandoor and then, stewed in a spicy sauce, in this case a cream sauce. It's the closest thing here to the usual Mughlai curry, but the spicing is a bit more lively. There are straightforward curries, and good ones. Ask for them hot, by the way, and the kitchen complies enthusiastically (a good argument for ordering one of those 22 - ounce bottles of Indian beer).
    The curry of the day is always worth investigating. One day it was chicken dhansak, a variation on that cliché of the London - style Indian menu, lamb dhansak: meat stewed with lentils and vegetables. It was a little on the sweet side but lighter on its feet than most dhansaks.

SPICY: The curried lamb frankie is rolled up in a flour tortilla like a burrito.

     For my money, the best thing here is Bombay chicken, which started showing up at Bombay Cafe as a special a couple of years ago. The chicken is poached with onions and spices and then stir - fried with mango powder, coriander and cayenne. (This much the menu admits, but it doesn't explain a sweet aroma like coconut.) It's a fascinating dish, more tender than tandoori chicken, more fragrant than a curry.
    There's a large selection of tandoor breads, of course, including a version that encloses a thin patty of spicy ground lamb. It's worth ordering a selection of the fresh - tasting sweet chutneys (the mango, mixed fruit and coconut varieties are more vivid than the tomato chutney)?
    Instead of the usual heavy Indian sweets based on ultra - condensed milk and syrup, the dessert menu limits itself to kulfi, kheer and gajar halwa. These translate as ice cream, rice pudding and carrot pudding, but only the ice cream is what you expect. You have a choice of pistachio (very rich, flavored with cardamom), ginger (fairly intense) and mango (real fruit flavor) kultis.
    The rice pudding is like a bowl of sweetened cream with cardamom and ground rice in it - a surprisingly light and clean - tasting kheer. And gajar halwa, usually a heavy, buttery carrot paste, is light, crumbly and not too sweet, with a lively citrus aroma.
This may not be news in Sawtelle, but it is in Pasadena, and in fact nearly everywhere else.

BE THERE

Instead of
the heavy,
repetitiously
spiced
Mughlall
curries
served In
most Indian
restaurants,
All India has
light,
crunchy
snacks and
brightly flavored
dishes you
can actually
tell apart.