There’s a little mom-and-pop restaurant here in Silicon Valley that has a southern Indian vegetarian lunch buffet. I’m familiar with dishes more recognizable to Americans like butter chicken, lamb vindaloo and tandoori chicken. The place I’m talking about now has an assortment of dishes which change daily as they concentrate on different regions of southern India on different days of the week.
I wish I could memorize the names of dishes, but I didn’t think to take pictures of the labels on the steam table. I can describe a couple of them:
There was a raita-like yogurt dish. Instead of finely chopped vegetables, it had little starchy balls, like dumplings or cereal puffs about the size of garbanzo beans. There were also chili bits and cilantro and it was kind of salty, but not overbearingly so. The label didn’t say “raita”, but again, I couldn’t memorize the Indian name.
There were these fabulous dumplings or fritters a little smaller than an egg, crusty brown on the outside and cakey yellow and crumbly on the inside. They were studded with bits of green beans, carrots and chilis. They were napped in a sauce that was composed of, I believe, peanut puree and coconut milk. Good lord, they were good.
There was a sweet yogurt dish, butter yellow in color. It had saffron in it, and other spices I couldn’t identify. There were chopped cashews all over the top. It was richer than sin, addicting, and should not have been eaten on top of all that other good Indian food.
Do any of these sound identifiable to anyone? I’ll take pictures of the labels next time with my iPhone.
By the way, anyone working in south Silicon Valley, the place is called Dee Dee’s, and I haven’t found better Indian cooking anywhere on the peninsula, and that’s saying something.