Factoria's Taste of India

Even in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown, I kick myself for not scraping together every penny I owned to buy a few shares of Google stock when it went public in 2004. Not only because I would have been a multi-thousandaire by now, but because the damn thing practically owns me. I credit the search engine, along with two obsessive foodie friends, for helping me figure out what I should order at Curry Leaf, a new Indian restaurant across the street from Factoria Mall.

Ben and Hannah hunt down out-of-the-way places even more assiduously than I do, and they've been responsible for a few good finds over the years. One day, while we were e-mailing back and forth about dinner plans, Ben suggested Curry Leaf, enclosing a link to the menu and a teaser: "I think they serve Keralan food." A man after my own heart, he'd been plugging the names of the menu's unfamiliar dishes into Google to see what came up. And "kappa with fish curry," "parota with salna," and "vermicelli payasam" seemed to come from India's southeastern coastal state. If there's such a thing as restaurant-critic crack, it's a new flavor, something unexpected, the hint of a dare.

The rush of discovery might never have hit if the three of us hadn't done our research by the time we arrived at the strip-mall restaurant. While Curry Leaf's menu gives many clues that the restaurant specializes in South Indian food, it's also full of red herrings.

To explain what those are, bear with me for a couple of paragraphs before I get to the food: India's many cuisines are as dramatically varied as those on the European continent. Just as you could draw a vaguely useful line dividing the cuisines of Germany and Eastern Europe from those of the Mediterranean countries, you could draw a similar one between the north and south halves of the Indian subcontinent. North Indian restaurants—where many of us are used to getting our tandoori meats, puffy wheat breads, and curries enriched with yogurt, ground nuts, and ghee—are more prominent in the States. Meanwhile, southern restaurants are where you go for gigantic, papery crepes known as dosas; lentil-and-rice steamed dumplings and fried donuts called idlies and vadas; the tangy lentil soup called sambar; and the predominant spices of coconut, mustard seed, and curry leaf.

Complicating the picture, most of the South Indian restaurants on the Eastside don't stick to their culinary borders, since non-Indian diners tend to get sketched out if they can't find their palak paneer and butter chicken. Udupi Palace and Mysore Masala hew more closely to southern food, but the menus at Mayuri, Spice Route, and Curry Leaf are all over the place. At Curry Leaf, you can order a Punjabi classic like baingan bartha with Muslim boti kabobs and an Indo-Chinese dish mysteriously named "chicken 65." (Just a hint here, based on experience: I'd rather eat at Panda Express for a week than try gloopy, mushy Indo-Chinese food one more time.) When Ben, Hannah, and I started asking the owner about the Keralan connection, he shut us down with "We serve food from all over India—north, south, all over."

The few northern dishes I tried at Curry Leaf—lifeless naan, a bland hariyali kofta curry, and a merely pleasant stir-fried "kadai vegetables"—seemed to back up my sense that the South was where it was at. Therein, the three sections of the menu where we Google-enabled diners found the highest concentration of southern and Keralan-specific dishes were in the "Curry Leaf Specialties," "Curry Leaf Combos," and "South Indian Specialties" (duh).

I can get channa masala and Kashmiri naan at 20 places in Seattle, but I'd certainly drive back to Bellevue for Curry Leaf's kappa with fish curry. "Kappa" turned out to be a mass of seasoned cassava root, starchier and blander than potato, which was mashed and then fried. We dipped crisp-edged blobs of it through a soupy, spice-reddened coconut-milk curry, bathing the starch in a slightly tangy, sweet-edged sauce.

A similar reaction was elicited by the goat curry, whose impact was more of a body rush than a palate-prickler. We fished chunks of the red meat out of their brick-red paste, threaded here and there with pinkie-size red chiles and curry leaves. Despite the signs of heat, the curry had a dense fragrance beyond mere spiciness.

If a theme emerged from the meal, it was the ubiquity of curry leaf, which to me tastes somewhere between bay leaf, black olive, and toasted chickpea (the herb has no relation to "curry powder," other than the fact that its Hindi name, kari patta, sounds like "curry.") Curry leaf was also ground into a pesto and smeared thinly on the insides of the curry-leaf dosa, where its nutty-citrusy aroma tinged an excellent crepe. We tore off bits of the dosa, glossy brown and crackly on its pan-cooked side, and either dipped them into sambar or swabbed them through a trio of chutneys: toasty, rich coconut chutney; fire-red "gunpowder" chile puree; and a dark-brown paste of toasted pulses and spices that I found bitter and burnt. At the apex of the fanned dosa folds was a lump of spiced potatoes mixed with crunchy pulses.