Southern Spice

🇮🇳 INDIA
📍 15651 Hawthorne Blvd., Lawndale, South Bay
🅿️ Ample parking in plaza
🥤 No Alcohol
🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

When you dine at many Southern Indian restaurants in the United States, they usually have a more specific regional specialty and some other dishes thrown in for good measure. But Southern Spice lives up to its broad name with a lively menu full of regional southern biryanis, chicken 65 from Hyderabad, Tamil-style vegetarian plates that remind you of your time in Chennai, and even some northern tandoori dishes for the diners that would feel uncomfortable without at least some on the menu.

The weekday buffet ($17.95) seems pretty standard, but fresh rotis do keep coming out of the kitchen and its popularity probably hints at how good it is. On Weekends, it fills up with even more selections and gets more special, a definite coup for residents that live nearby. After multiple visits, it appeared that every single (mostly South Asian) diner was here for the buffet and not ordering from the menu.

One stand out dish that will be hard to pass on in future visits because it is frighteningly good is called Vijayawada chicken biryani ($16.99, below), named for the city in Andhra Pradesh it hails from. The vibrant spices of the dish are overlaid onto chicken which has a tartness from being marinated in lemon and yogurt. The final dish is also just a bit sweet from fried nuts being added to the sauce.

This is all placed over rice which is cooked separately in this style. Despite being named for one city, the dish is enjoyed all over the state of Andhra Pradesh and beyond, having been adapted from its more famous neighbor in Hyderabad. Recommended.

On weekends, you can travel further south in Tamil Nadu almost to the southern tip of India for another famous biryani. Dindigul thalappakatti biryani ($17.99, above) is a baby goat meat biryani that uses short grain seeraga semba rice, and is one of those dishes where you get a nod of approval from the manager when ordered. Seeraga semba almost looks like broken rice, but this is the full grain and beloved in many parts of Tamil Nadu.

The city of Dindigul is well-known for this biryani style and also its agricultural economy. If you travel there from the high-tech cities of Hyderabad and Bengaluru, it seems like a trip into a completely different world. There are of course many specialists of this biryani in the city, all with their own recipe and slight variations.

Vegetarian and vegan diners usually feel at home in Southern Indian restaurants, but the spices and flavors here are more than just common Tamil stews. The list of 12 vegetarian entrees (some have cheese and are not vegan) all have specific tastes and none are afterthoughts. Common masala dishes like aloo gobi masala ($12.95, above rear) and bhindi masala ($12.95, above front) will act to freshen up your life when these orders seem boring at many takeout restaurants outside of Artesia.

The ennai kathirikai ($13.95, below) is a standout Tamil eggplant curry that should be ordered even by meat lovers. The "gravy" of this dish is full of roasted peanuts, spices, and coconut, and also has a moderate sourness from tamarind. It is another eye-opening flavor coming from this very talented kitchen.

It was clear the manager of Southern Spice also has a taste for northern flavors, on both visits that took place for this article he steered the table toward the tandoori fish ($15.99, above). Tandoori appetizers like this are of course enjoyed all over India these days, so it makes sense for the restaurant to offer some. The fish is no slouch, stuffed full of spicy pastes that permeate every bite when cooked.

He also recommended the kadai options the restaurant offers, and these are no let down either. The goat kadai ($17.99, below) is named for the deep vessel (think a wok without the long handle) it is cooked in, which you may see as karahi depending on where you are dining. The bone-in chunks of goat are even tastier here than in the biryani above, and as with all non-veg and veg entrees, comes with a good portion of basmati.

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Maghreb Apron

🇩🇿 ALGERIA
📍 10817 Venice Blvd., Palms, Westside
🅿️ Parking lot behind store
🥤 No Alcohol
🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

EDITOR'S NOTE: This new vendor does catering orders and is now popping up in the West LA International Market, where this article is based on. Please check with them for hours/locations.

For the most part, the food of the Maghreb in Los Angeles has so far been limited to some Moroccan kitchens around town, with a small sprinkling of Tunisian, Libyan, and Algerian if you look really closely. This collection of countries in Northern Africa known as al-Maghrib in Arabic, meaning the west, has its own distinct flavors taking in centuries of influence from Arab, Berber, and European Mediterranean countries across the sea.

A new Algerian-owned business has recently started popping up to offer the cuisine of this region at Venice Blvd's West LA International Market, which has served the Westside's halal eating communities for quite some time. Using the name of the region for the business rather than one country, the flavors and ingredients are also a reflection of this larger identity.

For the past two weekends, the business has popped up here on Fridays and Saturdays, a small steam table with prepared foods that are assembled when customers come to order. A set menu of couscous and rice dishes is complemented by a soup and dessert that rotate from day to day. The chef also has weekly meal services and catering that you can take advantage of through social media if you love everything and need more.

The menu lists four different types of couscous available: vegetables, chicken, lamb, and something the chef calls couscous royal that combines all three with merguez. A display of couscous with lamb was sat on the counter in a tagine (above), so this seemed a natural place to start, but the kofta and rice dish as well as both daily specials were ordered to create a full meal that in reality was more than two.

Feel free to start with dessert, which on this day was a lovely basboussa ($5, above top left), a semolina cake that is moist with syrup and spiked with orange flower water. This spongy treat will satisfy your sweet tooth while not overdoing it, the toasted almonds on top deliver the final crunch necessary to round the whole thing off.

The couscous with lamb ($23, below) itself comes with two meaty sections of shank, which have obviously been cooking elsewhere for quite some time as the meat is easily separated from the bone and very tender. A section each of cucumber, carrot, and potato have also been cooking for quite a while with the meat, and chickpeas and deliciously sweet white raisins round out the toppings for the dish. A small container of harissa will be in your takeout bag, and feel free to stir in spicy ribbons of this into your couscous for an added kick.

The most simple menu item is probably the rice & beef kofta balls ($18, above), but the rice is far from simple and flavored with what might be an entire spice cabinet. The beef meatballs retain a bit of the tomato sauce they come out of, and the whole meal is supremely comforting. Every grain of rice was eventually extracted from the container and enjoyed.

The soup of the day ($7, below) this past Friday was harira, a tomato-based stew thickened with flour and full of chickpeas and lentils. The flavor of onions and garlic are in every bite, and this may have the most spices possible without being even a hint spicy. Grab a portion of this if she has it, memories of eating it on travels in North Africa will come right back to you after just one taste.

Harira is eaten in both Morocco and Algeria, but Algerian chefs usually omit the lentils making this more of the Moroccan variety. The chef will probably tell you it is her style though, not that of any one country, as even tasting each harira at a night market will give you quite a lot of variety in recipes. Squirt in a bit of fresh lemon juice right before eating if you have it, break off a piece of bread, and enjoy every drop.

For the time being, Maghreb Apron plans to be continuing these Friday and Saturday pop-ups at the market (below), so find her in the afternoon either of those days in coming weeks. You get the sense that bigger things will come soon for her business, so this is your chance to get a taste before everyone else is crowding the future restaurant.

West LA International Market

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Kobee Factory and Syrian Kitchen

🇸🇾 SYRIA
📍 14110 Oxnard Street, Van Nuys, San Fernando Valley
🅿️ A few spots in front
🥤 No Alcohol
🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

If you are driving in the Valley these days and see a plume of smoke rising over the next block, it is often a good idea to slow down from your highway cruising speeds and prepare to pull over for one of many Armenian barbecue stands that seem ubiquitous. But on this section of Oxnard Street the smoke is more likely to be the byproduct of an automotive repair shop, seen in all directions surrounding this restaurant, which acts like a bit of an oasis.

When Kobee Factory and Syrian Kitchen opened in late 2014, it immediately became a place much of the Syrian community of the San Fernando Valley came to for sustenance and home cooking. This love found in its cooking was later revealed to the rest of Los Angeles through the generous article the late Jonathan Gold wrote in 2017 for the Los Angeles Times.

Next to the Norias of Hama, the proprietor's photo with the smiling food writer still hangs on the wall, a bit faded along with many of the subsequent articles that came waxing nostalgic about this mostly takeout shop in Van Nuys. A more recent Times Valley map from 2019 and "Best of the Southland" award from 2022 have more color left in them and show the longevity of the restaurant.

If you are coming to Kobee Factory on your own, plan to properly sit down and enjoy your food at its freshest. They do a good job cutting holes in packaging to reduce steaming, and keep the hummus away from the hot items, but unlike a platter of kebabs and rice, much of the food here is better immediately. The fresh salad will be crisp, and that hummus will be smooth and excellent if it only has to travel from the kitchen to your table.

Before moving onto the main entrees, you may notice a couple breakfast items like fatee ($9.99, above top left), which loads hummus and chickpeas on a bed of thin pita shards. After recently enjoying this a lot at Nawal, just the sight of it on a menu led to an intense craving. Mix in the spices on top before enjoying and you will wonder why there is a full aisle of breakfast cereal boxes at every supermarket in the country.

As Gold describes in his article, there are many ways to say the namesake food depending on the country or region you are saying it in, but the family here say "kobee" to describe theirs. Even Wikipedia transliterates this word as "kubbi" when talking about the Syrian version, but Angelenos are probably more familiar with it written as "kibbeh." The city of Aleppo was always famous for having two dozen or so varieties of preparations of the dish, and a few of these are available here in Van Nuys.

The first on the menu is called kobee barbecue ($16.99, above), grilled hockey puck-sized discs of ground beef mixed with and surrounded with bulgur before hitting the grill. The mixture inside is nutty and citrus-y, and has the subtle essence of cinnamon and other spices. The kobee fried ($16.99, not shown) comes as the more familiar fat teardrops put in the deep fryer, but regardless of which you choose also grab a small yogurt salad ($5.99, not shown) for dipping.

Gold wrote off the shawarma without much thought in his review, but in the years since quite a few reviewers who spent parts of their life in Syria had much better things to say. It is certainly not guaranteed for success, but "Food X takes me straight back to Place Y" in a review always raises excitement levels. On a recent visit, a chicken shawarma wrap ($10.99, below) was unavoidable due to cravings, and was even better than expected after reading these good things.

The sandwich is decidedly juicy with garlic sauce and the drippings of the pickles and tomatoes. This is all well contained by the house-made bread, which reads somewhere between a cross of thin pita and roti, both strong and delicious. This is one of the best chicken shawarma wraps enjoyed in recent years, and will be hard to resist on follow-up visits to Kobee Factory.

Success can sometimes be fleeting for restaurants, a rush of business always follows important exposure but eventually calms back down for most places. Thankfully the mother and daughter chefs of this Syrian kitchen took it all in stride and never changed their process. Nine years after first opening, the food is as good as ever and only seems like it will continue this way in the future.

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Plate50LA Indian & Sri Lankan Restaurant

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA
📍 2411 W. Olympic Blvd., Westlake, Central Los Angeles
🅿️ Very small parking lot for plaza
🥤 No Alcohol

🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

EDITOR'S NOTE: This meal was enjoyed in a dine-in situation but it should be noted that wait times, despite being the first customers, were much higher than average for food to arrive. If this is something that will be a problem for you, try delivery as drivers seemed to be coming in constantly to pick up orders and those meals were all ready to go out the door.

Back in June when Plate50LA first opened, eyes were opened wide to see the addition of another Sri Lankan kitchen in Los Angeles, especially for those centrally located. For their first few months of operation the business was only available via pickup and delivery, but recently their tiny bare-bones dining room has been opened for dine-in service. The brightly lit space still seems like a ghost kitchen pickup lobby as drivers come and go, but if you have the time, you can enjoy your meals fresh and avoid adding another stack of styrofoam to the city dump.

About an hour after opening on a recent weekday, the chairs were still on top of the three tables available but were promptly put down when asked if eating in was an option. The smells were a hint that the kitchen had already been making quite a bit of food, and immediately made any feelings of hunger triple. Orders were placed, chairs were settled in, and the anticipation built.

And as the note at the top describes, it kept building. And enough time passed that expectations started to go down as confidence fell. Thankfully once food did start arriving, it was all excellent and proof of an enormously talented chef. People in the area will probably benefit the most from the wide array of Indian classics that are assuredly executed very well, but hopefully they eventually find their way to the Sri Lankan items that pepper each section of the menu.

The best portal straight back to your memories in Sri Lanka is an order of any of the deep-fried goodies that you see in so many storefronts and probably ate multiples of each day. Sri Lankans call these "short eats," and you should ask when you arrive which ones they might have on any given day. It is likely not all of them, so order as many as they do. Despite four on the menu (buns, pastries, rolls, and patties), on this occasion only the rolls ($1.75 each, above) were available, stuffed with fish and egg. They were clearly just made from scratch and excellent, a very good sign of things to come.

 

Bring at least one friend but preferably three so you can order plates like the coconut roti with chili paste ($2.50, above), two very slightly sweet breads that beg to be slathered with the spicy chili and any other sambals and curries that might make their way to the table. These are much more dense and filling than naan so ration yourself despite their deliciousness.

If you are here for Sri Lankan food, the Sri Lankan traditional plate ($14.50, below) will of course stand out on the menu, a spread of basmati and four other dishes. Normally it includes tuna ambul thiyal, a sour fish curry, but on this day that was not available and substituted with the chicken curry. Lentil curry, coconut sambal, and sweet and sticky tempered sprats rounded out the meal with just about every taste and texture necessary.

The chicken curry did not seem like a downgrade at all despite the initial disappointment, and both the sambal and lentils were great to have around for joining with just about everything. Sprats are similar to anchovies and add an intense umami to anything they join, and are another reminder of tastes you experience almost daily in Sri Lanka.

There are a few options for curries available, all seemingly prepared differently. The Sri Lankan shrimp curry ($14.50, below) only alludes to "authentic spices" on the menu but is creamy from coconut milk and brown sugar, and probably contains half the spice cabinet. Garlic and ginger pervade. It could use a few more shrimp, which are all quite small to begin with, but the big plate of basmati is enough to make the curry hearty when you run out of the crustacean.

The most surprising section of the menu might be the options for Sri Lankan curries that were all meatless, listing lentil, mixed vegetables, mushroom asparagus, beet, and brussels sprouts options. When inquired about, a sixth off-menu option was presented and ordered, the young jackfruit curry ($12, below), meaty hunks of the fruit in a wonderful curry similar to how the chicken was prepared.

While orders of butter chicken and sag paneer were showing up on the next table, small tears were forming in the eyes of those who wanted this Sri Lankan chef to thrive. Undoubtedly the Indian food is going to pay the bills for a while, but hopefully one day this can become a destination for anyone in the mood for something a bit more rare in Los Angeles without the means of getting to the Valley or Anaheim.

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Anjappar Chettinad Restaurant

🇮🇳 INDIA (Tamil Nadu)
📍 18218 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia, Southeast Los Angeles
🅿️ Parking lot
🥤 Beer available

🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

EDITOR'S NOTE: As discussed in the article of a nearby restaurant, online reviews are tricky for Artesia's Indian eateries and seeing sub-3 star joints is common. Yelp reviews should be taken with a grain of salt in general, but especially when dealing with restaurants here. When they have been around for many years and are still full of patrons, something must be going right.

If you have ever walked the streets of Chennai, you will remember the frustration of every surface of sidewalk being taken by cars, motorbikes, and other tools of humanity. It constantly pushes you out to the treacherous street, where moving vehicles have little patience for pedestrians, outnumbered and considered a nuisance. You will also remember seeing branches of Anjappar Chettinad Restaurant in just about every neighborhood in the city if you survived those walks.

With restaurants all over India and now around the world in cities with large Indian populations, Anjappar Chettinad started in Chennai (then named Madras) and has blown up from there. The menu consists of dishes using the preparations from that small place in southern Tamil Nadu called Chettinad where its founder came from and learned in kitchens from a very young age.

While the food of southern India and Tamil Nadu generally receives the generic "South Indian" moniker in restaurants in the United States at least, the food of the second most populated country on Earth is obviously much more complex than that. Within India and especially in the south, and also amongst the diaspora from all over the nation, the food of Chettinad and its surrounding region is especially renowned.

While Tamil Nadu is well-known for vegetarian dishes, Chettinad cuisine offers a full range of meat and non-meat options. Branches of Anjappar Chettinad around the world also include regional variations on their menus depending on locality and the demands of customers. Here in Artesia, the menu is full of much more than just Chettinad preparations, offering a wide range of dishes to satisfy more general crowds.

Items start arriving at the table fairly quickly, but as the first bites are taken it is apparent that this has no reflection on quality. One fast way to get a sense for the spices and preparations used in Chettinad-style and similar cooking is an order of the nattukozhi biriyani ($19.95, above), which is made with a Chettinad masala and is aromatic with garlic and ginger.

Underneath this mass of delicious basmati is country chicken (nattu kozhi), which is a way of describing birds that have not been through mass farming. Typically it is thought that these chickens have more health benefits and are much tastier, which cannot be debunked when eating this delicious biriyani. If chicken is your jam, you can also order the Chettinad chicken (not shown) for further exploration of how the bird is prepared in the region.

Turn the menu pages to find the small "shepherd special" section if you are in the mood for mutton. The mutton sukka varuval (18.95, above) is a dry curry (sukka) that has been stir-fried and has a medium spice level unless you ask for it amped up. Like many other Chettinad dishes, it is laced with a full array of aromatics and chilies, each bite seems to have dozens of levels in it. Recommended.

While this meal included naan, which can easily be used to grab dry curries like the sukka varuval, Chettinad cuisine might more often be eaten with rice-based accompaniments like dosas (see below), idlis, and appams. These options and rice itself are more typical in the south in general and the next meal here will not be so quick to place a naan order.

Fish 65 ($16.95)

Nethili fish fry ($16.95)

Chili paneer ($16.95)

In Chennai or anywhere else in the state of Tamil Nadu you will have eaten dosas until they come out of your ears, so it makes sense to grab one here and see how they are doing. This ghee podi dosa ($14.95, below) was a popular item on the table, torn to shreds by five sets of hands by the end. Flip up one end to reveal the complex spice mixture that makes up podi, then use the two wonderful chutneys and sambar that come for dipping.

While the coconut chutney is delicious, the orange (is it a peanut chutney?) one on the right end is a revelation. If your meal goes like this one, you will need at least one refill, and it will start to be used for bites of naan, dipping fish 65, and just about everything else.

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Yordanos Ethiopian Restaurant

[FRONT FACADE IMAGE MISSING]

🇪🇹 ETHIOPIA
📍 4020 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Crenshaw, South Los Angeles
🅿️ Street Parking
🥤 Beer and wine

🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

When you arrive at Yordanos in Crenshaw, the exterior does not hint to the joy that you will eventually find inside. The gate appears to be down, the neon open sign will probably not be on, and only a bit of light might be shining through the door if it is dark outside. But the warmth of the space and the wonderful aromas smack your senses as soon as the door is opened and you take one step past the threshold.

The restaurant has the feel of a place that has been around for its community a long time, but in reality the grand opening was in the summer of 2019. Despite surviving many months without in-person dining during the pandemic, nowadays you will find groups of friends coming to talk with each other over beer, wine, or Ethiopian coffee, or enjoying an NBA game on the TV after finishing a meal.

With the flags of both Ethiopia and Eritrea on the counter and walls full of photos, artwork, and handicrafts, Yordanos might be the epicenter of East African life in Los Angeles outside of Little Ethiopia. While there is a page of the menu that is titled breakfast and indeed has some morning items like scrambled eggs with injera and multiple options of ful, the restaurant opens at noon daily, so make your plans for the first meal of the day accordingly.

Most of your main dishes will arrive together on an appropriately sized dish covered in injera, but if you would like an appetizer the restaurant makes some really delicious sambusas ($3/each, below). These triangular pastries can be filled with lentils (recommended) or ground beef, and each bite shatters hundreds of pieces of the thin, fried shell.

The vegetable version especially is already filled with plenty of spices, but the sambusas arrive with a small plate of awaze sauce for dipping. This glowing red condiment is found in plenty of the other dishes as a base of spices, but using it as a dip is a nice way to enjoy all of its bold tastes directly. If you are not one for heat, use it sparingly.

When the meal arrives, it instantly turns your table into a celebratory occasion. The beauty of Ethiopian food is always important, and presentation is part of a meal. Seen below is a plating of the vegetable with fish combo and goden tibs, the latter which take the place of prominence in the center surrounded by many colors of vegetable stews and salad.

The vegetable plate is known as beyeanetu, but can be upgraded to include a whole trout that is fried in specific Ethiopian style. This beyeanetu with fish ($23.99, above and below) is a good entry to the restaurant if you are coming for the first time and do not feel the need to eat red meat. The fish itself is fried expertly and full of flavor hidden under its crispy exterior.

The colors that circle the plate besides a crisp salad with delicious dressing are black and yellow lentils, collard greens, cabbage with potatoes, shiro, and attar kik, a stew of split peas. More awaze arrives with the big plate to be used as desired, but your first round of tastes should be made without it so that the subtleties and differences of each option can be enjoyed when picked up with injera.

If you happen to show up to Yordanos on a Sunday, you can order their special goden tibs ($20.99, below), fatty beef ribs that are full of rosemary, black pepper, and onion. The menu calls their preparation a sauté, but the exterior of most pieces is quite crisp as if they have also been deep fried. Sautéed onions and green peppers finish off the presentation.

Two-thirds of the meat eaters at the table found the beef itself to be too chewy, but that just left more for the person tasked to write about the meal. Big hunks of ribs still on the bone are mixed with tiny, crispy bits and everything in between, and is altogether delightful. The range of textures from fatty to crunchy is a definite plus and Sundays will always need to include this order in the future.

Tej - Ethiopian honey wine.

One of many Ethiopian beer choices.

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Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

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Sri Lankan Delight

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA

📍 19016 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, San Fernando Valley

🅿️ Parking lot for plaza

🌱 Vegetarian friendly

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: An updated version of this article (23 April 2025) is available as part of the Historical section of our Substack page. Check that out here:

https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/sri-lankan-delight-tarzana-market

While there are many Indian markets around the Southland that carry a smattering of Sri Lankan products, and another Sri Lankan establishment in Northridge that's shelves are hit and miss, it is Tarzana that unlocks the keys to all your wishes for cooking the foods of this island nation. Spices, preserves, teas, grains and dhals, curries, sodas and juices and much, much more have been available from this location for three decades. You can even get personal items shipped to and from Sri Lanka and Los Angeles if you need.

If you are new to Sri Lankan products or otherwise curious, the store is also fun for a wander. Its shelves are almost too tidy and organized given that the aisles always seem to be full of a few people. The market is not large, but it seems to have an endless amount of fresh and packaged goods.

For those that are not as well-versed in the kitchen and just looking for options ready to eat, this is not a restaurant but the freezer section is worth checking out. They have frozen meals, appetizers, and desserts that are made and assembled in Sri Lanka for the market and shipped to sell in Los Angeles.

Despite the home cooking and imported aspects of the foods, most packages are either $4.99 or $5.99, making the filling up of your freezer an economical possibility.

Vegetable stuffed roti and patties and fish kottu.

Widely available as home-cooked fast food in Sri Lanka, kottu is a perfect quick plate when you do not feel your most adventurous while traveling or when an exceptional hunger starts to bring pain. It will be no time before a satisfying mound of hot and wonderfully greasy kottu will show up, usually beneath the fold of a few sheets of the day's newspaper.

The dish is made up primarily of Sri Lankan roti called gothamba, chopped up (the literal meaning of kottu) and mixed with ingredients. On a Sri Lankan corner, you will be able to pick and choose exactly how much of each ingredient you want, a little more egg, a lot more chili, etc. As you can imagine, all the ingredients and spices are added already for freezer version, but they do a good job catering to average Sri Lankan levels.

Both the vegetable patties and stuffed roti are spicy and simultaneously full of spices. The roti is especially buttery and miraculously good for something that has been frozen for so long. Customers who have an air fryer will find the best results using that appliance.

In Sri Lanka, these stuffed roti are called elawalu roti and can be found cooked in carts or the storefronts of restaurants and come in a variety of shapes of which a triangle is the most common. Usually found in the same warmed cases and only made recently, another "short eats" favorite are patties with fish or vegetables.

The only slightly disappointing dish of this round was the fish biriyani (below), which despite a package showing long strands of basmati was actually just nubs of broken rice and very dry by the time it was warmed up.

The rice is already infused with plenty of spice but does come with whole and ground peppers to mix in if you want to thoroughly punish yourself. The filet of tuna and the eggplant are good, but unfortunately there is just not enough of either for the portion of rice.

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Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

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Podi Dosa

🇮🇳 INDIA
📍 17607 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia, Southeast Los Angeles
🅿️ Parking lot
🥤 Beer and wine available

🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

EDITOR'S NOTE: An updated version of this article (28 February 2025) is available as part of the Free Friday Favorites section of our Substack page. Check that out here:

https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/podi-dosa-indian-artesia-los-angeles

In general when you find a place that receives such a large group of one star reviews but absolutely none of these selfish Yelpers say anything bad about the food, it is safe to say that the restaurant will be delicious. Sometimes you can either relax your service expectations, leave a little more time than normal, or otherwise adjust your attitude. Weirdly most of this is actually unnecessary at Podi Dosa, a strip mall eatery on Pioneer Blvd. that is generally friendly and relatively efficient despite the views of some.

At certain times of day and especially on weekends, once you pass the waterfall at the door you will find most or all of the tables full and even a waiting list to put your name down. Many of the tables are six people or more, families and groups of friends love sharing meals here and usually have a lot more in front of them than dosas. This is because when you sit down you will find a full six menus, in addition to the dosa menu, desserts, and drinks, there is a full biryani menu, Indian-Chinese, and what they call the masala menu, which features an array of dishes from more standard fare to Keralan specialties.

On the dosa menu it is hard to resist the namesake offering of the restaurant, of which there is also an explanation of what podi entails. This "stuffed" dosa is available in two formats, plain and the street spicy podi dosa ($13.99, above and below), which is indeed packing a lot of heat. Podi is a complex spice powder mixture often served with idli or dosas, the menu here lists a full nineteen ingredients used in their house special podi.

This dosa has the podi pre-mixed into its contents and bursts with flavor in every bite. The wrapper's edges seem to shatter even before you touch them, so crispy and thin yet with a soft underbelly on the thicker parts.

Possibly more important is the arrival of a four-component presentation of chutneys, all served in large bowls and ready to scoop onto plates. All four are top rate and seem to be almost universally beloved including an onion chutney, peanut chutney, coconut chutney, and a sticky sweet and spicy chutney. On top of that, a small metal bowl of sambar (below), a lentil-based broth full of flavor and wonderful for dipping.

The wait can be a bit too much for some customers who enjoy talking about themselves on Yelp, so bring people you care about and come prepared as the food is so worth the time it takes to prepare. When orders are ready the bell rings from the kitchen. Instead of the one pleasant ding you are familiar with at diners, the chef in the back goes after that bell with the fury of someone at a motel who has a clogged toilet.

On a follow-up visit a plain dosa (9.99, above) was ordered to make sure the array of chutneys came again. Even this "plain" version is massive and stretches off each end of the plate, more than enough for a group of four to share and each get plenty.

This visit was meant to get into the other menus and South Indian dishes though, since it seemed that under 50% of the customers were eating dosas during that first meal. It would be quite the feat for the kitchen to be skilled in all of these, but so far everything has impressed.

The Chennai-born favorite chicken 65 ($13.99, above) is available and popped off the menu. It gets its color and taste from the abundance of red chilies used in its preparation, but all in all is one of the milder dishes served here although where "mild" lives at this restaurant is well beyond the norm. Chicken 65 can be served with bone-in chunks but this version is boneless and unbelievably juicy.

Since biryani gets its own menu, at least one of the many different styles they serve here had to be enjoyed. Under the "house special" section, the Andhra mirchi biryani ($14.99, below) is made with the large peppers in the style of Andhra Pradesh. These spicy vegetables are not de-seeded and stuffed with more spicy and nutty gravy.

A cooling cup of yogurt is served alongside the biryani but many will find it is too little too late to take on the intense heats. It is all for a good cause though, as the biryani is delicious and worth finishing. Take the leftovers home to finish the next day and you will find it to be even spicier.

While much of the south of India are vegetarian-only diets, the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh also has a culture that revolves around fishing. The Andhra fish curry ($18.99, below) is another delicious dish and probably won the award for spiciest. Thankfully it comes served with a decent helping of basmati, which helps tone it down just a bit.

The tomato and chili-based curry is also good for dipping pieces of dosa and medu vada ($8.50, below), a "soft" fritter made in the shape of donuts. The texture of these done perfectly, and bites can also be used to dampen the effects of spice.

Another good way to calm the taste buds is with the long beer list that includes many Indian varieties. These are served in larger format bottles and opened at the table, a process that is reminiscent of what happens with beer in India and brings a smile from memories.

🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

Thank you!

VENMO: @JAREDCOHEE

CASH APP: $JaredCohee

PAYPAL: (no account necessary, use link)