Bukhara Indian Bistro

A JP spinoff comes into its own

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Bukhara Indian Bistro 701 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain (617) 522-2195 Open Mon-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.- 11 p.m.; Fri, 11:30 a.m.-midnight; Sat, noon to midnight; and Sun, noon to 11 p.m. AE, CB, DC, MC, Visa Beer and wine No smoking Access up one step, bathrooms down full flight of stairs

Bukhara opened as a kind of second branch of the beautiful Kashmir, on Newbury Street, but the food initially was not extraordinary. A year later, they added "Special Regional Dishes from Bangalore and Madras," in southern India, and I recently returned to find things much improved. One improvement was the décor, which has turned the rather stark bare-brick space into one of the most beautiful Indian restaurants in Greater Boston. The northern Indian food, under veteran chef Balbir Singh, is also quite good now. And the service of Japanese-style hot towels between courses makes for truly wonderful moments.

The southern Indian menu is admittedly a stretch from the northern. From Bukhara to Bangalore is farther than from Boston to Santa Fe. Bukhara, actually in Uzbekistan, is an ancient trading center and home of Islamic learning. (It's the spice-trade reference that names the restaurant.) Southern India is strongly Hindu, with more vegetarian and spicy food than the rest of India. I've been nagging for southern Indian food for decades, and I think it makes a good complement to the standard northern Indian restaurant menu that developed to serve the meat-loving British.

The best of the southern appetizers is chat papri ($4.95), an intriguing dish of fried pastry and chickpeas in a sweet-and-sour sauce based on yogurt and tamarind. This sweet and crunchy treat outstrips bhel ($4.50), my favorite South Indian dish from Rangoli, which here combines bits of puffed rice, cut-up breads, tomato, and onion for a more savory platter of crunch.

Pav bhaji ($6.95) are "famous Bombay-style" potatoes. They aren't famous yet in Jamaica Plain, but they are quite good, in a kind of dry stew with cauliflower, beans, carrots, and peas. The curry is also dry in flavor, leaning perhaps on fenugreek or cumin. Pav bhaji are served with what the menu calls "a toasted roll," but which turns out to be one of the things this restaurant does best, two triangles of garlic naan. You could probably wrap the vegetable stew in the naan, but we ate it by itself. The only weak Southern appetizer is dahi bhala ($3.95), allegedly lentil dumplings in a yogurt sauce. The dumplings are almost as hard as golf balls, which cannot be the classic style. Hardly any culture chops lentils up to make them denser.

I mention this because the idli sambhar ($4.95) were also quite dense. Idli are an important bit of Indian food technology, based on the discovery that rice and pulses fermented together became more digestible. Today's idli come fried as well as in steamed-dumpling style. But Bukhara's version were overly heavy. Straight lentil dumplings, medu wada ($4.95), were a little lighter and much tastier, with a browned flavor. Both dumplings were served in sambhar, a fiery vegetable soup with another dry-tasting spice mixture, which usually includes fried pulses as a spice.

For the various dosa dishes, the sambhar is a dip. Dosa are pancakes -- giant crêpes, really -- of the same kind of mixed sourdough as idli. To judge from our mysor masala dosa ($7.50), the dosa at Bukhara are very good indeed, almost irresistible. They're also fun to have at the table, since they are served in a very long roll that hangs over both ends of the platter. You slice them and eat the slices, which are stuffed with various things. Ours was a vegetable filling with a lot of mashed potatoes and moderate spice. Although we asked for "spicy," the overall level of spice at Bukhara is rather mild. Only the sambhar had any real burn to it, and I've had hotter sambhar even in Boston.

Uttapam is a thicker pancake of a similar blend, served flat as a kind of pizza. We had one with barbecued lamb ($7.95) that would have been a good appetizer for four people. The lamb dominated the other toppings, although fresh cilantro came through.

As a kind of baseline, I had been by for a lunch buffet ($7.95). Regular readers know that the Indian buffet is the only kind approved of in this column, because most Indian food holds up well on the warming table. My day, the chef's special soup was a slightly spicy minestrone. Everything else was quite good, especially a murgh tikka masala -- broiled chicken chunks in a tomato-cream sauce -- which had a wonderful combination of spices. Tandoori chicken had less of the usual red color than most, but much more of the tarry, smoky flavor of the real tandoor. Dal mahkni was a lemony bean stew, excellent over the basmati pilaf. The fried appetizer (which doesn't always hold up so well) was a vegetable fritter the size of a Rhode Island clam fritter -- that is, not much smaller than a baseball. They also put out some pav bhaji, with perhaps more fresh cilantro and less spice than the dinner version. And the buffet gets you a great, creamy rice pudding with raisins, almonds, and cashews.

Bukhara has a mostly American wine list that goes with very little of the food, but lists a number of beers imported from India. Our tastings of Kingfisher, Taj Mahal, and Flying Horse suggest that the pipeline now delivers clean lagers that go very well with this food, with an extra nod to the hoppier Taj Mahal, brewed in West Bengal.

Bukhara is now often crowded with happy yuppies. The space is noisy, but the bodies and the tapes of Indian classical music seem to soften the clatter. The lighting is romantically dark, but it makes the fine print on the menu hard to read. The embroidered wall hangings are the best of the artwork, although a large brass statue with four arms and bare breasts makes a splendid answer to Locke-Ober's "Mademoiselle Yvonne."

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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