Lawrence of India

With the exception of the Kerala-style dishes at Mayura, most of the Indian restaurants clustered along Culver City's Venice Boulevard focus on the same vegetarian-centric, vaguely Southern Indian style of cooking. This is far from a bad thing -- can one ever have too many choices for jackfruit curry, potato dosas or bowls of samosa chaat?

But If you were looking for something more esoteric, the last place you would guess to go would be Lawrence of India, a garish-looking building lit with strings of lights and crowned with miniature Indian flags stuck in a strip-mall sandwich between a Thai BBQ and one of the neighborhood's older trattorias.

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D. Gonzalez

Roti with green curry sauce at Gindi Thai

Somehow, food always seems to taste better when it's shared. And not just as it's passed around a table, but also when it travels across borders. The South Asian subcontinent has passed down its plates far and wide, providing the inspiration for new dishes through its native ingredients like pepper, ginger and cardamom, as well as incorporating itself into a wide world of meals through its unleavened flat bread, roti.

From South Africa's Cape Malay roti to the Caribbean's wrap roti, just as the use of spices spread across the globe, so has the use of roti and roti-like breads. Yet our favorite takes on roti don't wander too far from home. In L.A., some of the best roti comes from Southeast Asian restaurants like Gindi Thai, Simpang Asia and Penang Malaysian Cuisine.

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B. Hansen

spring dosas at New Bhimas

What should you eat to celebrate today's arrival of spring? A spring dosa, of course. It's the dish of the season at New Bhimas, a South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Artesia's Little India. Dosas are big, crisp pancakes that come with all sorts of fillings, most typically spiced potatoes, as in masala dosa.

New Bhimas has lots of dosas, even a pizza dosa with tomatoes and American cheese. But forget that one for now. You want to lighten up with the spring dosa, which cuts down the amount of masala potatoes to make room for shredded cabbage, sliced red and green bell pepper, carrot strands, onions and an occasional small dried chile. The dosa itself is smeared with spicy red paste, because New Bhimas cooks in the style of Andhra Pradesh, an Indian state notorious for hot food.

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Barbara Hansen

Smita Vasant with kulfi.

Saffron Spot's Indian ice creams include a newcomer, kulfi on a stick. This ice cream shop in Little India has always had kulfi, but not frozen in the traditional cone shape.

Owner Smita Vasant has procured food-grade plastic cones from India. The ice cream and stick are frozen in these, producing kulfi that you can eat on the go, like a popsicle.

Just three flavors come in this form -- mango, pistachio and malai (cream). Saffron Spot's other ice creams are frozen in a machine, which incorporates air. That makes them softer than kulfi, which goes directly into the cones and then the freezer.

"Kulfi is one of our most authentic items," Vasant says. "It's made the old-fashioned way, by boiling milk until it is reduced and then adding sugar and spices to it. People who come here from India and eat it say that it tastes better than what they get back home."

Read more from Barbara Hansen at tableconversation.com, eatmx.com, @foodandwinegal and Facebook.

Jim Thurman

Dosas, Woodlands, Chatsworth.

Mention vegetarian food to most carnivores and the result is often a pained expression followed by a series of jokes about sawdust and paper. You need to get these people to Chatsworth. Woodlands features a south Indian lunch buffet and a large menu, but the real star here is on Wednesday nights, the Indo-Chinese Dosa Dinner Buffet.

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Guzzle & Nosh

The No Tomatoes! truck and restaurant.

No Tomatoes!, the Indian food truck (@notomatoestruck) with the incongruous name, is the latest mobile eatery to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. In early October, the No Tomatoes! cafe opened in the corner of a popular strip mall just south of the Beverly Center. Despite the highly trafficked location, that particular nook in the hard-to-see corner of the strip malls seems cursed. It was previously occupied by Crepe Republic and before that by a short-lived outpost of Brats Brothers. Let's see if Indian food does better than crepes and sausages.

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Sudha Koul

Tandoori masala

In India, people always go out for Tandoori; now hardly anyone owns a tandoor, the North Indian clay oven after which the cuisine is named. Even when they did back in the day, it was more for baking quotidian nans and other mouthwatering breads, than for roasting the bright red colored non-vegetarian dishes most associated with the cuisine.

Tandoori cooking consists of two steps: marinate and roast. The average grill or broil functions in ovens are good enough substitutes for the clay Tandoor oven if you're not a fanatic. That leaves the rub, and there lies the rub, as Indian kitchens do not have recipes -- new or handed down -- for Tandoori masala. As a result Indians living and cooking abroad have spawned a commercially bottled plethora of the spice mixture which range from faint approximations to stunning true versions.

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B. Mesirow

All India Cafe's Chicken Tikka Masala

Every so often something triggers in us a wistful sort of Anglophilia. It could be a movie, a book, or a tasty glass of warm, flat beer that gives us this phony nostalgia, but the craving it brings is usually (and unsurprisingly) for English food. This week, instead of rushing out to find the nearest pasty or dousing 'chips' with vinegar, we decided to go for Britain's other national dish, Chicken Tikka Masala. This week's food fight, then, pits two local Indian restaurants against each other, and to add a little extra rivalry to the curry we picked two competing spots, Pasadena's All India Cafe and South Pasadena's own Radhika.

Turn the page to see who makes the most magical masala...

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Screenshot of The Onion's Twitter feed

Customer: "Waiter! I asked for alu paratha but I find no potatoes in it!" Waiter: "What's in a name Sir! If you ask for Kashmiri pulav, will you expect to find Kashmir in it?"

At Saffron Spot in Artesia, the ice creams tend toward a vibrant candyish hue and sport names that sound like particularly festive planets in the Star Wars universe. Rajbhog? Chikoo? Sure, a working knowledge of Hindi would help, but you'll do fine to order based solely on linguistic exoticism. It's hard to go wrong at Saffron Spot, where vanilla and chocolate play a faint second fiddle to distinctly Indian flavors like guava, jackfruit and Kulfi Kreme.

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