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Friday, July 18, 2003

By Sarah Billingsley, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

You don't expect to find, in such a modest setting, an ambitious, saucy menu like that at Namaste.

	Owner Sonny Sharma at Namaste, where Tandoori Platter and Chicken 65 are among the specialties. (Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette)

The restaurant is a tiny storefront in dingy Banksville Plaza, where cars park at a wicked slant, the afternoon sun seems dusty and the rutted parking lot looks like it survived cluster bombing. But location matters little, in this case, since the food is the destination, and Namaste has good company in the neighborhood, with tasty, respectable Maharaja in the Day's Inn down the road.

Inside, the restaurant is bright and airy. The drapes are gauzy white, the walls tinted a warm pinkish-beige. Plastic plants and friendly silk flowers welcome, though the black chairs are straight and uncomfortable, and a sheet of glass tops the tablecloth, which inevitably leads to irritating mid-meal Windexing.

The soundtrack is catchy and upbeat, a mixture of Brit/Asian dance mixes and infectious Bollywood pop -- including "Noori," which a friend recognized from the film "Bend It Like Beckham" -- instead of the usual sitar wail.

Owner Sanjeeb Sharma challenges the Indian idiom: His music is fun, his dining room simple and relaxed. The walls are free of velvet Taj Mahals.

Instead of the creamy royal fare offered at most Indian restaurants, Sharma showcases the simple, fiery street foods of his native New Delhi. Namaste is a true immigrant's immigrant restaurant: Sharma gives to Pittsburgh a cuisine that sprang from a collision of cultures -- Chinese food, Indian style.

Refugees escaping China's Opium Wars in the mid-1800s and Tibetans fleeing the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1910 migrated to New Delhi and made their living by selling Chinese/Tibetan food flavored with Indian spices. Popular in New Delhi for a century, Chinese Indian fusion cuisine is rapidly spreading on the East Coast; several New York restaurants have popped up, as well as the trendy Hot Wok chain in Atlanta and Chicago.

	Namaste India 3101 Banksville Road Banksville Plaza Banksville 412-563-1901 HOURS: Lunch, Tuesday to Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday noon to 3 p.m. Dinner, daily 5 to 10:30 p.m. BASICS: Specializing in Northern and Southern Indian, royal dishes to street fare, and Chinese food, Indian-style. No smoking; all major credit cards accepted; 70 seats. BYOB; no corkage; reservations recommended for weekends. Takeout and catering available. Restaurant and restrooms are handicap accessible. A Market Square location of Namaste will open soon.

Sharma worked for years at Papa J's in Carnegie as cook and manager while earning a degree in biological sciences. Many of the foods on his menu are family recipes. Namaste's chefs -- recruited from New York and Chicago -- are South Indian. This combination of influences makes for a heady menu of fragrant foods, and many tempting choices.

Indian standards -- vindaloo, curry, mattar paneer -- prop up inventive vegetarian and seafood offerings and the Indian Chinese dishes, which makes up a small part of the menu. The extensive menu requires navigation; it's a good thing the wait staff is always helpful, swift and smiling.

The meal begins with razor-thin crisp pappadum wafers, accompanied by tamarind sauce and mint chutney, both homemade and pleasantly grainy.

A meal could be made of any of the South Indian pancakes and crepes. Thick uttappams are built of rice and lentils, sauced with onions, chilies, tomatoes and warm butter. Idlis are moist steamed rice cakes, with a dense, spongy texture, served with soupy sambar and two chutneys: coconut and tomato. Dosas are crackling rounds of batter cooked to a lacy crispness, a perfect textural opposite to fillings of soft egg, silky curried veggies and tender mashed potato and onion.

On the vegetable platter ($4.99) are freshly fried nibbles. Vada are lentil mini-doughnuts. Aloo tikki are fried mashed potato balls. Both are dark and satisfying as hush puppies. The samosa was flaky, and "snakes" are dark orange, perfectly pungent onion rings. Mirchi baji are India's version of the jalapeno popper, filled with mild, hot unctuous paneer (Indian cheese).

Chana batura ($5.99) -- my favorite appetizer -- is a crunchy puff of bread to scoop up spicy chick peas and herbed yogurt. We tried all the other breads; best were the kulcha ($2.25), studded with onion slivers, the floury roti ($1.75) and the feathery layered paratha ($1.75).

An entire book could be written about Chicken 65 ($3.99). Like most food worthy of lore, it's worth ordering. Red to the eye, bite-sized bits of chicken spit with heat. On the tongue it is smoky, salty and spicy.

The dish could be named for seasoning -- the number of spices used in the dish -- or machismo -- the number of chilies (65) per pound of chicken. Some say it's named for the chicken-eating hero of a 1965 Bollywood blockbuster; some that it's the dish prepared by a chef for an English traveler visiting Kerala in 1965; others that it's best made with a 65-day-old chicken. Sharma claims it's named for an emblematic highway, since it's a dish found in truck stops, a meal of the people.

Entrees are an orchestra of flavors and textures. Common dishes are a step above. In chicken saag ($8.99), cubes of chicken are tenderized in the super-hot tandoor oven before they are mixed with thick green flecks of spinach. In buttery baigan bharta ($8.50), eggplant, treated gently, is pulpy and tender. Kheema matar ($10.99) was the best I've had: ground lamb and peas in a deliciously subtle gravy with a sneaky heat and silky texture.

There are few disappointments. Dull cauliflower looked sexy when cross-dressed in a hot pink Manchurian sauce, sweet and sour, spiked with cumin and chilies. Too bad the dish had a strident vinegar taste, and the cauliflower was rigid, despite its warm, flamboyant suitor of a sauce.

Promising bhindi with potato curry was overcooked. Singed dry spices were acrid on the tongue. Stewed okra usually pops; this was chewy. But Namaste will rev up the spice level; it's one of the few restaurants where an eight on the heat index sets your mouth afire.

For dessert, warm carrot halwa was chewy. Chilled, the fine, sweetly vegetal shreds of the dessert have a refreshing cold juiciness. For an infusion of cooling fruitiness, you can also look to the sweet or mango lassi ($2.75), mango milkshake ($2.75) or gentle rose milk ($2.50).

Namaste is a Sanskrit greeting of peace. The yogic translation of it -- "The light within me recognizes, bows and honors the light within you; and together we are one with this light" -- pays respect to you, the guest. It is up to you to reciprocate by feeling indulged and delighted. That is the purpose of good food in any culture.