CAFÉ
SECOND CHANCES
OP’s Masalas is reborn — with a much bigger menu.
BY
CHARLES FERRUZZA
Masalas Authentic Indian Bistro • 7301 West 91st Street, Overland Park, 913-381-1234 • Hours: lunch 11 a.m.–3 p.m. daily, dinner 5:30–10 p.m. daily • Price: $–$$
don’t have much enthusiasm for my own possible reincarnation — really, whose karma is that good? — but I’m all for the reincarnation of restaurants. Last week in this space, for instance, I made note of R Bar’s highly commendable reincarnation as Voltaire. And this week, I offer Masalas Authentic Indian Bistro, an Overland Park restaurant reborn after a five-year run as Masalas Authentic Indian Diner. There’s a world of difference, you know, between a diner and a bistro — or so the new Masalas wants you to understand. The place looks the same as it did before, but the spiral-bound menu’s 18 pages now provide what the restaurant’s new owner, Shashi Bommireddy, insists is the most comprehensive selection of Indian cuisine in the city. Bommireddy told me last week: “People come into the restaurant and ask me, ‘Do you serve Northern or Southern Indian cuisine?’ I tell them that I only serve authentic Indian cuisine. I have dishes that American diners have never heard of before.” Not everything is obscure. One of the first listings on the menu (which is printed in a font that’s so difficult to read, I first thought they must be temple rubbings from Konark) is, in fact, pretty familiar: tomato soup. But Bommireddy, a native of Hyderabad, a region famous for its biryani dishes, is a charismatic salesman. Talk to him during your meal at Masalas, and he may convince you that you’re not in a Kansas suburb but in Mumbai. The first Masalas was known for the story, perhaps apocryphal, of its initial owner — a young, Indian-born software executive — who bought out the original tenant (chef Max Chao, who now cooks at Nara) and supposedly spent a small fortune gutting the freestanding building to create Masalas in 2008. When Bommireddy bought the place, last December, it had been closed 14 months. He did some cleanup work and decided to keep the name. (The customers liked it, he says.) Six months in, the lunch traffic is good, and Bommireddy is trying to rebuild dinner business. His plan has some interesting wrinkles. A couple of the servers I saw working the dining room on my visits to the restaurant might have been swiped from an Old Country Buffet. They were funny and attentive but relatively clueless about Indian cuisine, authentic or otherwise. “A pakora is kind of like a samosa,” one of them told me. “It’s all fried, you know?” The starter selections are dominated by the deep-fried, including crispy battered pakoras (heavy on the spinach) and medu vada, two
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liquor license, but he’s months away from serving booze. I asked for tonic water or club soda, and my server suggested that I jog across the parking lot to Whole Foods. This is how I came fried-lentil-batter doughnuts that were dry and to order a Sprite, which the server brought me heavy, like a couple of auto parts. in a chilled can. The appetizers and the complimentary A friend of mine that night was craving paper-thin (but wildly peppery) papadums are an ice-cold Kalyani Black Label beer with presented with an array of chutneys: creamy his butter chicken (“A very common dish,” tomato, a soothing mint, a bland coconut that Bommireddy half-chided) but settled for wacould pass as Cream of Wheat, a syrupy tamater instead. Still, he raved about the chicken. rind. I asked Bommireddy why I could find no Bommireddy wasn’t wrong onion chutney at his tables. to sniff at it — this is the “No one eats onion chutney Masalas Authentic chicken potpie of Indian cuiin India,” he told me. “You Indian Bistro sine, and his kitchen makes it realize it goes bad after two Pakoras............................$6.89 with the kind of tomato sauce hours? And the smell!” Deconstructed samosa $8.89 designed to comfort diners Chutneys are to be used Gobi–65 ......................... $10.89 wary of unfamiliar textures with less flavorful dishes, if Mysore Masala dosa ..... $9.75 and spices. you ask Bommireddy, and Lamb vindaloo ...............$13.99 Butter chicken ..............$12.89 Bommireddy seems more many of his creations don’t proud of his five biryani rice require them. That includes dishes, all prepared Hyderthe Gobi–65 — fried cauliabadi-style. “It’s a blending of Mughlai and flower fritters slathered with a fiery red-chili Andhra Pradesh styles of cooking,” he told me. sauce — or his “deconstructed samosa,” which But what does that mean? Well, it’s dominated is best described as a smashed traditional by tomatoes, tamarind, garlic and onion, and, samosa pastry smothered in a pasty chana for my taste, it’s heavy on the mutton. masala and sprouting little baby samosas. It’s I love biryani, but I was here for things not definitely artistic, but count me among those found on other local Indian menus. For exwho still value construction in their food. ample: a lamb vindaloo prepared, according I was eating these exotic inventions with a beverage I almost never drink: soda. Why not, to the menu, “Portuguese style.” Vindaloo, a standard offering on Indian I figured, given that Bommireddy serves only menus, turns out to be a word derived from a presweetened iced tea. He has applied for a
The menu at Masalas ranges from the traditional to more exotic Indian cuisine.
beloved Portuguese dish called carne de vinha d’alhos (meat marinated in vinegar, sugar, ginger, chiles and spices). Unaware of this at the table that evening, I asked the waitress about the Portuguese connection. She sighed. “I’d ask the guys in the kitchen,” she said, “but there’s kind of a language barrier.” The vindaloo was delicious, even if it had to overcome a slightly too-chewy lamb. I preferred the vegetarian Hyderabadi Khatti dal, satisfying and fragrant with ginger and garlic. At one meal, I ordered dosa — the delicate crepe made from rice and lentils and fi lled, in this instance, with potatoes and a good chutney — and it was brought to the table crisp and golden and rolled up like a sacred papyrus from the tomb of Menkaure. It held together well enough to dip in the hot sambal, a soupy condiment made with garlic and chiles. Bommireddy is planning to introduce a new menu, with even more dishes, later in the summer. (And he promises to change the type so that it’s easier to read.) It’s a bold idea, given that the current menu is almost like reading the Upanishads. But that’s Bommireddy: ambitious. “There is no other Indian restaurant in Kansas City like mine,” he said. Not in this life, anyway.
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