Combo Momo, Nepali Dal Bhat thali, and butter masala momo create a colourful Nepalese feast at Indian-Nepali Kitchen.
I don’t decide a ebook by its cowl, nor a restaurant by its location in a motel alongside Freeway 99. However I’ll completely decide a Nepalese menu by amount and high quality of momos, and Indian-Nepali Kitchen passes with flying colours. Additionally with frying colours, since a mixture plate of the dumplings serves up a rainbow of steamed, fried, spice-marinated sandheko, and sauce-bathed chili renditions.
Do not decide a ebook by its cowl, nor a restaurant by its location in a motel on Freeway 99.
The small orange constructing affixed to the facet of the Crown Inn on Aurora fills up rapidly, particularly on weekends when co-owner Baburam Panday estimates the kitchen makes and serves someplace between seven and eight hundred momos. Vegetarian and hen variations of the dumplings every are available in 10 totally different kinds, together with the butter masala ones: a dozen crescent-shaped, chicken-stuffed momos, deep-fried till crisp sufficient to withstand the come-ons of the brick-red sauce during which they arrive.
The dumplings are made each day or near it, simply as they’d be on the streetside stands and Panday’s house kitchen within the Nepalese province of Lumbini, the place he realized to prepare dinner. Earlier than transferring to Seattle, Panday owned a small grocery market, however when he arrived within the US in 2015, he took a job at Bothell’s Everest Kitchen, the place he labored with Indian-Nepali Kitchen co-owner Gopal Magar.
The Combo Momo provides diners an opportunity to attempt the dumplings in a wide range of cooking kinds and flavors.
Regardless of the equal-opportunity identify, a part of Panday’s objective with the restaurant is to indicate off Nepalese delicacies. There are different Nepalese eating places in Seattle, however they hardly ever brag about these origins. “They only put an Indian identify and only a few gadgets from Nepal,” says Panday. “We dared to place some on the menu particularly from Nepal.”
The 2 cuisines share many spices, however diverge in strategies, which has helped the restaurant because it introduces prospects, most of whom are conversant in Indian meals, to extra Nepalese dishes. “The primary distinction between the Indian and Nepali meals is the cream and butter,” says Panday. “All of the Nepali meals is sort of dairy free.”
The Nepali Dal Bhat makes beginning place for newbies: the thali serves as a sampler plate of conventional meals, and Panday says it’s the closest factor to what you’d get for dinner at somebody’s house in Nepal. The association of rice, black lentils, pickles, and mustard greens comes with a selection of curry. “That’s one of the best meals right here, after the momos” says Panday. When the meat within the Nepali-style goat curry collapses at even the gentlest contact and swims into its thick sauce of tomato, garlic, and ginger, I’m arduous pressed to argue.
However delving deeper into the Nepalese specialties brings a few of the greatest surprises on the menu, just like the tangy sourness of the gundruk, which comes from the fermented and dried greens within the potato and bean curry. The Nepalese barbecued meat, sekuwa, which Panday describes like tikka, however juicier, comes with crisp slices of carrots and cucumbers to offset the excessive stage of spice, in addition to chatpate, a crunchy puffed rice and herb salad.
Different dishes diverge from typical meals present in Nepal, just like the Aloo Rayo ko saag, the place Panday explains that, to make their mustard greens right into a extra substantial dish, they added cubed potatoes. It really works, because the greens and spices have greater than sufficient taste to unfold on a wider canvas. The creamy tikka masala momo, however, is an immigrant restaurant growth, one thing that isn’t distinctive to the restaurant, however not present in Nepal itself both.
The butter masala momos are usually not conventional in Nepal, however that does not make them any much less engaging.
Fortunately, the large wood tables that fill the room give prospects loads of house to attempt dishes from all around the six-page menu, which features a full slate of vegetarian choices, and a sub-continent’s price of bread—eight sorts of naan, plus paratha, roti, and puri.
Sadly, the tables additionally staff up with the room’s low ceiling and few home windows to really feel slightly darkish. However what the house lacks in character, the useful service and vibrant meals greater than make up for, and Panday gives hope for a setting that matches the meals sooner or later.
Lower than a 12 months after opening, he and Magar are already on the lookout for a bigger location for Indian-Nepali Kitchen. Proper now, only one or two large teams pack the unassuming location, leaving latecomers ready awkwardly on one of many metropolis’s least savory stretches of cement.
The situation, paradoxically, was a giant a part of the draw when Panday and Magar got down to open the restaurant: it’s handy and has free parking. However they didn’t but notice how a lot folks would respect the firecracker flavors of their homestyle Nepalese cooking. Panday guarantees they received’t transfer too far, simply to someplace sufficiently big to accommodate all of their present momo-loving prospects and any future ones who haven’t but realized simply how good they are often.
