California Grubbin'

food: 5/5 experience: 4/5 overall: 4.5/5 There are a couple India's Ovens in Los Angeles but this one is for the Brentwood location, which is actually upstairs in an office building. It's a place you gotta just know about. Insiders only, y'know. Now obviously it's hard to go wrong with Indian food. We did have a little mishap with the samosas though, apparently they were too spicy for mom. Bah. I thought they were perfect. The batter was so crispy and tasty, and the filling had only a hint of spice. I love samosas. Best Indian appetizer by far. That is, unless you count naan as an appetizer. So this naan. The first time I went I basically fell in love with it. We just got the plain naan. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. This was possibly the best naan I have had in my life. They put a bunch of spices in it including fenugreek and it's nice and fluffy. If you come here you have to try the naan, I don't care what kind of diet you're on....

food: 2.5/5 experience: 3/5 overall: 2.5/5 Since I was in the north area I decided to take the opportunity to try this highly-rated Indian restaurant. First time I came I thought a basic fish curry masala would be a good start. As you can see it turned out to be pretty damn watery. Surprising since I don't believe I've ever had watery curry; Indian curry is always thick and creamy. Putting that aside I still gave it a shot. They use swai fish, which is fine, I actually eat swai regularly. But this was bad. It's spicy, sure, but 1) the flavor isn't there and 2) it's essentially just fish soup like I said. It did come with a heaping box of their rice which is surprisingly delicious in spite of being plain old white basmati rice. It's spiced with cumin and potentially some other things. If the rice is the star of the show at an Indian restaurant you're doing something wrong. Ah well, I thought I'd give it another shot a few weeks later. This ...

food: 4/5 experience: 3/5 overall: 3.5/5 First thing we noticed about Madras is it's packed with Indian people so you know it's good. Lotsa take-out orders. It's not a fancy place by any means, you just place your order up front and sit at a linoleum table. They have metal cups for water which also taste metallic. This place specializes in obscure-sounding South Indian bread-type products, I guess. But it's popular. Their most popular it3em is the dosa which seems unappealing to me. It's just a thin huge chip basically, made from lentil and rice flour. There's different fillings like cheese, onion, kara chili powder, masala, vegetable and "special vegetable" which is what we got. And we got a vegetable utthapam which I also had no idea what it was. They had a special one with cashews and stuff in it which sounded good too. Decisions decisions. These dosas are huge!  Longer than my mom's arm, as you can see. They come with a brown sauce, ...

food: 2.5/5 experience: 1/5 overall: 2/5 You can smell this restaurant hundreds of feet away. And clearly the Indian people all come here judging by the interior so you know it should be good. Should  be. Beware the noise upon entering. No booths unfortunately, just basic chairs and tables. Lots of them with only three chairs. Weird. There was some miscommunication about the naan being unable to eat without curry, dunno what that was about. Eventually I just pointed to it on someone else's table and it got cleared up. Maybe there's some kind of naan they have that's for dipping only? Anyway. We tried the chicken and beef seekh kabob, tandoori fish, and naan. Unluckily we came during Ramadan right around the time they can break their fast so all the cooks were eating. It took over twenty minutes. Starving by then. This kabab came out and yes it looks like a shit. It wasn't bad tasting but it was nonetheless a shit kabab and therefore inedible. We tried the...