(They make a four-foot long dosa for family celebrations, but even the standard size is likely to activate the phone cameras around the table.) Dosas aren’t as much food as they look like because most of that tube of crisp batter is empty – the middle has a layer of seasoned vegetable stew, and you can crunch on the cracker-like sourdough crepe by itself in between scooping up the stew with it. The dosa, a crisp crepe that can be up to four feet long, is a specialty at Copper Pot Indian Grill. This item surprises people when they first encounter it, because it’s a crispy tube of batter almost two feet long – and I had ordered a small one. It was aptly followed with another showstopper from South Indian cuisine, a masala dosa. It’s spicy and cooling and warm at the same time, something pretty much without parallels in European cuisines. Eat this as soon as it arrives at the table and it’s amazing – a warm doughnut with herbal overtones under cool yoghurt topped with herbs and chillies. The first thing to arrive was thayir vada, doughnuts made of lentil flour beneath a layer of yoghurt with savory spices. We ordered a few that we knew, a few that we didn’t, and sat back to see what happened.
#COPPER POT FULL#
Some are named after ingredients that are unfamiliar to most people – would we prefer the one that contains gongura leaves to the one with rogan spice? Luckily the restaurant wasn’t very full so our server was able to spend time explaining some of the dishes. There are five different styles of biryani rice dish offered, but few or no clues about how they are different from each other.
This means Copper Pot has some offerings that are very different from most in our area, but unfortunately the menu does a terrible job of explaining them.
The cooking style is different too, with more flatbreads and rice dishes and distinctly different seasonings. Among other things, they use more seafood, lentils, plantain, and coconut than they do in Punjab and northern regions, which historically had the most immigration to America. It’s a region most Americans don’t know much about, and it has a distinctive cuisine based on ecology. One item I would nominate for the décor would be a large map of South India, because that’s where this cuisine is from. Given the richness of visual art from South Asian tradition, this has to be a deliberate omission, but I can’t imagine why. More than a month later, that hasn’t changed. I first visited the Copper Pot Indian Grill in Redondo a few days after they opened, and figured the stark white expanse would be covered with art after they settled in. It is therefore boggling when a restaurant that represents one of the longest unbroken culinary traditions in human history has bare walls. Those pictures whet diners’ appetites for the feast to come, allowing them to imagine themselves in those pictures, enjoying that hospitality. It’s a reminder that these recipes are the legacy of countless generations of loving experimentation in home kitchens.
The images of village markets laden with exotic produce, bakers proudly holding fresh loaves, grandmothers stirring pots over wood fires, and families at the table are more than mere decoration. I like it when restaurants display symbols of culinary culture.
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