India Sweets and Spices

A little taste of Artesia has recently opened up right here in Los Feliz. Apparently this store is a bit of a landmark with the Indian community, so as you can imagine I was quite excited to have this open up right here since Artesia is 30 miles away. The store is filled with an amazingly large selection of Indian food ingredients, and is connected to a chat house. Apparently chat house is a fancy way of saying cafeteria. With that said, you'll understand why I dont give this place high marks for the decor or ambiance. But, when you consider my dinner special #3 was only $5.99 including a mango laasi and a rasmalai for dessert, the decor becomes easy to ignore, although not so easy to forgive.



Now we can get down to the food. The samosa was not the best, fried foods are always best served extremely fresh, and this samosa was only kind of sort of fresh. I thought the sambaar was pretty good, but the experts say Paru's is better. The true allure aside from the price, is the availability of many specialties that you just can't get anywhere else around here. Pani poori, a tasty little fried puffy dough, is quite tasty as is the behl, idli and dosa. Even our staff expert doesn't know what the "Bollywood Chat" sign on the wall means, so maybe someone can fill us in on that. There's also a wide selection of desserts in a counter that you'll notice right when you walk in. Some look really good, some look not so good. Paru's is probably better on all accounts, but cmon $5.99 is just a great deal. The value here is great, the specials actually start at $3.99, so I really splurged with special #3.