Kathir Food Experience
9316 - 34 Avenue NW, Edmonton AB
I’m not sure that anyone uses this term, but if Edmonton has a “Little India”, it is on 34 Avenue. The strip malls east of 97 Street are packed with spice shops, jewelry joints, and at least a dozen Indian restaurants. A few of these specialize in south Indian and Sri Lankan food. Their menus are almost identical, but for its utter lack of pretence I like Kathir Food Experience. The dining room is just a notch more formal than a high school cafeteria, and the food is excellent.
The heart of Kathir is dosas, the over-sized crepes that recently ascended to the pantheon of regional dishes that are made at nearly every Indian restaurant in North America. Their diameter is generally measured in feet, not inches. The most common style is made from a mixture of rice and lentils that is fermented overnight to aerate and sour the batter. At Kathir this acidity is not shy or passive: it takes the savoury fillings by the hand and walks them down the aisle.
You can probably guess most of the fillings that are available - masala potatoes, palak paneer, chicken, eggs, or just a healthy schmear of ghee - but the dosa menu is not just a list of fillings: there are a few different types of batter that make distinctly different dishes.
Uttapam, for instance, is a thicker, cakier crepe - very moist and tender - studded with bell peppers and barely-cooked onions.
The most unique dosa must be rava dosa, which is made from semolina flour, and is not sour like the others. To describe the texture of this dish, I ask you to imagine you are cooking a rustic, European crepe. Your butter has foamed, and you have swirled the batter around the pan. You are now watching the perimeter, the very edge where your batter is thinnest, and it starts to brown and crisp and curl away from the surface of the pan. As you flip the crepe, some of that crispy edge breaks off in the pan. You deftly grab it and put it in your mouth. Rava dosa is an entire crepe with a more robust version of that particular texture, a folded sheet of lacy, ethereal, crackling pastry. If you examine the rava dosa closely you can see flecks of coconut and cilantro held in the translucent crepe like ancient creatures preserved in amber.
All of Kathir’s dosas are accompanied by a bowl of peppery sambar, and three chutneys: a gritty, jade-coloured coconut chutney, a smooth red tomato chutney, and a jammy mango chutney. These are simple things but they deserve mention because eating dosa is like performing a fugue. The dosa and its filling are the principal themes, repeated with each bite, but combined with the sauces to produce new and ever-changing harmonies.
There are other snacks worth ordering. Idly are based on rice flour, each one a stout white discus with a mild tang and bran-like aroma. Vada are airy, savoury doughnuts spiked with onion and chilli. These can be ordered on their own, or soaking in yogurt, or soup.
The menu items appended by “65” (Chicken 65, Fish 65, et c) are dunked in a brick-red paste before being fried crisp and garnished with lime leaves, a lemon wedge, and some thick curls of raw onion. All the variations are good, but there’s something about the janky, cruciferous flavour of cauliflower that makes the Gobi 65 my favourite. I don’t know if this is traditional, but a basket of Kathir’s Gobi 65 is a near-perfect accompaniment to cheap, cold lager.
