The flavor is right on the tip of my tongue — literally and figuratively.
The appetizer known as kukhura ko sekuwa looks like a mistake, basically: It looks like tandoori chicken in which the chef forgot to add the chili powder and brick-red food coloring to the marinade. But as I devour one charred morsel after another, I’m struck by the meat’s complex mustard-oil pungency and its pronounced sourness, which rattles the edges of my tongue with a watery, metallic tang. I’ve experienced this sensation before, but not in this context. I feel like I’m watching a familiar play in a foreign language.
Then, out of nowhere, as if dreaming while awake, my brain whispers two words into my ear: Sichuan peppercorns.
A few days later, I’m on the phone with Atma Ram Upadhyaya, co-owner of Namaste restaurant, and grilling him about the kukhura ko sekuwa, a dish from his native Nepal. Ingredient by ingredient, we dissect the appetizer, trying to pinpoint the source of the sensations I experienced. Finally, a light goes off in Upadhyaya’s head: He says chef Nabin Kumar Paudel uses Nepali timur pepper in the dish, a powerful spice known to produce similar reactions.
A few keystrokes later at the computer, I discover that Nepali timur peppers belong to the same botanical family as Sichuan peppers, differing in color but sharing many of the same characteristics. I didn’t know it at the time, but the distance between the rugged, unforgiving terrain of Nepal and the flat, densely populated lowlands of eastern Sichuan had just shrunk to the size of my appetizer plate.
I don’t mean to make Namaste sound like a cultural crossword puzzle that must be solved before you can unlock its pleasures. The plain, mango-colored dining room, tucked into a strip center on the outskirts of Alexandria, requires no intellectual curiosity to savor the plates produced in Paudel’s kitchen, other than a willingness to order something besides butter chicken when confronted by the sheer otherness of Nepali cooking.
The owners are smart, of course, to pack their menu with Indian and Indo-Chinese dishes to augment their native cuisine. Just as important, they don’t treat the supplementary offerings as second-class fare. Paudel has studied Indian cuisine on the subcontinent, and his previous efforts with the northern branch of Indian cooking found favor with the pickiest palates: You might recall Paudel’s mouthwatering work as opening chef atJewel of India in Silver Spring.
While Paudel doesn’t have the same bejeweled stage on which to showcase his food, his dishes display the same refined air as the ones he produced in the Maryland ’burbs. His lamb korma kashmiri, with its cashew-based sauce studded with fruit, coaxes flavors from every ingredient and combines them into this organic whole, as perfect as double helix DNA. His tandoori lamb chops, paired with a ginger-laced chickpea gravy, has such depth of flavor you could bathe in it. And his Raj kachori is a puri-like fried dough ball erupting with vermicelli, chickpeas, onions and potatoes, all drizzled in yogurt and tamarind. You will eat the whole thing.
The kitchen does exhibit moments of weakness. The incendiary Indo-Chinese chili paneer features house-made cheese fried to a dense and chewy consistency, while the tandoori wings, a kind of Indo-Buffalo synthesis, do not push the concept far enough, leaving too much heat and fragrance back at the tandoor station.
For a pure pepper adrenaline rush, try the lamb vindaloo, a dish so molten you can smell the heat when the plate is placed before you. A curious phenomenon about the vindaloo: The cubed potatoes ferry the spice with more glassy-eyed effectiveness than the meat, the residual fat likely muting the flames.
Like most countries, Nepal has a hot-and-cold relationship with chili peppers: Some regions embrace the heat, others don’t. The Nepali dishes at Namaste don’t aim to impress via the Scoville scale alone, but through a combination of spice, fragrance, pungency and sourness, a cuisine informed by the cultures around Nepal but still retaining an ineffable Himalayan quirkiness.
The momo dumplings are a good place to start: They’re expertly folded pockets concealing minced chicken meat that radiates ginger in all directions. They come with a pair of chutneys, one a roasted-tomato dipping sauce and the other a yellow condiment built from, among other ingredients, mustard and sesame seeds. The latter chutney hits the palate with a sort of stinging floralness, a tell-tale sign of that Nepali timur pepper.
The Nepali thali — say that 10 times fast! — gives you the best glimpse into the country’s decidedly vegetarian habits. A snowball of rice sits at the center of the metal platter, surrounded by the rainbow colors of the Nepali table: the bruised burgundy of the mas ko dal (a stewlike mix of black lentils and tomatoes, with a spicy edge), the muted green of the fried mustard leaves (which, I swear, smack of peanut butter), the mango tint of the fried potato “pickles” (slathered with that bewitching yellow chutney) and the hickory hue of the goat curry (its gravy ignited with ginger). This short tour of Nepal cooking goes best with a basket of Namaste’s warm, pillowy and perfectly chewy naan.
Like the kukhura ko sekuwa, the Namaste choe-la leans hard on mustard oil, the product so central to Nepali life. But the kitchen accentuates the oil’s inherent pungency with complementary bursts of piquancy: spring onions, red onions, garlic, an allium block party threatening to go rouge. The dish speaks to me on so many levels, but I can’t stop thinking about its sour cousin, the Nepali chicken dish that looks east, toward Sichuan province.
NAMASTE
6138 Rose Hill Dr., Alexandria.
Hours: Daily,
11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Sunday-Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 5 to 10:30 p.m.
Nearest Metro station: Van Dorn Street, with a 2.4-mile trip to the restaurant.
Prices: Entrees, $9.99-$24.99
source : washingtonpost.com.
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