The India Cafe
Costa Mesa's Indian-Himalayan restaurant gives you the rare chance to yak - in a good way
Elsewhere on this site, we’ve mentioned that Southern California tends to have more restaurants advertising themselves as Himalayan than ones with actually considerable Himalayan menus and preparations, but The India Cafe is something different: This Costa Mesa Indian restaurant doesn’t flag Himalayan, Nepalese, or Tibetan roots anywhere in its name or advertising, but has a collection of dishes that are conspicuously from that region, and they’re really quite good.
One major clue is India Cafe’s first menu item – Himalayan momo dumplings, which never appear on standard Indian menus – but there are many such choices, including Nepalese-spiced chicken cholla, Tibetan Thupka stew, Himalayan mushroom matar, and a Napali thali. One that immediately caught our attention was Yak Chili, one of those exotic meats you can’t just find everywhere, here served on a sizzling plate with vegetables and a chili sauce mixed with ginger, soy, and garlic. Unsurprisingly a little gamey and firmly textured, it’s distinctive enough that you know it’s not beef or goat, and still quite tasty.
We also tried several other of the Indo-Chinese choices, including the spicy chicken chilli, sweet coconut/cherry/nut/raisin-filled Kashmiri naan – a must-order – as well as the Nepalese-spiced chicken choila, and lamb coconut, a mild cream sauce with chunks of meat. While there’s certainly enough overlap between these dishes and classic Indian versions that any fan of Indian food will instantly be comfortable at The India Cafe, the differences in spicing and occasionally sweetness are akin to offering an extra path to explore when dining here.
One note: actually dining at The India Cafe isn’t an amazing experience. The restaurant’s interior is charmless – more a place for family dining than date night – and its prior white tablecloth ambitions have dissipated in favor of a more spartan and basic approach to service. When we visited, the restaurant was modestly staffed and not especially busy. That having been said, we’d go back in a heartbeat to try more of the menu, as we enjoyed everything we ordered, and really appreciated the menu’s wide variety of Indian and Himalayan options.
Stats
Price: $$-$$$
Service: Table
Open Since: 2016
Addresses
528 W. 19th St.
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
949.200.9365
Instagram: @theindiacafe1