Guru Lukshmi

Guru Lukshmi

2555 Erin Centre Blvd. #3

Mississauga, ON

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9 out of 10

Best South Indian I've ever had.

My brother and I drove to Mississauga (from Toronto, not Montreal) to a little a strip mall by Erin Mills to experience this restaurant. Maybe Brampton has better (I have no idea) but Little India on Gerrard does not. Udupi Palace, for example, is good, but this place is better. It tastes fresher, there are more options (not always a good thing, but in this case it was), you can customize according to taste, and there are items I haven't seen anywhere else.

Most places, "South Indian" is synonymous with dosa - the thin crepe-like wrap made of slightly fermented lentils. That's all well and good, but with Indian food it's never about one thing. Dosa is also about the rasam, the coconut chutney, the coriander chutney, the sambar, and for me, the idli. You come to Guru Lukshmi for all these things, and the first thing on the list is not the dosas themselves, as wonderful as those are here.

Best things about this restaurant, in order:
1. The coconut chutney. Unbelievably fresh and sweet. Not metallic and dry. SO good for you and you just want to eat it with a spoon.
2. The rasam.

Sweet and sour tomato-tamarind soup. I've had lots of rasam before but never has the tamarind stood out like this. It was a little mouth-puckering instead of just oily tomato soup.

3. The dosa itself. Choose from paper-thin dosa, steamed thicker dosa, no oil, a little oil, regular amount of oil, your chili heat preference, and of course, two menu pages worth of fillings. Everything is there from the classic masala dosa stuffed with masala-spiced potatoes (masala is just a spice blend that depends on the chef. It really just means "spice blend") to all kinds of chilies or even chocolate...hmm...I wonder if they could put those together for me? Anyway, in mine I could taste the fenugreek and fennel seed. Oh, and the cumin. Whole cumin seed. If you've never seen one of these dosas before, here's another picture:

They can be rolled up into a burrito-like wrap or just folded over like a very large omelet (top of post). Here it didn't really matter because everyone was eating traditionally - with the right hand only. The left is used to wash yourself (well, traditionally. Probably not in Canada. Hygiene is a little different here). But try eating this messy thing with just one hand! You kind of need to break off pieces. Mine was helpfully sliced into four wraps, making it easy to lift one quarter at a time, but I don't think this was quite what is normally done. The folded over ones (from what I saw) need to be opened and the fillings swept to the side. Then you break off pieces of the crispy parts of the dosa and use them as utensils to pick up pieces of the fillings. This works fine when it's a potato, or a soft mash of some kind, but when it's pieces of things it gets tricky. Makes sense that so many dishes are soft mashes in Indian cooking since they've got to pick them up somehow. Still, no matter what you do, it gets messy. I marveled at how it seemed easy to everyone else in the restaurant (we were the only Caucasians. A good sign except I feel like I'm intruding without an invitation). It's probably like chopsticks where it just takes a little practice. Maybe it's also not great for me since I'm left-handed and I kept trying to reach with my left hand, only to stop myself. There is a sink in the open area of the restaurant to wash your hands even. That way you don't create a line to get into the bathroom just to maintain hand hygeine. Very smart.

I had the vegetable spring dosa with chettinad ($9) that you couldn't really get without oil even though it's supposed to be lower-fat. What they really mean is the insides have more vegetables and less oil, but it's still pretty sticky. The chettinad was a blend of red chilies, herbs and spices combined with crisp cabbage (I think) and some other crunchy vegetables that I had a hard time of stopping myself to loo9k at. I didn't find too hot at all, but I eat hot sauce by the spoonful. Every time I go for Indian I have to be very insistent that I actually want it spicy. I love the flavourful burn, and here the heat didn't overpower anything for me. Hurray!

So there are some limitations to the dosa selection, but there are two entire pages of options. Everything from onion to coriander, cumin, vegetable curry-stuffed, cheese, ghee (clarified butter), tomato, greens in gravy (I imagine like saag? Though they have another saag dosa with feta), chana dal (like chickpeas) and all kinds of different chili peppers ground or fried and stuffed in the various dosa shells. Two exceptional things you can get are chocolate dosas (with nutella - I think rarely found in Indian restaurants...but a brilliant innovation. If crepes can do it, so can dosa. Maybe that should be their motto. Just no ham and cheese, please. Gross).

4. The idli.

These are just fermented rice and lentil flying saucers that are steamed. I never think they're anything special, which is why I keep ordering them wherever I go. I want to find a place where they have a flavour and I can figure out why they're on South Indian menus in the first place. Indian food is all about spice (not necessarily heat) and more importantly, about flavour, so these things are generally horribly bland by comparison. Here they're a little more interesting, but I think it's because of the accompanying sides. You dip these guys in the sambhar or the aforementioned heavenly coconut chutney. The sambhar is kind of a soup whose contents vary from restaurant to restaurant, cook to cook, like spice blends. Usually it's tomato-based and is garnished with coriander. It was okay, but the interesting thing on this plate that I'd never seen before was the idli powder (top right corner of photo). The powder was like a concentrated form of the idli ithemselves. There was a real, slightly nutty flavour. Very savoury and like fine pebbles to be crunched. You eat them and you think "Oh! THAT'S what idli are supposed to taste like." But when they get steamed they lose some of that quality and the chutneys come to the rescue. I think of idli as Indian pasta. In the world of pasta there's really good kinds that have real flavour from the egg and durum semolina or high quality flour, and then there are generic boxed pastas from the supermarket that gets eaten by the pound. It's like inhaling air, but it's still beloved by so many people. It's a staple. Other people might try it for the first time and wonder why we'd put something so tasteless in our mouths. I'm sure hordes of foreign exchange students go through that when they come to Canada and buy the cheapest thing in the grocery store - pasta. Normally this flavourless confusion is me with idli, but not here. Here I get it a little.

Something else I'd never seen before was a page of options for the jain and swaninarayan communites. I didn't even know there was one or what that was. All those options are without garlic and onion. They're two religious communities that obviously are large enough to be catered to at a great restaurant. This would also be great for anyone with onion or garlic allergies or intolerances.

I wish I could have tried the South Indian desserts. They're hard to find, but as it stood my stomach was full (and happy). So another time perhaps I'll try the payasam. Though, maybe not, since it's like rice pudding (made with milk) and would knock me on my lactose-intolerant bum for awhile. That bum would like to stay un-sat on more often.

Jolee

5495 Avenue Victoria

Montreal, QC
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6 out of 10

Sri Lankan/South Indian/South Asian

Kind of fuzzy on the type of food, I know, but International boundaries don't really bind culinary traditions in places whose interconnected histories go back thousands of years. For example, everything on the thali plate above looks like standard Indian except the noodles. Even the restaurant's sign says "Indian" but the Sri Lankan influences are huge, and there's definitely a combination of Northern and Southern Indian fare being offered here.

That being said, here's what this restaurant/take-away serves: dosa, idli, vada, biryani and uttappam - all South Indian specialties - as well as pittu, string hoppers and kottu, Sri Lankan dishes.

But Wait! There's more! Butter chicken, spicy vegetable and non-vegetable curries, naan, all served as part of thalis, and appetizers like pakoras - very much Northern Indian fare. Then, just in case you don't like any of these foods, there are the Chinese dishes of noodles and meat, vegetables or seafood with shrimp, egg, oyster sauce and soy sauce, reminiscent of Cantonese chow mein. There's nothing called "fried rice" on the menu, but between the biryani and the string hoppers kottu you'd probably never know the difference unless you were from one of the places listed above.
Because of all the selection, this restaurant does a mean take-out business with all the different people living in the Cote-Ste-Catherine area. With a buffet-style counter at the front, you can get your crab leg curry and chicken roti to go, along with samosa-type deep-fried pastries or vats of over-cooked meats in spiced oil. Yes, they've been sitting there for awhile, but the turn-over can be pretty good depending on the dish. I actually saw a fresh chafing dish of beef put out between the time I entered the restaurant and the time I left. Impressive, and the highlight of my whole trip was the take-away roti of ungreasy sweet baked dough wrapped around spicy chicken and potatoes, the whole thing the size of a kids hot dog, but much more delicious. I like spicy and despite my requests for spicy dishes, this was the only thing that came close to satisfying my tongue.
That's not to say that they didn't try to spike my string hoppers kottu with diced fresh green chiles. Unfortunately, it just didn't work very well. I could see mustard seeds and fennel mixed into the home-made diced noodles, onions, chili, egg and fried seafood mixture, but it just didn't taste like much. Turns out the trick with this dish is to order beef or lamb since the fat of those cheap pieces of meat flavours the entire dish. The seafood was tough, chewy and bland, and therefore so was the rest of the dish. The interesting part was that it was served with lime on the side, which is definitely a Thai influence on the Sri Lankan dish, not Indian. The lime added a lot to the enormous platter of food ($8.00 for the seafood option, $6.50 for lamb, chicken or beef, $5.50 for vegetarian), but there wasn't enough lime to flavour three meals of the stuff, which is how many meals I made out of it. God bless take-out containers and tupperware.
I really couldn't expect the Idly to be spicy. It's not supposed to be. 5 discs of steamed dessicated rice and lentils ($5.50) aren't supposed to be extremely tasty by themselves. It's their accompanying sambar and coconut chutney that should do the work. Unfortunately the sambar, a mix of carrots, okra (another less common ingredient), lentils and spices, ended up pretty watery and bland. I couldn't taste fenugreek or cumin or mustard seed (despite seeing them again) or coriander. The coconut chutney was worse. It tasted metallic and a little salty. It should be a little sweet, even the unsweetened variety. This probably means the coconut was not fresh, but it also means no spices or flavourings were added to help.
Sambar is served with just about all the South Indian appetizers and dosas, so there were a few more disappointments. The vada, deep-fried balls of lentils, coriander, onions and chilies sit in a soup of the stuff (thoguh they may be saved by the oil from the balls leeching into the liquid (think Gulf of Mexico oil spill but delicious), and the masala dosa - giant, thin, crepe-like cones of lentil and spices wrapped around potato and other unidentifiable, kind of spiced oily vegetables, all fried in more oil - didn't really have a chance.
The dosas themselves (we tried the regular masala version - masala just means spice blend, like curry means Indian spices to a lot of Westerners - and the onion version, which was exactly the same but added raw chopped red onions to the inside of the lentil wrap). The dosa shell was tasty, slightly fermented and lemony, but the inside was nothing to write home about. It needed a whole lot more fresh spice and heat, and less oil.

I'd never had stringhoppers before, so I was looking forward to trying the Sri Lankan specialty. These home-made noodles are very fun. They're a little brownish-red in colour and once steamed, stick together in small circular bundles, that are easily removed from on top of each other. They were served in a thali, a mixed metal plate separated into sections of different cooked vegetables, lentils and meats. The vegetarian version came with beautifully squishy (thanks to all the oil) eggplant, boring potatoes in a turmeric-based heat-less spicing, and a very respectable daal. I liked the daal because it didn't cheat by using salt to add flavour. I could actually taste the fennel, FINALLY! The noodles themselves don't taste like much, they're just noodles, after all, but there's something very comforting about noodles, and it's very different to be eating noodles, and not rice with what you think will be a rice-heavy South Indian meal.

Of course, the standard Indian thali is just like, but maybe a little worse, than any North Indian place in Parc Extension. For almost no money you get a ton of food - the same eggplant, daal and potato, along with rice, a piece of thin, sub-par naan and a curry of beef, lamb or chicken. The lamb was over-cooked and chewy, since I think it came from the counter-top buffet in front instead of the fresh pan I saw put out.

So there were problems here. The restaurant was dirty. Apparently they violated a whole lot of health codes in the past. There were hairs in some of the food. The bathrooms weren't clean, nothing seemed sanitized. Most importantly, the food was just so-so, but as a restaurant experience it was really fun. If you're the type of person who likes to try a new dish, a new style of cuisine, and learn about a different culinary tradition, this is a great place to come. Just ask what's fresh, order what the locals order and don't expect anything to be amazing. It will be very, very good for the meagre amount of money that you spend, though. I would go back for the chicken roti.

Hours: Noon-11pm, daily
Expect to Pay: Vegetarian - $7, Meat - $7.50-$13 including tax and tip, less on take-out.
Licensed: In theory, yes, but they don't sell alcohol and you can't BYOB, so probably they don't have a license anymore.
514-733-6362