OUR REVIEW OF YATRA BRASSERIE

Just over a year ago, Sonu Lalvani was another of those numberless London success stories from the huge colonial expanse divided in 1947 into India and Pakistan. He had a successful restaurant called Yatra in the stylish Mayfair district, with an attached nightclub flying the colors of ‘60s Carnaby Street called Butterfly High. Then a friend told Lalvani about Houston, and all bets were off.

These days, that established restaurant-club in Mayfair is having to look after itself a bit, while the entrepreneur focuses his energies on doing what many have tried and failed to do: making sense of Houston’s on-again, off-again, maybe-again downtown. Lunches at his new Yatra Brasserie have caught on bigtime among business people looking for curry in a hurry. At night, though, when the bulk of those people trek home to River Oaks and Tanglewood, not to mention Katy, Sugar Land and the Woodlands, it’s a brave new world fronting the Metrorail on Main Street. Happily, Lalvani has not only duplicated Butterfly High to grab some of the late-night, youth-driven club business but two other connected lounge concepts. The place is a by-god stately pleasure dome, as another Brit once said of Xanadu – the city, not the movie.

Yatra Brasserie is the creation of a man with polish, a man whose schooling took place in England, and a man who understood how to bring that country’s favorite “cheap food” – chicken tikka masala is now considered the UK’s “national dish” – to one of London’s poshest neighborhoods. In Houston, considerable amounts of style have made the crossing, though happily for us, Lalvani understands the need for reasonable prices to attract office workers in the day and young club-goers at night. The cuisine, again happily for us, is largely traditional and familiar to lovers of Indian food, all prepared very well and tasting of fresh ingredients. In short, at Yatra, Indian food is neither some nouvelle gourmet craze or the latest immigrant broken-English buffet in the ‘burbs. It’s a grand and ancient cooking style that we, like so many Londoners before us, will want to eat again and again and again.

Some of the dishes served here blend Indian and Pakistani origins, as befits a land long intermingled but then separated geographically on the basis of its two main religions, Hindu and Muslim. Even one of the naans (those terrific breads cooked in the clay tandoor) hails from the often-troubled border, but the mildly sweet bread studded with raisins is way too wonderful for religion or politics. There really is chicken tikka masala at Yatra, so everyone should be happy. And a wonderful version it is too, reminding us why so many people love a “good curry” when the concept and certainly the word usage were hard to find in India before the British started simplifying the names on things.

The appetizer list shows a few signs of reaching out to Houston diners. Traditional ground beef samosas show up under a far more familiar name in these parts, empanadas; there is virtually no difference in the construction. And you can almost feel the young people coming in to club stopping off for starters like spicy calamari, spicy chicken wings (cooked in the tandoor, not in Buffalo) and Goan-style crab cakes with a nifty lemon butter sauce. Oddly, Yatra sidesteps the omnipresent mulligatawny soup of London (another, we’re told, British colonial invention) for a pleasant cream of spinach and pea. Other favorites more in keeping with tradition include the samosa chaat – pastry stuffed with potatoes and peas, with curried chickpeas, tamarind and mint sauce – and chicken harra kabab, a kind of white-meat tandoori chicken nugget with yogurt and mint.

With deference to its customers base, some entrees are what we of the West would call “curries” – meats or seafoods cooked in a lush, spicy sauce that verges on being gravy, and other proteins are more simply grilled. We have many loves from that first collection, in addition to England’s national dish: the very-hot shrimp vindaloo (if you don’t like hot, avoid anything called vindaloo), the creamer-than-cream chicken korma, and the best lamb rogan josh we’ve ever tasted. While many of these dishes taste like curry, they are made traditionally not with anything called “curry powder” but with specific and varied blends of spices. And since many Indians are vegetarians, there is a larger-than-usual list of these items, including the popular ssag panir of spinach and cheese, the bhindi masala of cut okra with onions and tomatoes, and two kinds of dal made with two colors of lentil, black or yellow. Sided with some of Yatra’s flaky but filling naan and a bowl of aromatic basmati rice, this is the only vegetarian cuisine on earth in which a meat-lover might be happy.

Traditional Indian desserts are wildly unimpressive to Americans raised on anything from bread pudding to pecan pie to chocolate cake, so Lalvani and Co. have rejiggered the old-time recipes a bit. Gulab jamun, for instance, a kind of fried dough ball soaked in too-sweet-too-floral syrup, gets “born again” at Yatra flamed in cognac. Much improved, thank you! And take it from a London veteran: after the traffic jam of spices that is this bedazzling cuisine, any dessert that’s cold, clean and made with fresh mango is a salvation.