About

Swagat, whose name means, “Welcome,” has taken over the space formally occupied by Cajun Café. Swagat is the only Indian place around that offers several specialties from Madras and the Southeast. These dishes have become the restaurant’s signature dishes; they are basically crêpes made from various lentil flours, such as moong bean, urad and cream of wheat occasionally mixed with soaked rice and in some cases spiked with onions and chilies. Crisp and flaky, tawny brown and full a foot long, they cantilever over the plate in a display of exuberant excess. Dosas are gigantic and filling, since most of them are lavishly stuffed with vegetable curry-including potatoes laced with ginger, mustard seeds, aromatic asafetida, turmeir, onions and green chilies-and come with a cup of spectaculaty coconut-rich, tamarind-laced lentil soup, known as sambar. In addition to the creeps there are several more versions of what is essentially street food: sethu vada, a rather bland, deep fried pastry-thick disks of crunchy beans that are all texture, no taste-and utappu. a marvelously spicy and buttery grilled pancake that resembles a great individual designer pizza.

In south Indian, dosas are often accompanied by a buttermilk drink; to approximate this taste (but even better), ask for a Iassi, a cold yogurt drink available salty or sweet, often with a pinch of cumin ore rosewater. Then move up to creamy Kingfisher beer. Accompanying the dosas you’ll find a trio of deep-fried dipping sauces: a mild coconut and roasted chick pea, a tangy mint and cilantro, and a blazing hot tomato and jalapenho- ketchup’s desire for apotheosis. As you graduate from ivory to jade to ruby, you’ll experience a full range of flavors that marry beautifully with the pancakes, and you’ll see that Indian food is hardly a series of monochromatic stews.