My Indian friend M brought me to Kamal Palace on a spectacular July weekday, noon sun slanting through the restaurant’s nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, boats like a SoCal still-life in the adjacent Marina Pacifica, waiters in actual ties drifting silently up to the table with just mounds of naan, the pillowy bread about which I’ll reveal a secret. But not yet.

M is a woman whose mother and father left the subcontinent for the United States of America. She grew up in the Valley, works in an adoption agency she owns (with her mom) down the hall from District Weekly HQ and—this is important for our tale—is a lifelong vegetarian. I’m new to vegetarianism, a stranger in a meatless land; she is my guide.

On the drive to Kamal Palace she says “meat is death” and then apologizes for what she calls the provincialism of that view. She just returned from two weeks in Peru and Ecuador where, to her horror, American tourists—the Teva-wearing, non-judgmental, cultural relativist types—fell into the habit of eating fire-roasted guinea pig on a stick. She imitates the barbecued rodent: beaver-like front teeth, apparently, and angry-looking little forelegs with claws.

“How can they do that?” she asked of her fellow Americans. “How can they eat on vacation something they’d have as a pet at home?” “With your hands?” I offer.

She discovered Kamal Palace in 1993, on her first day at Cal State Long Beach. Her father had driven her in from the Valley; I don’t ask, but you can just imagine the man’s anxiety about sending off his daughter and then understand that he vented it—the anxiety—in a discussion with her about food. She recalls that this was paramount in his mind, that he said, “We’re going to find you real Indian food,” and that his initial notion was that Kamal Palace might deliver meals to her dorm room every day. She politely resisted.

Poor kid. Because no dorm food I can imagine could rival Kamal Palace, a favorite (Indian friends say) of Indian expats for the last 30 years. The lunch buffet is typical Indian fare except in this: It’s fabulous.

Too many Indian buffets are remindful of the Circus Circus Hotel in Vegas, catering to the fanny-packed masses where all-you-can-eat is more important than whether you ought to bother. Kamal is remarkable for the obvious preparation; on countless visits, I’ve seen the boxes of raw produce moving into the kitchen, and M can tell you how much time it takes to turn those fresh ingredients into each dish. This is not a grayed-out hash of stuff boiling through the midday in a steam tray. It’s art, delicate spices collaborating to produce a kind of Bollywood on your tongue.

“That’s why I love Indian food,” M tells me. “Because it’s so complicated. It’s like India. Each bite is its own experience.” I’m sort of English in my tastes, which is to say my palate runs toward the muted, so I go for the aloo gobi, a firm, curried mix of fresh cauliflower and potatoes that is, like so much Indian food, impossibly yellow—owing, M’s mom tells me, to the turmeric.

I blew through mushroom bhaji (mushrooms and peas with a variety of earthy spices) and poured lentils (daal makhni) over long-grained rice. I was like a Japanese hot dog-eating champion—threw down vegetable samosas the size of a child’s fist as if they were mere M&Ms, and drove fast toward the desserts.

I allowed myself mere samples of these, and would indeed have been satisfied with smearing mango chutney on naan; it’s my own innovation—like an Indian apple pie—but it can’t have escaped the attention of the nearly billion or so Indians presently sharing the planet with us. I mean, these people have created carrot pudding, which I tried here for the first time, and which, really, is no pudding at all but a sublime reduction of carrots, butter, sugar and ground cashews, and, therefore, precisely because of that nomenclatural weirdness (and maybe the hint of cardamom), one of those breathtaking moments in dining.

And what’s missing in our country when people will wash down three or four Hot Pockets with a Diet Coke but where gulab jaman—golf ball-shaped pancakes in nuclear-hot maple syrup—remains almost unheard of? There’s your million-dollar tip, my friend: Pancake Balls.

Tags: Food, indian, kamal palace, Long Beach, Restaurants