Photo Credit: ecstaticist.

So I’ve dedicded to start a new project for dining in 2010. The tagline of this site is “Sampling the World’s Cuisine Without Leaving Vancouver” and so instead of of traipsing around Vancouver’s culinary delights in the random way I have been for the last (almost) 2 years, I am going to present my finds country by country.

I still have a bit of a backlog of reviews, so I may post those interspersed with the project and if I feel really keen, I may even post some recipes.

First stop on the grand tour: North America. Got any favorites you’d like to recommend?

What’s better than a kick-ass curry? A kick-ass curry stuffed inside a rolled-up crepe, obviously. A specialty of Southern India and Sri Lanka, this delectable dish is called a dosa. It’s basically a pancake made out of rice and fermented lentils filled with curry and served with various chutneys on the side and the place to get them in Vancouver is at the House of Dosas. I’d been there with friends once before, quite a while ago and then it slipped off the radar entirely until an ex-coworker recommended it for a cheap lunch destination.

So good! How did I ever manage to forget about the dosas? At the waiter/owner/proprietor’s suggestion, we ordered 3 dishes to be divied up equally; lamb korma ($12.99), lamb curry dosa ($9.99) and seafood masala dosa -fish, shrimp, and crab ($10.99). And then we threw in an order of vegetable pakoras ($4.99) for good measure.

The prices are reasonable for the amount of food you get, but for a really stellar deal, go on Monday when the dosas are only $5.99 each.

I haven’t really been excited about the food selection around here since I got back from New York, but I started out this meal with a very loud, “MMMMMM!,” and kept it up through the entire meal until I’m sure my dining companions were irritated with me. It was impossible to stop but at least we were so full after the dosas that there was no chance of dessert.

The lamb korma was possibly the best korma I’ve ever had. A little bit sweet with chunks of lamb meat in it, I had ordered it medium spicy and while I normally like things spicy, the creamyness of this dish suited the amount of spice. If you’re sensitive to spicy things, you should be ok here, but even so, it comes with both naan bread and the cripsy, paper-thin pappadums, plus rice and yogurty raita to cool it down. I would have preferred if the seafood dosa (also ordered medium) and the lamb curry dosa (ordered mild) were spicier, so I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m back. Even without the heat, however, the dosas were delicious. The crepe covering was light and thin and proved to be the perfect medium for housing the generous chunks of curried meat and seafood.  

I also ordered a salted lassi to drink purely so that I could check it off the list, and was pleasantly surprised at the heat-cutting, refreshing yogurty taste of it. Possibly an acquired taste if you’re used to the sweeter mango lassis, but I often find mango too sweet, so I’ll definitely be having the salted one again next time.

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House of Dosas
1391 Kingsway, Vancouver