Dosa Hut

Anyone remember "hit the hut" from Pizza Hut?

Growing up with one health freak and one culture freak for parents, hitting that particular hut was strictly verboten.  It therefore followed that as a child, it was all I ever wanted.  I remember on maybe my 12th birthday my dad saying I could go anywhere I liked for lunch - anywhere at all!  I know he wanted me to say Mask of China or wherever else was the "it" place in the early 90's.  I said - you guessed it - Pizza Hut.  He was horrified!

Something must have rubbed off, though, as I now have zero interest in unlimited quantities of bad chocolate mousse and every interest in this particular hut, which I recommend you hit with vigour.  Meet Dosa Hut.

Dosa Hut has been in Barkly Street for at least as long as I've lived in the area (9+ years).  Over that time they have expanded into the place next door, and continued to expand their menu into a greatest hits of South Indian cuisine.

One of the best-known South Indian staples is dosa - very light, impressively huge pancakes made from a lightly fermented (like sourdough) rice and lentil batter.  They have crisp, burnished bottoms and are unflipped, making their top layer capable of soaking up all manner of delicious juices.  This was a nontraditional but particularly awesome dosa "filled" with Chicken 65...

...which are battered chicken pieces in a sticky red sauce spiked with curry leaves.  It's an Indian spin on Chinese food, but instead of being dumbed down, it's amped up.  Spicy, rich, tangy - awesome.

If that all sounds a bit much, start with the classic masala dosa.  This one is filled with a dry-ish potato dish made with peeled potatoes fried with spices.

It's a classic and deservedly so.  The dosa come with a zesty, runny pickle, amazing coconut chutney and sambar.  If you like it a bit hotter, get the Mysore version, which has special chilli powder added.

Sambar is a South Indian soup of sorts made with onion and other vegies (here, carrots), lentils, spices and tomato.  You spoon mouthfuls in between bites of dosa.

Mango lassi are awesome.

Dosa Hut's menu is voluminous.  If you don't know what things are, just ask - the staff are very friendly.  A few things I can tell you is rava dosa is a dosa made from semolina; uttapham is like a very thick pancake with toppings cooked into the top (kind of like a pan-fried pizza); the spring roll dosa is rolled up tight, almost like a burrito!  I have not partaken of the "Lindt chocolate dosa", but that sounds like a particularly worthwhile ordering experiment - and just as good as an all-you-can-eat dessert bar!

Dosa Hut
604b Barkly Street, West Footscray
Check out the menu here (Tarneit store, but as far as I can tell, the same as the WeFo one)

Rotifest at Chillipadi Mamak Kopitiam

Well before Britain colonized both countries, India and Malaysia had had historical connections throughout the centuries through trade.  Even before the 13th century (!) Indian ruling dynasties had established trading posts and even provinces in modern-day Malaysia.  During colonization, however, the connection became more explicit when the British rulers “imported” thousands of very poor South Indians to became indentured labourers on various projects.  Most were from the state of Tamil Nadu and many stayed, intermingling with the local people and leaving their mark on Malaysian cuisine.

If you have ever wondered why there is ‘roti’ in an Indian restaurant (round, flat wholemeal bread, somewhat like a tortilla) and ‘roti’ in a Malaysian restaurant (flaky, oily, pastry-like squares), this is why.  The Tamil migrant workers set up kopitiams (coffee shops) and hawker stalls, and the food they made was known as ‘mamak’ cuisine.  They took the bread of their homeland and (according to Madhur Jaffrey) competed in the spectacle of tossing the bread like pizza to get it as thin as possible.  Hence ‘roti canai’, the Malaysian word for this puffy, crispy, pastry-like bread, from Chennai, the original name of Madras, the city in South India from where many of these workers came.

I love Malaysian roti – it was a big part of our family BBQs.  My dad would buy the square packets of three or four pieces and grill them on the BBQ or on a flat griddle pan before cutting into squares with scissors.  We ate it with sausages or BBQd chicken – totally untraditional but we thought it was great.  I had been dying to try Chillipadi Kopitiam Mamak, a new restaurant in Flemington which celebrates Mamak or Malaysian/Tamil Muslim-style food, especially after Bryan’s gorgeous ‘happy roti man’ post.  When Penny organized a meetup of some of Melbourne’s food tweeting fraternity for a six-course roti banquet, despite being the crappest tweeter know to humanity, I just had to go.

Chillipadi make all the roti right here.  Oiled pastry knots are rolled and slapped out, twirled until paper thin.  But instead of being folded into little parcels, here they were twirled back into coils before being grilled and presented like roti escargots in little baskets.  The textural variation is just gorgeous.  There’s the soft, feathery interior then the flaky, crunchy exterior, sloughing off dark, crackly flakes.

It is traditional to have roti with a small bowl of curry.  This beef rendang was absolutely off the hook.  The chunks of beef were so tender – you could tear them with your fingers, the meat shredding into strands.  The sauce was just divine, very oily but that is the idea, that you just have a little to pinch between pieces of warm roti bread.  So fantastic!

These chilli prawns were similarly gorgeous.  The sauce is quite sweet and is thickened with strands of beaten egg, like egg drop soup or stracciatella.  The prawns were pretty special, juicy and fat, definitely fresh, not precooked.  According to Bryan the sauce here is very similar to the sauce for chilli crab.  It was only manners that kept me from licking the plate.

Next was roti jala.  A thin batter squiggled onto a griddle to create “nets” of pancake-like bread.

This came with excellent chicken curry with just the right amount of coconut creaminess and lots of lovely warm spices like cardamom.  As is apparently traditional, the use of coconut milk is quite light here compared to how Australians might normally think of Malaysian curries.  The curries here are seriously good.  We ate the roti with the chicken on top like spaghetti.  It was fun, but I wanted more of the original roti canai!

Roti Ruben, Chillipadi’s own creation.  Soft, doughy pieces of square roti filled with chicken, mayonnaise, sweet chilli sauce and an egg omelette.  I actually really liked this but others on my table found it too stodgy.  It was so sweet, it almost could have been a dessert, but it was tasty and well-made.  It you go with a group, get one to split - I think it is a winner!

I was so keen to try this.  Dosa is a famous South Indian delicacy, a huge, thin crepe made with fermented ground rice and lentils.  It is crispy and tangy and is often served stuffed with fillings such as spiced potato, egg, mince or cheese.  This had also come to Malaysia via the Tamil migrants, morphing into "thosai".  Instead of the traditional sambar or very thin, spicy red dal/soup of the Indian version, it came with dalcha, a thick puree of mildly spiced yellow split peas and a small serve of thin, coconut-based curry sauce.  I was so full by this stage I just had a mouthful but it was lovely - looking forward to going back to have another.

Roti bom, the original roti canai squiggled with condensed milk and chocolate topping.  OMG!  Pretty intense but good.

I was absolutely far too stuffed to do anything but jaw-drop at this.  Roti tisu, a Matterhorn of crispy roti bread with slalom trails of condensed milk and chocolate sauce careening down it.

Ice kacang, a traditional dessert of shaved ice and various toppings - there could be condensed milk, palm syrup, corn, candied fruits, jellies etc.  I am not an enormous fan of ice kacang in general but it is certainly fun.  I think this is the dessert about which on Food Safari Maeve O'Meara said, "That's a party in a glass!"

Chillipadi have a really great drinks menu.  This is the longan drink, served in a Fowlers Vacola jar (#20 for preserving nerds out there).  It was really delicious, sweet but not cloying, long and refreshing.  Bryan did laugh at me because I couldn't eat the longans or round, lychee-like fruits at the bottom.  I just cannot get into chunky "things" in drinks.  The fact that the Malay word for longan is "cat's eye" only adds to my distaste.

Bryan had raved about the teh peng here.  The tea or coffee is a big part of the kopitiam or Malaysian coffee shop experience.  So I went from a cat's eye drink to this teh peng, where one sip and my mouth went like the other end of the cat.  It was so astringent and tannic.  If my tea overbrews I will tip it out - I like strong tea but not overbrewed.  Bryan came and tasted it and said that is the taste he craves, that traditional, powerful astrigency, blended with lots of condensed milk.  It's poured multiple times from a great height to create the bubbles on top.  So interesting - the childhood taste he was after was diametrically opposed to how I, with an Anglo-Saxon background, think of tea.  Good to see that Chillipadi have not toned this down for a Western palate!

Now I know everyone loves Laksa King, but go a bit further down the road and try Chillipadi Mamak Kopitiam out - I think they are great.  They have a fabulous-sounding mamak nasi kandar, somewhat like a thali with rice, two curry sauces, two meat and one veg for $10.50.  Also check out Addictive & Consuming and Let's Get Fat Together who between them I think have pretty much eaten the whole menu!

Disclaimer:  All attendees paid for their meal - although there was a set menu, this was a meetup, not a PR-style invite dinner.



Chillipadi Mamak Kopitiam
295 Racecourse Road, Kensington (map)
Phone:  9376 0228
Hours:  7 days 


Wheelchair Access
Level entry

Hop & Spice

City of Melbourne High School muck-up day.  Who do we have here?  Well, there's Footscray, the edgy cool girl who gets As in every class (without trying) but wears her uniform too short and smokes down at the end of the station.  Yarraville had a rough childhood but fools everyone that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.  Seddon has it all but is still everyone's best friend.  Maribyrnong lives to shop and jog along the river - you may not think she is all that fashionable but she is a good honest sort, always reliable and there for you.

Photo time!  Hang on, someone's missing.  Typical - Braybrook is wagging school again.  No great loss, smirk the mean girls, tossing their hair.  Her uniform is never on right, it's always unironed and she seems to skulk around on the outer.  Still waters run deep, though, and I believe Braybrook will come good.  Right now she's lying on her bed in her fibro house, dreaming of the person she will be and all the places she will go one day...  maybe even Sri Lanka.

Braybrook is often where you drive through to go somewhere else, but if you slow down you will be rewarded.  Right near the shell of an abandoned factory and next to an old-school Aussie takeaway, Sri Lankan restaurant Hop & Spice offers refuge from the roar of passing cars on Ballarat Road.

Sri Lanka has been called "the pearl in the ear of India", delicately poised just off its larger neighbour's southeast coast.  It was known during British rule as Ceylon and the tea brand Dilmah for one still uses this term.  The cuisine has overtones of south India in its use of curry leaves and a final "tempering" for dal (popping whole spices in oil separate to the lentils and adding them at the end of cooking).  It is also very unique, particularly in its use of Maldive fish, chips of dried tuna that looks like pinebark, and its unique dark-roasted curry powder.  There are echoes, too, of Sri Lanka's colonisation by the Dutch and the Portuguese, as well as their trading partners from Malaysia and the Middle East



Pan roll, $2

This is a typical Sri Lankan "short eat" or snack - a spicy minced meat, potato and pea filling (similar to that a samosa filling) tightly rolled up in a coconut pancake, dipped in breadcrumbs and deep-fried.  So yummy!  It came with a side of good ole dead horse.  Pan rolls - if only the tradies going in and out of the takeaway next door knew what they were missing out on! 

String hoppers are a very cool foodstuff unique to Sri Lanka.  They are little "webs" of what looks like rice vermicelli.  They are made from rice flour that is extruded by hand through a special press and steamed on individual mats (see here).  Bharat Traders sell them ready-made dried in boxes if you want to cook them at home.  Anyway, they taste different to rice vermicelli and because they are like little mats, you can pick them up and use them to mop up sauces and grab pieces of meat that you couldn't do with regular noodles.

String hopper pack, $7.50

My "pack" came with my choice of curry (I chose chicken) as well as dhal (parripu) and pol sombol (coconut chutney).  The dhal was absolutely fantastic - creamy and sweet with coconut, fragrant with curry leaves and mustard seeds and with a big chilli kick.  The lentils were perfectly cooked, neither hard nor too mushy.  The coconut chutney was fabulous - I am sure it was fresh coconut, not dessiccated, mixed with red chilli and lemon.  It hit all the right notes - sweet and somewhat cooling yet tangy, rich and spicy all at once.

Although tasty, I have to say I found the chicken somewhat dry.  Next time I will choose the lamb or the beef and see if either are the Sri Lankan "black" curry style, which is made with spices that are roasted until a very rich, dark brown and ground until they almost resemble coffee.  There is a really exciting range of vegetarian dishes like bathala - "sweet potato in thick sauce", stir-fried snake bean in hot chilli and even kaju hodi in which cashews are cooked with coconut and green peas until amazingly plump and creamy.

Pol roti (coconut roti), $4.50

These small roti were flavoured with onion, fresh coconut and a little green chilli and came with a very sweet onion sambal.  I did find these somewhat heavy.  Really I was craving the aapa or "hoppers", bowl-shaped pancakes made of a fermented rice flour and coconut batter, cooked in a special pan and not flipped - dosa or injera's Sri Lankan cousin.  These are available only on Friday and Saturday nights when Hop & Spice have their fabulous-sounding buffet.  For $20 for adults and $8 for kids, you can have a veritable feast of pan rolls and other "short eats", breads, hoppers and string hoppers as well as curry of all persuasions.  Unreal!

Kalu dodol, $2

Who can resist subcontinental fudgy sweets?  This was a yummy, jelly-like sweetmeat made from jaggery (unrefined cane sugar said to be higher in trace minerals than the white or even the raw supermarket stuff), coconut milk and cashews.  Ah, naptime may be sweet but it is made even sweeter when savouring a little slice of Sri Lanka, and sweeter still to know that it is from this fabulous little restaurant - a Sri Lankan pearl in Braybrook's slow but inexorable awakening.

Hop & Spice

284 Ballarat Road, Braybrook (map)

Phone: 9310 2000

Hours:  Tues - Sun 10am - late (buffet Friday and Saturday nights)

Wheelchair Accessibility

Entry:  Large step inside the doorway

Layout:  Could accommodate

Dosa Hut

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "Family Meal Deal"?  Some sort of high-fat, high-salt junk food "treat", no doubt, marketed by fast food companies as every mother's dream "night off."  For the record, this mother's idea of a night off is cocktails at Madame Brussels and associated debauchery, not a bloody variety bucket.  However, I could be tempted with Dosa Hut's "Family Biryani Meal Deal," a mammoth pot of biryani proudly advertised on this little restaurant's front window.  McDonalds, watch your back!

Dosa Hut, bolted on to the end of West Footscray's Barkly Village, have a staggering menu of South Indian treats.  Choose from idli (UFO-shaped rice flour cakes), vada (crispy lentil flour doughnuts), or dosa (huge, paper-thin crepes made from fermented rice & lentil flours).  If you are used to the familiar equation, Indian = butter chicken and rogan josh, it might come as a bit of a shock to find no curries on the menu at all!

Masala dosa is one of my favourite foods of all time.  The dosa is paper-thin and crispy, yet pliable enough to form a long cigar shape.  Dosa Hut has a plethora of fillings - choose from egg, lamb, cheese, or even chocolate!  To decipher the menu, "kal" dosa is one that is somewhat softer than normal, "podi" has a spicy powder, and "rava" is made from semolina.  "Masala dosa" means that the dosa will conceal a dry-style potato curry, spiced with curry leaves, mustard seeds, and cumin seeds.

Masala Combo, $9.95

Concealed within the folded dosa, Dosa Hut's potato curry was excellent, heavy on the delicious ghee and bursting with fresh spice flavours.  It also came with a vada or lentil doughnut, which I usually avoid as in my experience they have a poor unhealthy-to-delicious ratio.  This one was really good though, springy inside and crispy outside, perfect for mopping up the creamy coconut chutney.  The little tower on the right is upma, a kind of savoury, wet, couscous-type dish mixed with whole spices and tomato.  Unfortunately, Dosa Hut let itself down on the sambar, the spicy, thin soup that is so beloved in South India.  This version was too watery and lacked punch.

Goat biryani, $9.50

I normally avoid biryani, as it often tastes to me like nothing more than gluggy, oily fried rice.  Not so Dosa Hut's version.  Each impossibly long grain of basmati rice was separate and stained a multitude of hues from spices and saffron.  Within the pyramid of biryani lay nuggets of excellent, tender goat, redolent with cardamom.  It came with very thin, so-so raita and an interesting peanut sauce.  Be warned, though - it is chilli-hot and probably not great for kids.

So, fellow parents, when nothing seems to be going right and you want a night (or goddamit, a whole day) off, take the family to Dosa Hut.  They won't care if you make a mess, and if you have guiltily left the kids in the care of the one-eyed babysitter (the TV) all afternoon, you can assuage some guilt by combining craft time with dinner time:

 
Dosa Hut
604 Barkly St, West Footscray (map)
Phone: 9687 0171
Hours: 11am-11pm, 7 days

Flora

 

Years ago, I went to Bangalore in South India.  The food there was unlike any Indian food I had ever eaten in Australia before.  Instead of the ubiquitous butter chicken and rogan josh, there were enormous, crepe-like pancakes (dosas), UFO-shaped rice flour patties (idlis), and the most divine light, spicy soup (sambar) that accompanied every meal (including breakfast!)  Upon coming home, I felt that I had been shown a miraculous world, the door to which was then abruptly slammed shut.  That was until I found Flora in Flinders St, which has since fulfilled all my South Indian cravings (for food at least).  Thanks to Lizard, a fellow Flora fan, for this mouth-watering guest review!

Alright, my first ‘guest’ review for Ms Baklover’s food blog! Like Ms B, I am a fierce foodie – I live to eat and I will die for the best kastu don. I even once wept over a bowl of the most amazing tempura snapper fillet on a Thai salad.

This is a restaurant that Ms B introduced me to – and I am now a fan of it: cheap, tasty and quick Indian food. Don’t you sometimes find that Indian food can be rather expensive? Also, served in kind of… smallish portions? It was only recently that I looked at the bill for the take-away Indian feast that was ritually ordered at my dad’s house for Sunday night dinner, and my blood turned to ice. Is Indian food trying to be a fad? Or is it genuinely difficult to cook, expensive to flavour and therefore, fairly priced?

 Flora, on Flinders Street, opposite that iconic station, kind of blows those expensive Indian restaurants du jour out of the water. For only 10 dollars, you can walk out of that restaurant with a painful cramp in your midsection that reminds you that your bellybutton is NOT bigger than your eye.

Step into the early 90’s décor, with Indian paintings crowding the walls, a bar available and a television screen with at 24-7 Bollywood MTV. The first thing you notice in Flora is the abundance of Indian mothers and grandmothers, complete with saris or Pakistani dress. It’s like a special chef's hat: this restaurant is a great place to take your mother/grandmother/relatives to. It attracts a parade of university Indian students (being right below a university housing), as well as a few Anglos who give you a grim look - that look where they hope you aren’t some reviewer that will tell everybody about Flora and ruin it for the real fans.

Okay, now, to the Food. I’ve been to Flora a fair few times, and the food is just as good every time. You have the option of a quick selection from the hot buffet cages, or from the menu for larger and typical dishes like Butter Chicken or Rogan Josh. There’s also fresh lassi available, and they have rosewater flavoured! I had that with a friend, and by gods, was it good! A bit heavy, but just what you need for a spicy dish.
 

Being a typical Taurean, I always order the small combo, foregoing rice for naan – one meat, one veg, and daal. One excellent thing about the combos – you can ask the smiling servers to swap for two meat, or two veg, et cetera. Today, I picked lamb vindaloo and chickpea balls in yoghurt, and got the compulsory dollop of daal. The naan is fresh and slightly oily, dry in spots and puffy in others. The buffet menu changes a few times a week – but there’ll always be a lamb, beef or chicken curry to pick out. The vindaloo isn’t always hot enough for my taste, but the coconut chutney that comes with the delicious dosa pancake or bohava is pretty damn spicy and delicious!
 

Speaking of the dosa, there is a list of various dosa that you can get. Word of warning when ordering the Masala dosa, the crepe-like bread that is rolled up like a wafer stick – it comes stuffed with a delicious and surprisingly light potato mix, but one person can’t finish it on their own! The same goes for the special menu items – do as the customers do: order one or two, a pile of naan, and share amongst four people. There is also mountains of deep-fried delights – bondas that are made of chickpea, lentils, potatoes, chillis and more – golden goodness that comes with the coconut chutney, a match made in heaven. Very hard to ignore, but we’re only human – buy one or two to taste to make mortality all worth the while!

I always make quick work of my curry-laden steel tray, and I always order a fresh small bowl of raita – my favourite condiment in the Indian cuisine (and I probably break a zillion Indian etiquette guidelines by slurping the raita straight up with a spoon). The meat is always tender, the sauce plentiful, and the vegetables are quite excellent – crunchy, never soggy, because of the never-ending queue of lunchtime patrons that doesn’t let the curries sit still.
 

 When you’ve finished, pull your belt back a few notches, and on your way out, pick up a spoonful of complimentary Indian breath freshener and digestion aid with its Christmassy colours (ingredients usually being coloured sugar, fennel seeds and coriander seeds). Most importantly - pick up one or two of Flora’s cards to trade with your friends!

Thanks Lizard!  I am craving masala dosa right now.  By the way, I regularly eat the entire thing on my own - what does that say about my appetite?!  If you too have a Melbourne food find you would like to share (anywhere from the city to way out west), please send it in to footscrayfoodblog at gmail dot com.

Flora, 238 Flinders St (between Swanston & Elizabeth), Melbourne City