Annapurna Cuisine

Pamper your tastebuds with Annapurna's wide selection of delicacies. Annapurna offers the most extensive vegetarian menu of delicacies and gourmet items. Try them out for their grand lunch buffet and wide dinner selections. You'll even find FREE Wireless Internet access and plasma TVs playing Bollywood musicals. At Annapurna's you'll enjoy excellent food and an exceptional atmosphere.Sari-clad matrons sit next to midriff-bared Indian American teens. This is Annapurna, where the walls are painted with Indian folkloric scenes -- bordered by the image of a strip of 35-millimeter film. "Your home away from home, " reads a slogan on the menu. The "you" addresses the homesick desi (Indian paisano). Many desis, it turns out, toil nearby in Culver City's film-related production businesses. The owner aims to provide them their favorite vegetarian comfort foods -- cooked exactly as they might be back home in Mumbai or Bangalore. Every dish at Annapurna has an assertive flavor personality of its own. Take the restaurant's aviyal and vegetable khorma. They may look similar, with their fresh coconut sauces and meticulously cut vegetables, but there's no mistaking the one, with its electric charge of dry-roasted chiles and tangy bursts of tamarind, for the other. From north India comes a stunning lineup of wheat breads -- flat, layered, yeast-risen, griddled, tandoor-baked and fried. Batura is a fragile golden puff of fried bread the size of a basketball; tear off a thin swatch and use it for scooping up mouthfuls of garbanzo and onion dal. Less showy than batura, but its absolute rival in the flavor department, is the layered, almost pastry-like paratha bread that comes with a mild vegetable khorma in a creamy coconut sauce.