Himalayan Grill

While it may not be entirely fair to evaluate a Nepalese/Himalayan restaurant by the extent to which its menu is not predominantly or entirely Indian, that has tended to be a useful initial yardstick locally – there are, oddly, quite a few “Himalayan” places that are effectively Indian restaurants under a different (and perhaps more exotic?) name. Himalayan Grill in Huntington Beach gets more credit than most of its local rivals for truth in advertising: Despite its name, its website clearly labels its food as Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan in that order, and there’s enough non-Indian food on the menu that you could have several meals without falling back to chicken tikka masala.

Chau Chau, for instance, is a bright yellow, lightly curried Tibetan wheat noodle and vegetable dish served with chicken, lamb, or shrimp under a garnish of fresh cilantro, simultaneously checking Indian flavor and Chinese ingredient boxes that typify Nepalese and broader Indo-Chinese cuisine – it has a lot in common with the similarly influenced Indonesian/Singaporean dish mee goreng, despite half a continent’s worth of geographic separation. Tandoori chilli chicken, chilli fish, Tibetan lamb, and other dishes arrive sizzling yet still gleaming with spicy red sauces rather than baking them into the proteins like a crust, another sign of the cuisine’s Chinese influences on Indian concepts.