Where To Eat In The Real Los Angeles
Graded “A”  By Jonathan Gold

As much as I like the more refined sort of Indian cuisine, I often find
myself drawn to the glory of Pakistani cooking. Where Indian curries can be as
delicate as butterfly wings, Pakistani curries practically scream with flavor,
not just of chilies but big handfulls of cloves, cardamom and enough cumin to
flavor your breath for days. Southern Indian cooking features rice-flour pancakes
as thin and crisp as the burnt sugar on a creme bulee. Pakistani cuisine
has whole-wheat Parathas so thick and saturated with butter that they probably
stop bullets. The Indian diet is largely vegetarian: I sometimes get the feeling
that some Pakistani would be happy if they could figure out a way to fashion
rice, bread and carrots out of meat, so that they’d never have to put anything
in their mouths that wasn’t made out of cow, chicken or goat.
Among the best Pakistani Muslim restaurants in town is the strictly
Halal (the Islamic equivalent of Kosher) Al-Noor, a busy storefront in a
Lawndale strip mall, a quick five minutes south of the airport and a straight
shot from the 405. Like most Islamic restaurants, Al-Noor is fairly spare, decorated
chiefly with great swaths of Arabic scripts and a travel poster or two,
but there are tablecloths, soft lighting and silk roses encursted with rears of
plastic dew. Al-Noor is a nice place. It is a fairly rich restaurant neighborhood,
across the street from Sao-Paulo-style fish restaurant located in a former hamburger
stand (if you must eat moqueca in the South Bay, this is your place), a
few blocks down from a pretty good teriyaki hut and a decent Madras-style
Indian chicken restaurant, a five minute drive from the Peruvian restaurants
of Lawndale. At noon, the crowd eating lunch can be as vaired as any in the
South Bay: Pakistani businessmen, Spanish-speaking mechanics and Lassiswilling
white guys in carpenter’s overalls, a tableful of chador-cloaked women
nibbling on girlled Kabobs a few away from a table of fish-eating surfer dudes –
all brought together by smoky, garlicky tandoor-barbequed chicken and great
slabs of hot bread, a combination that seems ot override every ethnic boundary
in the world.
The Chef once at Bundoo Khan, a Pakistani restaurant in a KoreaTown
mini-mall around the corner from an apartment I lived in for years, and where
I probably stopped in once a week for Kabobs and Islamic “Hamburgers” before
it burned down in the ‘92 riots, but the menu at Al-Noor is more classically
Pakistani, a short document of stews, vegetables, and tandoor-cooked meats.
The restaurant is locally famous for its version of Nehari, more or less the
Pakistani national dish, an incense, mahogany concoction of Lamb shanks flavored
with garlic, chilies and an immoderate amount of shredded fresh ginger,
along with what seems like half the contents of a spice cabinet. Nehari can
sometimes be a little thin, as genteel as country French ragout, but the Nehari
here is cooked down to steaming, creamy mass with the density of a dwarf
star, bubbling and glistening with red-tinted oil, a stew substantial enough to
fortify three hungry men after a day of hard farm labor or a stringent religious
fast.
The other stews at Al-Noor are wonderful too – the brightly flavored
brains simmered with curry and Haleem, a deeply flavored beef stew thickened
with grain. But what draws the crowds – which often snake out the door on
busy weekends – are the tandoor-cooked meats, boneless chunks of chicken
Tikka or hanks of ground beef roasted over super-hot mesquite coals, bits of
shaved meat in a powerfully sour marinade, chunks of lamb Kabobs on sputtering
hot steel platters with blackened onions, and fresh-baked, if lightly clumsy,
garlic naan.

Al-Noor is just about perfect.