With locations in Pasadena, Santa Clarita, and Thousand Oaks, Namaste Spiceland is a one-stop shop for groceries and dining. It’s a place to stock up on rice, lentils, and frozen staples, and stay for dinner. Crowd favorites include South Indian dishes, especially the dosas, and the Bombay street food selection. The trick is to order the mouth-puckering chaat first to avoid grocery shopping on an empty stomach, and then grab pantry staples for the month.

With locations in Downtown, Northridge, Westwood, and Riverside, Tulsi is a fast-casual restaurant dedicated to providing regional Indian fare to Southern Californians. The combo is a winner, as it allows diners to try Northern Indian and Southern Indian specialties in tandem. The Gujarati dishes are some of the best the city has to offer, and a side of loaded makhani fries flavored with tikka masala gravy adds extra flavor.

Owners Premil Jayasinghe and his wife Koshalie have been running Baja Subs since 2016. While the original owners served mostly Mexican food, the Jayasinghes have slowly expanded Baja’s Sri Lankan menu over the last four years, offering some of the most remarkable Sri Lankan food in Los Angeles. Popular dishes include the koturoti with lamb curry, egg hoppers, and chicken biryani.

When deciding what to order at Abhiruchi Grill, the choice is pretty simple: Get one of the 10 biryanis. There’s something for all with offerings like gobi Manchurian, a deep-fried cauliflower dish, and navratan korma, a medley of vegetables and nuts in a creamy gravy. 

One of LA’s most beloved Indian restaurants, Mayura specializes in Kerala-style cuisine with dosas, uthappam, and fish curry. The thalis offer small servings of a larger variety of dishes, with options for vegetarians and meat eaters alike.

Arth Bar and Kitchen, which opened in July 2021, serves a contemporary but thorough take on Indian cuisine. Expect dishes that pull from multiple regions across India and move beyond traditional techniques and ingredients to provide an experience that is imaginative yet comforting to those more familiar with the cuisine.

The menu features Old Monk drunken wings made with India’s rum of choice, along with lobster moilee, a coconut milk-based dish from the state of Kerala that is traditionally made with prawns or shrimp and is harder to find elsewhere in Southern California. Especially worth trying are the more inventive treats, like the malai broccoli and jackfruit nuggets. Old Monk also shows up on the drinks menu in the form of a Manhattan or a Desi sour, which also includes peach liqueur, lemon juice, egg whites, and eucalyptus bitters.

This humble market and takeout restaurant has a smaller but excellent array of mostly Pakistani dishes, starting with flavor-packed biryani. Chicken tikka, beef kabab, and plush naan are also on the compact menu, along with chicken karahi. Weekends bring some specials like lamb pulao. Call in to order ahead, and be sure to take home a packet of dried lentils from the market.

In business for over 30 years, this halal Indian Pakistani restaurant is one of the South Bay’s most respected. Chef Mohammed Mumtaz makes traditional dishes like lamb korma and goat karahi stir-fried with onions and tomatoes, but also experiments with new recipes daily.

There’s plenty of Indian food across the South Bay, but this unassuming strip mall find in Lawndale, with just a smattering of seats and a setup mostly accommodating takeout, could be the best Indian food in the area. Preorder online for the smoothest service, where the kitchen will prepare intensely spiced dal makhani, complex channa masala with plump garbanzo beans, and some of the most immediately delicious butter chicken in LA. The palak paneer is another winner, with nicely sized paneer cubes settled into a thick paste of cooked spinach.

This hidden gem in Lomita serves a solid mix of Pakistani and Indian classics. The malai kofta is the menu highlight — vegetarian potato-and-paneer balls swimming in a creamy gravy — along with fluffy and flavorful biryani.

Little Bangladesh sits nestled into a small area on the northern edge of Koreatown with a small but mighty collection of restaurants. Biriyani Kabob House serves some of the best lamb biryani in town, made with fluffy basmati rice and tender chunks of lamb. The menu also has classics like chicken tikka masala, karahi, kebabs, and channa masala.

One of Los Angeles’s hottest restaurants is an Indian sports bar. Its unexpected combination results in stunning malai rigatoni pasta, verdant saag pizza, garam masala-crusted wings, and Indian-inspired cocktails. The nearly dozen TVs are not intrusive, the crowd is happy to be there, the food is exciting, and reservations are required.

With another location in New York, Baar Baar made its LA debut in May 2023, bringing chef Sujan Sarkar’s contemporary Indian dishes to Southern California. Just blocks away from L.A. Live, Sarkar and his team are adding something special to the LA Indian dining scene, with dishes that showcase a wide regional range across India and Bollywood-inspired drinks that riff on several classics. A menu highlight is the mushroom pepper fry made with sunchokes, smoked almonds, and ramps. The chutney set, avocado pachadi, and homemade crisps are other standouts.

Finding Kamal Palace is a bit of an obstacle course. Go down the stairs and toward the rear structure to find this friendly, family-operated restaurant that’s right next to the water. The vegetable malai has ample coconut, and an extra order of naan helps to sop up the remaining butter chicken gravy.

This San Gabriel Valley stalwart has been comforting residents with chicken tikka masala, coconut fish curry, and lamb curry since 2011. Located on the bustling corner of Huntington and Rosemead boulevards, Bhanu doubles as a grocery store, so peruse the shelves for staple goods before or after one’s meal.

After generating plenty of attention for his high-flying Indian wedding dinners at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, it was only a matter of time before chef Sanjay Rawat was going to open a place to call his own. Kahani, a dimly lit dining room tucked into the Ritz-Carlton, buzzes with folks excited to experience some of the most modern Indian cooking in Southern California. The $265 curry sampler feeds two to four people and is a great way to get a feel for Rawat’s culinary vision.