OP’s Masalas is reborn — with a much bigger menu

I don’t have much enthusiasm for my own possible reincarnation — really, whose karma is that good? — but I’m all for the reincarnation of restaurants.

Last week in this space, for instance, I made note of R Bar’s highly commendable reincarnation as Voltaire. And this week, I offer Masalas Authentic Indian Bistro, an Overland Park restaurant reborn after a five-year run as Masalas Authentic Indian Diner. There’s a world of difference, you know, between a diner and a bistro — or so the new Masalas wants you to understand.

The place looks the same as it did before, but the spiral-bound menu’s 18 pages now provide what the restaurant’s new owner, Shashi Bommireddy, insists is the most comprehensive selection of Indian cuisine in the city.

Bommireddy told me last week: “People come into the restaurant and ask me, ‘Do you serve Northern or Southern Indian cuisine?’ I tell them that I only serve authentic Indian cuisine. I have dishes that American diners have never heard of before.”

Not everything is obscure. One of the first listings on the menu (which is printed in a font that’s so difficult to read, I first thought they must be temple rubbings from Konark) is, in fact, pretty familiar: tomato soup.

But Bommireddy, a native of Hyderabad, a region famous for its biryani dishes, is a charismatic salesman. Talk to him during your meal at Masalas, and he may convince you that you’re not in a Kansas suburb but in Mumbai.

The first Masalas was known for the story, perhaps apocryphal, of its initial owner — a young, Indian-born software executive — who bought out the original tenant (chef Max Chao, who now cooks at Nara) and supposedly spent a small fortune gutting the freestanding building to create Masalas in 2008. When Bommireddy bought the place, last December, it had been closed 14 months. He did some cleanup work and decided to keep the name. (The customers liked it, he says.) Six months in, the lunch traffic is good, and Bommireddy is trying to rebuild dinner business.

His plan has some interesting wrinkles. A couple of the servers I saw working the dining room on my visits to the restaurant might have been swiped from an Old Country Buffet. They were funny and attentive but relatively clueless about Indian cuisine, authentic or otherwise. “A pakora is kind of like a samosa,” one of them told me. “It’s all fried, you know?”

The starter selections are dominated by the deep-fried, including crispy battered pakoras (heavy on the spinach) and medu vada, two fried-lentil-batter doughnuts that were dry and heavy, like a couple of auto parts.

The appetizers and the complimentary paper-thin (but wildly peppery) papadums are presented with an array of chutneys: creamy tomato, a soothing mint, a bland coconut that could pass as Cream of Wheat, a syrupy tamarind. I asked Bommireddy why I could find no onion chutney at his tables. “No one eats onion chutney in India,” he told me. “You realize it goes bad after two hours? And the smell!”

Chutneys are to be used with less flavorful dishes, if you ask Bommireddy, and many of his creations don’t require them. That includes the Gobi–65 — fried cauliflower fritters slathered with a fiery red-chili sauce — or his “deconstructed samosa,” which is best described as a smashed traditional samosa pastry smothered in a pasty chana masala and sprouting little baby samosas. It’s definitely artistic, but count me among those who still value construction in their food.

I was eating these exotic inventions with a beverage I almost never drink: soda. Why not, I figured, given that Bommireddy serves only presweetened iced tea. He has applied for a liquor license, but he’s months away from serving booze. I asked for tonic water or club soda, and my server suggested that I jog across the parking lot to Whole Foods. This is how I came to order a Sprite, which the server brought me in a chilled can.

A friend of mine that night was craving an ice-cold Kalyani Black Label beer with his butter chicken (“A very common dish,” Bommireddy half-chided) but settled for water instead. Still, he raved about the chicken. Bommireddy wasn’t wrong to sniff at it — this is the chicken potpie of Indian cuisine, and his kitchen makes it with the kind of tomato sauce designed to comfort diners wary of unfamiliar textures and spices.

Bommireddy seems more proud of his five biryani rice dishes, all prepared Hyderabadi-style. “It’s a blending of Mughlai and Andhra Pradesh styles of cooking,” he told me. But what does that mean? Well, it’s dominated by tomatoes, tamarind, garlic and onion, and, for my taste, it’s heavy on the mutton.

I love biryani, but I was here for things not found on other local Indian menus. For example: a lamb vindaloo prepared, according to the menu, “Portuguese style.”

Vindaloo, a standard offering on Indian menus, turns out to be a word derived from a beloved Portuguese dish called carne de vinha d’alhos (meat marinated in vinegar, sugar, ginger, chiles and spices). Unaware of this at the table that evening, I asked the waitress about the Portuguese connection. She sighed. “I’d ask the guys in the kitchen,” she said, “but there’s kind of a language barrier.”

The vindaloo was delicious, even if it had to overcome a slightly too-chewy lamb. I preferred the vegetarian Hyderabadi Khatti dal, satisfying and fragrant with ginger and garlic.

At one meal, I ordered dosa — the delicate crepe made from rice and lentils and filled, in this instance, with potatoes and a good chutney — and it was brought to the table crisp and golden and rolled up like a sacred papyrus from the tomb of Menkaure. It held together well enough to dip in the hot sambal, a soupy condiment made with garlic and chiles.

Bommireddy is planning to introduce a new menu, with even more dishes, later in the summer. (And he promises to change the type so that it’s easier to read.) It’s a bold idea, given that the current menu is almost like reading the Upanishads. But that’s Bommireddy: ambitious. “There is no other Indian restaurant in Kansas City like mine,” he said.

Not in this life, anyway.