Bustling Tibetan restaurant adds heat and spice to Somerville
Type: Tibetan
Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; 5 to 9:30 p.m. daily
Good choices: Pan-fried potato cutlets; sauteed vegetables in fried roll; battered fried vegetables; lentil soup; hot and sour soup; curried potatoes; sauteed slices of beef in gravy; spinach hot garlic; beef hot garlic sauce.
Credit cards: All major credit cards.
Access: Not handicapped- accessible.
HOUSE OF TIBET KITCHEN
235 Holland Street, Somerville
(Teele Square)
(617) 629-7567
Restaurant reviewed 03/20/98 by Sheryl Julian
There was a lot going on at House of Tibet Kitchen last week. At one table three MIT professors were having an animated discussion about quantum electrodynamics. There was at least one serious trekker and another diner who seemed to know the exiled Tibetan community here - or so overheard snatches of conversation seemed to suggest.
Then a man dressed in overalls emerged from the kitchen pulling a large box marked ``furniture,'' which he managed to drag down a flight of stairs. He reemerged carrying a filing cabinet, then later the drawers, and finally disappeared.
When the professors vacated their table, a dozen students came, and several diners along one wall picked up their plates and water glasses and moved their seats to accommodate the larger crowd. This just seemed logical in this informal month-old place.
After all the bustle, things settled down. One of the students looked up from the menu and announced to his friends, ``Everything here is individual.''
I knew just what he meant. He was expecting communal dishes with everyone dipping in family-style, like a Chinese restaurant. At House of Tibet, every meal is complete. Each plate arrives with a main course, jasmine rice or Tibetan bread, and a little piquant slaw of cabbage, bean sprouts, and carrots. This is the way owner Yeshey Palsang's mother served meals at home in Tsawarong, in the southern region of Tibet.
In the south, the population eats vegetables and fruits, while in the mountains and plains, there is yogurt, cheese, and dishes made from roasted barley. Palsang makes the food of her region, which is strongly related to both Chinese and Indian cuisines. There are very hot and spicy dishes with large pieces of chili peppers heating the sauce, and others that are linked to curries. Unlike the neighboring cuisines, however, the food is hardly salted, so the lighter dishes that don't have heat can be bland. Still, everything on the menu is beautifully fresh. And the little restaurant, with its 25 seats, is so full, nothing sits for long.
A lentil soup with freshly ground ginger ($3.25) was smoky enough that I wondered if it simmered with a ham hock. But it's vegetarian. A hot and sour soup ($3.25), garnished with peppers and vinegar, was as nice a version of this soup as I've ever eaten. Sauteed vegetables in fried rolls ($3.50), which looked like egg rolls, have the same pleasingly crisp wrappers.
The hot main courses are the best choices here. A dish of curried potatoes ($6.95) was mildy hot and aromatic and just right with the crisp slaw by its side. Tigmo, the Tibetan round steamed wheat bun, came with it. Tigmo is both unsalted and soft and looks like a steamed Chinese dumpling in another shape.
Tibet's steamed dumplings came filled with ground beef, coriander, and ginger, and they were doughy and needed lots of the chunky, hot sauce that came with many of the dishes.
We should have divided the dumplings among our table, and eaten them with spinach hot garlic ($6.50), which is bright green, crunchy, and intensely good. Perhaps a little chicken hot pepper ($7.25), loaded with red and green bell peppers and chilis, could have gone with it. The beef with hot garlic sauce ($7.50), also based on peppers of all kinds, carries a wallop on the palate and that would have been grand with dumplings.
Palsang's partner in this venture is Gyalnor Tsewang, who owns House of Tibet Rugs in Arlington. Daughters of both owners are waiting tables and working hard to make things go smoothly. There's another House of Tibet restaurant in Salt Lake City, and one scheduled for Moscow sometime this month.
Palsang and her husband, Kuncho, have been in Boston since 1978. She's been working to raise money for the Tibetans at home and in India while he works looking after the grounds of Roxbury Latin School.
Yeshey Palsang's House of Tibet is constantly bustling with diners staying in and carrying out. You really have to stay to get the full effect. ``People who come here, they come again and again,'' says Palsang. ``We are very happy.''
Tips & hits
