Bombay Cafe

Apparently this place used to be bustling every night of the week, but when we went on a Sunday evening, there were only 2 other tables. This is a huge mystery because the food was delicious and plentiful, the menu offered a slew of choices, and the service was fantastic. My boyfriend, who lived in London for many years and so is quite picky about his Indian food, loved the lamb vindaloo. We had enough food to take home and have for lunch the next day. Definitely give it a try … I would hate for this place to go out of business.

This place is great. The people here are very nice. The service is great and I really have had a good experience with every meal. I probably come here every two weeks and really enjoy coming here with friends or alone.

I’ve been going to Bombay Café since it was in a strip mall on Santa Monica Blvd, I’ve always enjoyed the food there.
Last night I picked up a take-​out order of Lamb Korma, basmati rice and garlic naan. It was 7:30pm and I was surprised that there were many empty spaces in the parking lot and no valet parking attendant on duty. When I walked in to the restaurants there were only 3 or 4 tables occupied and the staff were just standing around.
My order was approx $ 30, which I thought very expensive for ½ pint of Lamb Korma some rice and an order of naan. The food was tasteless and I don’t mean un-​spicy.
Needless to say that I was very disappointed and given the large number of better alternatives in the neighborhood I will not return.

Bad food. Not authentic at Pretty bad food. The tikka masala was below average. The chicken was rock hard– looks like
It had been made the previous day/​s. The sauce tasted like tomato soup.
Also saw the chef using his bare hands to plate the rice.
Won’t be returning to this place anytime soon.

We were looking for a place to go for lunch today as we were passing Bombay Café. There was parking right in front. We were the only one there. I have heard about the Lamb Frankie for years and wanted to try it. Wife got the Saag Aloo. We ordered naan, plain yogurt, chai & iced tea. Everything was great tasting and it was more food than we could eat so they packed it for us to go. We were talking about putting it on our regular rotation until the check came. I expected it to be just under $ 30…but it was $ 45. Tea & chai were $ 4 each, yogurt was $ 5. No rice came with the spinach dish. We paid the check and sadly left knowing we would never be back. They badly need a lunch menu with lower prices. That will bring in more customers and he can fill up dozens of tables at $ 30 for 2 people instead of one table at $ 45. Server was also excellent but it is easy to find Indian food that is great at 35% less. I’m far from the first person to point this out in the reviews. I hope he reads this and if he starts offering an affordable lunch menu I’ll be back in a flash. Fingers crossed.

This is my favorite Indian restaurant in Los Angeles for the past 15 or more years. Murgh pakoras are amazing and the palak paneer is to die for!

Enjoyed a great meal on a Monday evening. Saag Paneer was delicious as was the naan bread and the rest.

Love this place. Staff is always courteous and the food — which is spicier than many other local Indian spots — is delicious. When I’m meeting someone in West L.A., it’s often here. Try the Uttapam with rice and garlic nan and their wonderful chutneys.

Bombay Café is a nice cozy restaurant located in the Sawtelle area. Excellent customer service. They have variety of items to choose. But I personally love their lunch thali options. Most of them are less than $ 15 and not more than $ 19​.It is pretty filling for me .I normally choose tandoori thali or the southindian thali. Thandoori thali comes with rice, chicken kabab, green salad, naan and lentil and is about$ 14. They also have a bar which is cool.

Food is still pretty good but the new owners are a pain.
Tried to order online, after I got an email with a 20% discount. The online site didn’t recognize my email login, even though it had sent me the email… even though I could get to my acct page to adjust my settings, lol.
Tried several times before giving up and calling in the order. I explained the situation and the wife says, We’ve had several online orders tonight! Nothing wrong with the system!
Ohhhkay, must be my fault. Can I have the discount with a phone order?
She says ok and tells me 25 mins. I come in 25 minutes and she says, I was worried about you!
Lady, if I want some passive aggro interaction, I’ll call my mother.
Then she gives me the bill with no discount. I explain everything again and she says ok. She comes back with a 10% discount, I tell her it’s BOMBAY20. She argues with me for a while until her husband comes over and tells her, no it’s 20%.
Then he turns to me and says, we usually ask ppl to bring in the coupon. Huh?
Suffice to say, it took as long to argue about and pay the bill as it took to cook the food.
I’ve been a Bombay Café customer since they opened but not sure I’ll continue to be one.

Great customer service and the food was amazing! The «desi burritos» are delicious!!!

This place is okay at best I would say. I have definitely had better Indian cuisine in other parts of LA, but perhaps not in the Sawtelle area.
I ordered take out from them using the promo code «HUNGRY3», so at least I got a discount on the food I ordered.
I ordered the Machichi pakoras, which were small pieces of fish covered with batter. Although I am a fan of fish, the taste of these were way too fishy. I also ordered the shrimp tandoori, which wasn’t too bad actually. However, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had better. The shrimp didn’t seem very fresh, and the spices were a little too spicy for my liking. They ended up overpowering the shrimp and was too much flavoring.
I’m glad I was able to try this place, but can’t say I was blown away.

Picked up some takeout on the way home using RushOrder, which was pretty convenient, but I would say that was probably the best part of this experience. While the food was okay, it wasn’t spectacular. Perhaps I’m a bit biased by having recently found a gem of an Indian spot in the La Brea area, but I think 3-​stars is a fair rating for this one.

Better than average, good service, but lack of curry sauce over the two dishes we got. Very overpriced for Indian food. $ 17 for a lamb korma without rice.
The worse, we both got to go to the bath room twice in the morning.

I used to come here in the 90’s when I lived on the Westside. Back then it was one of the happening places. I returned last weekend since I was in the area. The restaurant was nearly empty, but all of my favorite dishes were still there: Sindi Chicken, Pakoras, Chicken Tikka, Aloo Matar. They were all as good as I recalled. Service was good. I was disturbed at some of the recent comments here on Unilocal and can only think that some people just didn’t know what or how to order in an Indian restaurant. I will be back. Thanks…

What is there to say about this? Excellent service. Very attentive and helped lead us around the extensive menu. I’m gluten-​free and there was quite a bit of car given to my selections. The waitress checked in with the kitchen to make sure I was all good, and I was.
Let’s get to the meat of it. The food was excellent. We’ve all had Indian food and it’s always nice when you taste a combination of spices that makes you feel there was some thought put in the dish. Even the basics like lentil were so delicious that I had to slow myself down. I would not hesitate to go again. We went on a Friday night and the restaurant was quiet. In our previous visit I remember it being quite filled up. Either way, we left with bellies full. Highly recommended if good food is your goal.

Yum! Super tasty. Love their fish pekoras and frankies. Definitely one of our favorite Indian places in LA. Easy parking, attentive service, delicious food. Again, yum!

Well, this has been a week of disappointments. I used to love this place, but hadn’t been here in 3 or 4 years. I was so looking forward to the deliciously spiced Indian dishes typical of Bombay (Mumbai).
What we got tasted like an American’s idea of what mild Indian food would taste like. The server (maybe an owner?) came over to the table to see how we liked the food and we told her it was a disappointment. She said they always cook the food mild but we could order it more spicy.
It wasn’t a matter of «more» spicy. It was the fact that there was no flavor. There didn’t seem to be ANY Indian spices, forget about the hot/​spicy factor. The vegetable Korma, usually a favorite dish, tasted like they had dumped a couple of cans of mixed vegetables into the pot and added a little yogurt. Believe me, I was in India for 4 months and have eaten in Indian restaurants all my life. This was not Indian food.
How can you ruin Saag Paneer (Spinach with cubed ricotta)? Well, they managed to do it. The spinach was slightly slimy and the ricotta cubes didn’t taste right. They didn’t taste like they were sauteed with the spinach. The garlic naan wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. It was too dry and — again! — had no flavor.
The one thing that wasn’t bad was the masala dosa, a long lentil flour crêpe filled with sauteed potatoes, onions and peas. The flavor was better on that (maybe the cook was South Indian, since this is a specialty of South India), but the mixture was still drier than it should have been. The sambar (a sort of watery lentil dressing) was okay. It’s supposed to be served with green coconut shutney but I can understand that green coconuts can be hard to come by in America. Nonetheless, they could have done better than the mystery white chutney which didn’t have any coconut flavor at all.
The place was empty on a Saturday afternoon and I guess I can see why. So so so disappointing. I had been looking forward so much to what I remembered as very authentic Indian cuisine. Not so much any more.
Buh bye phony Bombay Café.

Unfortunately I didn’t even get to the eating part to rate the food, but this one star is purely based on customer service. I had purchased a Living Social coupon good for «$ 15 for $ 30 worth of dinner» here. The fine print said it was for dine-​in only. Seeing as how they had their dinner menu available all day, I thought I’d go in for lunch since it was the only time of day that I could make it and order a dinner, which I did. I handed the waitress the voucher and she returned several minutes later to say that I couldn’t use it because it was for dinner not lunch. I then told her that was why I ordered the dinner and not the lunch special and she wasn’t budging.
Ok, that could be my fault. It DOES say dinner in the title and I DID come in at lunch, even though I think my logic with the dinner entrée is correct. Accepting fault, I then said, «That’s fine — Can I just get the promotional value ($ 15)?» It says right on every Groupon, Living Social, and other vouchers that the promotional amount never expires. She, again, refused. I told her that I would not be able to come in for dinner this week and it expires at the end of the week. She then suggested that I give it to my friend and let her use it this week. When I asked if there was a manager there that I could ask, she just looked around and said «no». We cancelled our order and left.
Bottom line, while I might have been wrong about the dinner/​lunch difference, I offered several solutions and to not accept the promotional value (which is basically just a gift card to the restaurant) was just absurd. I won’t be going here regardless of how great (or seemingly not-​so-​great) the food tastes because they apparently have no regard for customer service and I advise everyone else to follow suit

Mehhhhh…
This review is only for the Masala Dosa. I’ve been craving a good dosa for months now and after experiencing a dosa fail a few weeks prior to coming here, I was hoping Bombay Café would satisfy my craving. I’m sad to say, I’ve experienced better in taste and in price.
Now I’m not saying that I’m a dosa expert by any means. I’ve only had dosa at three other restaurants prior to coming here. All I can give is an opinion. That’s what Unilocal is about, right? Opinions. Opinions that can influence your decisions or can be taken lightly with a grain of salt. Do what you will with this opinion.
The thing I like about dosas, or at least the ones I’ve had in the past, is that they are thin and lightly crispy while still retaining its softness. In many ways, I crave the texture of the savory crêpe. With masala dosas, I like the bold and flavorful spices used in the potatoes. Bombay Café seemed to be lacking these qualities. The only common factor that I found was the size. Their portion is quite huge! But when I consider that this place charges $ 9 and other places charge $ 4 – 7 for the same portion size, then I’m less inclined to come back here. The only saving grace for their dosa was the delicious sambar.
I suppose that the higher price is for the atmosphere. This place is a bit fancier than I expected. I could see how this would be a good date place. Also, if you don’t score street parking, you have to pay to park in their lot.
But to end this with some positive notes, our waitress was nice and service was good. Also, the free tomato chutney and papadums were really tasty.