Pioneer Boulevard

Illustration by Peter Hamlin

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Ambala Sweets & Snacks

18433 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701

Category: Restaurant > Diner

Region: South Bay

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Ambala Dhaba

18413 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701-5534

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: South Bay

Artesia Bakery

18627 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701-5629

Category: Restaurant > Bakery

Region: South Bay

Ashoka The Great

18614 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701-5630

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: South Bay

Photos

The India Restaurant

17824 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701-3902

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: South Bay

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Jay Bharat Vegetarian Gourmet

18701 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: South Bay

Kim Tar Restaurant

18309 Pioneer Blvd.
Artesia, CA 90701

Category: Restaurant > Seafood

Region: South Bay

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More About

• Asia (Band)
• Kim Tar
• Jay Bharat
• Eating Out
• Indian Food and Cooking

There is nothing quite like Pioneer Boulevard on a clear Saturday afternoon, a fragrant Indian welter of sari merchants and jewelry artists, snack shops and bhangra-blasting boutiques, Bollywood posters and signs that advertise Parsi-Gujarati spectaculars. Music pours out of Jeeps, out of restaurants, out of music shops, sometimes the righteous keening of a sitar or a quwaalisinger but more often the relentless boom-ch’boom of Bombay-manufactured house music; glorious smells flood the street, the winy stink of saffron, the funk of burning incense, the aromas of cardamom, ginger, charred meat. There is a sweetness, a slowness to life on this street. The singles ads in the local classifieds are as specific about caste as the ones in the back of the Weekly are about desire.

Pioneer, as it courses through Artesia, may be the only street in America where a gentleman sporting a dagger and a scarlet turban excites no comment, where a woman might feel more at home in gilded mauve silk than in denim, where the nose-ring count exceeds even Silver Lake circa 1992. It is as easy to find fresh turmeric as fresh milk, as easy to buy a gold anklet as it is to purchase a wristwatch or a roll of Scotch tape. Samosas are as common as tacos, bhel as common as potato chips, in the overgrown mini-malls that line the boulevard.

The first person I knew who loved Pioneer was the late DJ Jac Zinder, who gathered much of the music he played at his club from the $2 bins backed up against the henna and the gripe powder at the local groceries, Bengali versions of Michael Jackson songs, Punjabi disco tracks, Bollywood film scores and heartbreakingly beautiful ghazalsbootlegged onto barely functional cassettes. Half the merchants on Pioneer used to know Jac, and they were always digging up Bombay fan magazines for him from back storerooms, naughty videos from beneath oil-stained counters. And eventually, Jac became expert on the local restaurant scene: the wondrous vegetarian dishes at the unfortunately defunct Sabra, the great ragda pattis — a thin yellow-pea stew topped with crunchy fried noodles — at the Gujarati snack shop Jay Bharat; the simple, delicious eggplant curry at a restaurant simply called The India; the spicy, chutney-soaked pastry-potato hodgepodge papri chaat at Ambala Sweets.

Forty years ago, this swath of the county was home to dairy-farming Dutch and seafaring Portuguese, and the Dutch-speaking Indonesians who settled here after World War II. You can find traces of the old neighborhood scattered here and there on Pioneer if you look. At Susie’s Deli, a wonderful Indonesian restaurant a few blocks off the strip, you sometimes hear more Dutch spoken than English, although the bakmi goreng and the fried chicken with candlenuts may be a more universal language than either. At the Artesia Bakery, a local institution for almost 50 years, people of every possible ethnicity line up for the exotically simple Dutch pastries: almond turnovers, baked apples in pastry and the cream-cheese-filled puffs called floppen — not to mention some 60 different Dutch cookies ranging from wafer-thin cat’s tongues to gingery windmills, pink valentine hearts to buttery Artesia Girls. The boerekaas in the cold case, a mellow, nutty-tasting aged Gouda, may be the best cheese in the world to stir into hot macaroni.

There has been no Portuguese restaurant in the area since the Navigator closed a decade ago, but the deli Portazil still carries a few brands of hot linguica and imported sardines, Portuguese bread and little pastries filled with ground almonds. Few sandwiches in Los Angeles are as delicious as Portazil’s masterpiece of dense, musky Portuguese ham — presunto — on a roll with sharp white cheese.

Pioneer Boulevard is also home to a number of Chinese restaurants, from the classic Cantonese barbecue place Sam Wooto the Cambodian-tinged noodle shop Kim Tar to the haute Hong Kong–style fish at Great Seafood House. The northern end of the strip is dominated by Korean restaurants of no particular merit; the south by posh, if undifferentiated, Chinese palaces. (Motions to officially name the area Little India, even to identify it on a freeway exit, are regularly shouted down by the locals.)

But Indian commerce remains the soul of the street, and the handful of regional Indian restaurants tend to be pretty much authentic by definition — if you’re serving the only Gujarati-style dishes in an area populated by Gujaratis, you may as well remind your customers of home. (Of course, there are exceptions: The buffet at the Little India Grill will remind you of every college-town Indian diner in the world.)

Ashoka the Great

has the same Punjabi-inflected menu as almost every other Indian restaurant in California, tandoori chicken and garlic naan, curried cauliflower, the spinach dish saag paneer. But at Ashoka, even the lacy taco-size crackers called papadum are laced with seeds and aromatics, and the bright-red pickled carrot sticks are almost crunchy with pungent black mustard seed. This is where to come for tandoori dishes: garlicky naan bread and potato-stuffed paratha, sure, but mostly the skinless chicken legs and fish kebabs and minced-lamb sausages marinated in yogurt and spices, flash-cooked in an ultrahot clay oven and served sizzling on a bed of onions on a heated steel platter.