Tigerlily’s enchanting Indian-fueled fusion brings a secret-circus feel to Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto

What if you were planning to eat at your neighborhood’s hot new restaurant, an innovative-sounding spot about whose candied bacon, sage-crusted lemon tarts, and punchbowl-sized sharable cocktails everyone’s talking?

What if you were planning to eat there, but every time you started out your door to do so, you stopped, overcome by a strange feeling, and decided not to go?

What if, after the fifth such sequence of events, you realized that this strange feeling was fear?

Food shouldn’t scare us. Restaurants shouldn’t shimmer menacingly in our minds. But we inhabit a time and place in which no mashup or ingredient is too bizarre or too arguably gross. At Oakland’s Hawker Fare, beef bile adorns steak tartare. Flora serves, as a starter, roasted marrow bones with fruit, onions, and toast. The Trappist serves soft-boiled eggs with mayo, wasabi, flying-fish roe, and habanero oil. For some, this is the stuff of nightmares.

Tigerlily bears earmarks that might scare scaredy-cats.

First, it’s in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, where it opened quietly in January in the former Mint Leaf space. (It’s owned by Mint Leaf co-owners Deepak Aggarwal and the Farm League Design & Management Group.) Secondly, its executive chef is young, tattooed, and cool: Joel Lamica is a veteran of Pizzaiolo and the Ramen Shop, along with San Francisco’s Bix and Nojo. Thirdly, it’s a fusion restaurant, chiefly informed by Indian cuisine. Lamica dubs his modus operandi “tiger style,” which he defines as “embracing the challenge of cooking delicious organic food that uses every ingredient to its full potential, with as little waste as possible.” For example, “fermenting summer vegetables for winter pickles is tiger style.”

Fourthly, while everyone is clearly welcome, distressed walls and salvaged wood and exposed pipes and vintage bricks and old-fashioned long-filamented lighting fixtures holler, “Hipster magnet.”

But. Sometimes it’s worth facing your fears.

Lamica switches his seasonal, sustainably sourced, organic dishes daily. Consider the juicy, satisfying, not-your-grandma’s garam masala-spiced Green Buns & Lamb burger adorned with Gruyère, fried egg, raita, arugula, fermented radish and cabbage on a house-made green-garlic and nettle brioche (with, on the side, spicy crab mayo and “farmers’ market chips”: taro, sweet potatoes, and other produce fried to the perfect point between bendy and crisp). You savor it excitedly on Tuesday but by Wednesday and perhaps in perpetuity it is merely a memory. A few dishes make frequent reappearances, however, such as a Maldon-salted, crème fraiche-crowned carpaccio made with ever-so-thinly sliced Riverdog Farm root vegetables; it resembles a stained-glass window. Another standby is the crunchy-skinned, generously portioned “Oh No You Didn’t!” Fried Chicken, made with turmeric and buttermilk marinade, Korean red chili, Aggarwal’s signature tikka-masala sauce, market greens, and celeriac-Yukon potato mash. On Sundays, this bird comes with waffles.

Step inside Tigerlily, and its workers really smile. Behind a sleek bar whose surfaces are deliberately rough and satiny, a bolero-hatted, plaid-shirted mixologist shakes cocktails—one in each hand—with a shaman’s rhythm and a power-lifter’s muscularity, adding a syncopated backbeat to the Frank Sinatra songs swirling around a slim, dim dining room, its ceiling tented with jewel-toned exotic yardage, like a flamboyantly decorated ventricle. Sinatra is ironic because a flatscreen over the bar displays nonstop vintage Bollywood films, without the sound. Black-and-white drawstring-panted dancers twirl beside the Taj Majal, while Frank exhorts: “Come fly with me.” It’s ironic because Tigerlily would rather be caught dead than serve straight-up Sinatra-esque veal Parmesan or surf and turf.

Fear further vanquished by a smoothly spicy Northside Swizzle cocktail (rum, Campari, coconut cream, cinnamon-bark syrup, lime), you order salted savoy cabbage salad, which entails Saint Benoît house-made yogurt cheese, Pink Lady apples, pounded-walnut vinaigrette, and smoked Mt. Lassen trout.

After accepting the nearly completed dish through the Dutch-doorish window dividing the bright and busy kitchen from the dusky dining room, your server bends over a table poised just under that window. This table bears many planter pots, the kind you see at nurseries, each overflowing with a different type of herb, flower or sprout. Snipping off a few cilantro blossoms, sprinkling these over your salad as a subtle grand finale, a nearly invisible signature, the server sets the dish before you, smiling like a circus ringmaster. Served upon heavy, hand-hewn earthenware, the salad is shade upon shade of pale. Forefinger-sized and -shaped tussocks of trout crown cabbage whose tight cortices resemble those in brains. This salad isn’t beautiful, but poignantly it aims to be. It evokes plain but saintly sophomores who hope their carefully assembled ragtag costumes will attract the cool kids, unaware that their own inner radiance makes the very idea of costumes obsolete. One bite reveals: This salad shines from within, from its cruciferous heart and the clever, calculating soul of its creator.

Cut into bite-sized pieces, the brined cabbage—fresh from Tigerlily’s fermentation room, its jars of daikon, raisins, seaweed, lemon, whey, persimmon, and kohlrabi visible through a large window off the dining room—is tender-crisp, just on the right side of sour. Soft cheese and soft nut meats provide a perfect counterpoint.

Merging disparate elements from disparate cultures, as Lamica and his fusion-wielding fellows do, demands an encyclopedic awareness of flavors, textures, and the chemistry of combinations. It also requires gall. When modern fusion works, it’s the culinary counterpart of Picasso and Braque. When it fails, it’s like, “Let’s pour Listerine and pepper into Mommy’s coffee and watch what she does!”

Some “tiger-style” dishes are masterworks. Kabocha-squash fry bread, made with King Richard leeks, black sesame, fennel seed, turmeric Gruyère, and chili oil, is the spicy-mild, smoky, fluffy, feed-me-this-forever answer to a sweet anti-paleo dream. Some dishes here have stroke-of-genius elements: heavenly mirin-pickled raisins served alongside turmeric-ghee naan. Grain-tastic farro biryani in the Coconut Curry Catch of the Day. And some dishes show signs of overreach: Looking at you, squid-ink naan, reeky purple supper for performing seals. And dark-chocolate pot de crème, which with its jaggery whipped cream, rosemary hazelnut biscotti, and pine-nut salted caramel would have been rich, thick, and one-bowl-serves-two thrilling enough. Why add sunflower-seed sprouts, discordant rosemary blooms, and olive oil, even if it is exclusive, small-batch, Sicilian Partanna extra-virgin olive oil? Why serve this fancy dessert in a thick, gigantic bowl with massive spoons that make you feel like a shrunken Alice in Wonderland?

Minor missteps aside, Tigerlily is magical. No, literally. Being there feels like being inside some secret clubhouse, perhaps underground—maybe, given that china gnome atop the bar, a fairy mound. Or maybe, with its books lining bookshelves too high to reach, the slightly surreal sickroom of some Victorian shut-in genius child. Or, given all those jarred bits floating, fermenting before our very eyes, a special circus whose ringmasters are quite right to smile.

Tigerlily

1513 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley,
510-540-7900
www.TigerlilyBerkeley.com
Open daily 5:30-10:30pm
except Sunday, 11am–5pm
Entrées $17–$23.
Beer, wine and cocktails.
Accepts credit cards.