Udupi Palace

Udupi Palace sits at 18635 Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia’s Little India corridor, a few doors from the densest stretch of mithai shops and sari stores. The name points to Udupi, the temple town in Karnataka whose vegetarian restaurant tradition traveled through Bombay and into diaspora strip malls. A 1999 Los Angeles Times review named owner Uday Shetty, born in Udupi, and treated the room as an early LA destination for dosai, idli, and thali when South Indian cooking was still scarce outside a few chains. The current house site frames it as a 100% vegetarian Little India landmark with paper dosas and traditional thalis.

This is a working corridor restaurant, not a tasting-menu night out: walk-in lunch crowds, quick plates, and the dosa as the house specialty. The Infatuation rates it 7.8 and keeps it on Little India shortlists for that reason. Eater LA’s Artesia map still points diners here for fermented rice-and-lentil dosas on Pioneer.

Critics agree the paper masala dosa is the order that explains the room. The Infatuation calls out a crispy tube about three feet long, stuffed with potato masala and meant for coconut chutney, sambar, and milk curd. LA Weekly’s “Best Dosa” pick praised the same balance of crisp and chew, plus creamy coconut chutney and cuminy sambar. Eater’s Virali Dave steers first-timers toward Mysore masala dosa for the red chutney layer, or uttapam if you want a softer, thicker cake. Thrillist notes the rava masala dosa’s lacy window-pane texture and a rotating South Indian thali with rasam, sambar, poriyal, dal, rice, chapati, and payasam.

The 1999 Times piece already described the spectacle of a yard-long paper dosai from an eight-foot griddle, weekend Kanchipuram idlis, bisi bele bhath, and filter Mysore coffee. Public scores sit around 4.0 on Google across roughly a thousand reviews, with Yelp a notch lower in aggregator snapshots: diners often praise dosa size and value, service on busy days, and approachability for North-Indian-only eaters; some note lunch crowds and the usual strip-mall pace.