Avantika Vandanapu has a bad date to thank for discovering one of her favorite restaurants in Los Angeles.
On a recent afternoon, the actress, who goes by her first name only, sits at the counter at Gyoza Bar, a small, dimly lit restaurant on that stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park in the shadow of Dodger Stadium.
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“I came here on a first date and I never spoke to this person again,” she says with a laugh. “But I left with wonderful memories of Gyoza Bar.”
1:59 p.m. Gyoza Bar
As the star of “Spin,” Disney’s first TV film with an Indian American lead and breakout roles in the recent musical remake of “Mean Girls” and the horror film “Tarot,” multiple projects in the pipeline (she can’t mention them just yet), her own production company in the works and school at Columbia University (she’s majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Economics), Avantika doesn’t have much time to eat out. But for Gyoza Bar, she makes time.
While in Los Angeles for some promotional engagements, she’s taking me on a food crawl to some of her favorite restaurants.
She arrives at our first stop with an entourage of sorts, comprised of her friend, actress Jade Bender, one of her co-stars in the Netflix movie “Senior Year.” And makeup artist Robert Bryan, who she keeps close on all press tours and red carpet engagements.
“Whenever I’m on a first date and they ask me for a cuisine, I tell them Asian is my first preference,” she says. “I love the food here and I love the vibe, it’s very intimate but also still feels really sophisticated.”
The room has a distinct red glow. A row of paper lantern lights overhead serves as the main source of light. Semi-shouting is necessary to have a conversation over the music.
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She orders the dipping noodle, salmon sashimi, pork gyoza, though she doesn’t eat pork, and the cold tofu.
“Pork gyoza is for Miss Jade here, my bestie,” she says with a nod to Bender. “Cold tofu I’m trying for the first time. I’ve been seeing cold tofu like all over TikTok.”
At 19, Avantika has a career that spans the globe, with experience as a dancer, film and TV actress in both India and the United States. Her latest Bollywood series, a boarding school drama called “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” is streaming now on Prime Video.
Born in Union City, just 30 miles outside of San Francisco, she moved to India when she was 9 years old to pursue a career in entertainment.
“My mom was like, ‘Why don’t you go and work in India for a bit because everyone there is brown and everyone there roots for a brown person,’ ” she says.
Avantika worked in Bombay for 5 years, appearing in a handful of Indian films, including “Premam” and “Manamantha.” But when she aged out of childhood roles, it became difficult to find work.
“The way the Indian film industry works, you basically have childhood characters and lead actresses,” she says.
She relocated to Los Angeles, hoping for more acting opportunities, and eventually settled in Northridge. Now she lives in New York, where she attends Columbia. Her parents moved back to Hyderabad, India, where they’re originally from.
Our server offers the cold tofu first, the blocks of bean curd are nearly hidden under a pile of green onion, kaiware sprouts and spoonfuls of chunky chili oil. Underneath is a pool of bonito dashi. With her first bite, she erupts in exclamations of admiration.
“Fire!”
Another spoonful.
“Flavor bomb!”
And another.
“I might have to hop on the tofu bandwagon!”
Bryan comes by to check in. In between bites, he somehow manages to keep her makeup glowing, her lip liner smudge-free and each strand of her long wavy locks in place.
Next is the tsukemen, a large bowl of noodles with fresh herbs and a jammy egg, served with a smaller bowl of creamy fish broth for dipping. Avantika uses her chopsticks to pluck a small bunch of noodles and dunk them into the broth.
“Slay,” she says.
3:28 p.m. Bombay Frankie Company
Avantika grew up eating her mother’s Southern Indian food, and she relished her years living in Bombay, with an array of street foods like Frankies.
It’s the specialty at Bombay Frankie Company, a fast-casual restaurant on the northern rim of the Westfield Culver City shopping mall.
“My dad brought me here and it’s so hard to find good Indian street food anywhere,” she says. “When you find good Frankies, you remember. They’re literally some kind of Indian stuffing or curry filling in like a roti or garlic naan.”
She approaches the counter with familiarity and purpose, ordering a chana masala Frankie in roti, a vegetable samosa, a chicken tikka masala pijja and a mango lassi.
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While we wait for our food, Avantika boasts about her mom’s cooking.
“Her food is southern Indian,” she says, “so it’s not the typical Western perception of Indian food, which is a lot more chicken tikka masala and naan. My mom usually made roti and vegetables cooked in Indian spices.”
Roti was the first thing Avantika remembers her mother teaching her to cook.
“I think it was the starter food, like every immigrant mom, they want their kids to know how to make round rotis,” she says.
Next were idli, dosa and aloo fry.
While she still prefers eating her mother’s food to just about anything else, now, she says, her heart belongs to cooking Thai. But instead of her mother teaching her, she used the internet.
“YouTube University,” she says.
When the samosas arrive, she studies the golden triangles before taking a bite. The pastry flakes and crumbles, collapsing into the warmly spiced potato inside.
“This is great, the pastry lining is slightly different, thinner almost,” she says.
She unwraps the Frankie to reveal a thin flatbread bulging with yellow-tinged chickpeas, potato and onion. The vegetables are cooked until beyond soft, the mixture turning to mash at the slightest squeeze.
“The pickled onions!” she exclaims. “It almost feels Mediterranean with the pickled onion moment.”
She’s just now starting to slow down, her excitement at the pijja dimmed slightly by her approaching fullness. She picks up a slice and nibbles at the tip. It’s blanketed in tikka masala sauce, melted cheese and shredded chicken.
“I can’t wait to eat this in bed tonight while watching ‘Baby Reindeer,’ ” she says. “It’s so good!”
5:32 p.m. Cassia
With our appetites newly invigorated by a drive in afternoon traffic, we settle into a table in the the back room at Cassia. Avantika purposely chose Asian food as the general through line for the day’s culinary adventure, and she’s been a fan of Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng’s Santa Monica restaurant for years now. When she learns it’s also one of my favorites, she forgoes her typical mapo tofu and Vietnamese sunbathing prawns and looks to me for recommendations.
I introduce her to the clay oven flatbread with chickpea curry, the vegetable fried rice and green papaya salad.
“My dad’s favorite Thai food is papaya salad, and my friends always order it so I want to find one that I like so I can see the hype,” she says. “I have never met a green papaya salad that I enjoy.”
No pressure. I switch the focus from my now sweaty palms to Avantika’s budding career as a producer. First up is developing a series that she sold to Disney called “A Crown of Wishes.” Based on the book of the same name, the story follows the journey of a young prince and princess from rivaling kingdoms who join together to participate in a tournament to save their kingdoms.
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“I like to describe it as ‘Hunger Games’ meets Indian mythology and Bollywood,” she says. “This is the first project that I even pitched and to have it sold has given me a lot of confidence in pitching other things.”
The series is hopefully the first of many, Avantika says, that will allow her to build a roster of work to create her own production company.
“I’m trying to figure out what my niche is as a producer and the types of stories that I’m drawn to,” she says. “I have found that they tend to be immigrant stories. I feel like so many young people are understanding that their voices have more of an impact and more power so I’m figuring out where I fit into that whole puzzle.”
She pauses to take in the green papaya salad, a mountain of tangled green strands now in the center of our table. She tentatively puts a small spoonful on her plate then takes a bite.
“Oh my god, I think we found a papaya salad that I like!” she says.
Is she just being nice? Acting? I think back to how she stole every scene in “Mean Girls” with her impeccable comedic timing and how I laughed out loud at the part where she pats her face in the mirror with a sandwich like it’s a makeup sponge.
“It’s incredible, so refreshing,” she goes on. “Is that candied walnut? Wow. God that is good.”
I believe her. One bite of the cool, familiar salad, with its pops of fresh herbs and spiced walnuts and I relax.
She tears off a piece of the bubbly flatbread and swipes it through chickpea curry. It reminds her of chana masala, only softer, more coconutty. In a word: “bomb.”
And her mom would approve of the amount of vegetables and herbs in the fried rice, the grains studded with broccoli and strands of wilted lettuce.
“It’s very fresh,” she says. “It’s not a term I usually use to describe fried rice.”
Even with a slew of films already in the works, and her production company fast becoming a reality, Avantika hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a career in food. If she wasn’t an actor, she says, she’d want to be a chef.
“Part of why I love acting is getting to have an immediate effect on people, and I think food has that power just like entertainment does,” she says. “I even thought about going to London to culinary school for a bit and I’d love to do that at some point. I’d love to do a guest appearance on a cooking show.”
You read it here first. Martha, Giada, Bobby, Gordon … Avantika is waiting for your call.
Follow along on the Avantika food crawl
Gyoza Bar, 1501 W. Sunset Blvd. Unit #A, Los Angeles, (213) 265-7015, www.gyozabar.com
The Bombay Frankie Company, 6000 Sepulveda Blvd Suite 1601, Culver City, (310) 444-9241, www.thebombayfrankiecompany.com
Cassia, 1314 7th St. Santa Monica, (3100 393-6699, cassiala.com
Makeup and hair by Robert Bryan
Eat your way across L.A.
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