Two decades after roasting in the masala and rolling in rich restaurant meals, Indo-Americans in the Bay Area are craving the lean, mean and pukka -- that's Indian slang for the real thing. They want something that reminds them of their mothers: basic, home-style food.

It used to be that if you wanted to eat home-style Indian cooking, you had to do it at home. But South Bay restaurants, caterers and groceries have begun to feed the longing for low-cholesterol, Mom-style comfort food at reasonable prices.

Ask local Indians what they consider ``home-style'' cooking, and the replies boil over. ``Fresh ingredients with veggies other than carrots, potatoes or onions, please.'' ``All vegetarian so I don't have to stress about E. coli.'' ``Much less grease.'' ``Low on spice.''

How things have changed. The first Indian restaurateurs here offered dishes such as tandoori chicken, which 20 years ago seemed exotic. Then they served up kurmas -- braised dishes heavy on the cream and spice. A few years later came South Indian dosas, crepes painstakingly made from fermented rice that even in India are considered a delicacy. Then came the Indian subcontinent's version of fast food: chaat. Now, home-style is the leading edge.

Annadaata: Food shuttled to your door every morning

Tucked away behind a gas station in a bland part of Santa Clara is a rental kitchen where the turmeric and spice are on from 5 to 8:30 a.m. every weekday. When I arrive at 8:05 a.m. on a Friday, four women are ladling thair vadai (fried lentil patties soaked in seasoned yogurt) into disposable containers. The women sprinkle fresh coriander leaves on top of the vadais, snap on the lids and wedge the boxes into brown bags. A delivery driver grabs as many bags as he can and dashes out to load his van. Annadaata.com is on its way to bring home-style Indian food to 60 customers that morning.

``My dream is to build A-Arches across the United States,'' says Kavita Srivathsan, Annadaata's feisty, 20-something owner. An ex-PBS marketing specialist, Srivathsan jumped into the fray in April 2002 when bachelor friends of her husband raved about her cooking skills. ``Sure, come home every evening, but I'm going to charge you,'' she said.

``OK, how much?'' they asked. She answered and the price stuck.

Annadaata soon became known as ``the $5 meals on wheels.'' (Meals with meat are $6.50, and there is a delivery charge.) A typical meal includes rotis (flat griddle breads) or rice, a vegetable dish and lentils, but Annadaata offers menus from different regions of India.

Mike Raghavan of San Jose doesn't think Annadaata matches his mom's food by a long shot. ``Yet, when I want a variety of Indian food every day that resembles home food and want my food on the table by a certain time, I cannot find a better deal,'' he says.

Sunnyvale's Chanda Baggarly and her husband order Annadaata's food twice a week from the menus that Annadaata posts online at http://www.annadaata.com/. ``I love the price, the quantity of food I get and the fact that it's delivered right to me at work,'' she says.

Customers can go to the site and click among several menus. For Baggarly, it's a Web-based tutorial on Indian cuisine. Her favorite? The adai on the South Indian menu, a crisp pancake made of fermented lentils and rice.

Komala Vilas: Reminding techies of student days

When they enter Komala Vilas, some South Indian expatriates might think they're in a Brahmin home deep in southeastern India, where women in handloomed silk saris and men in cotton dhotis still eat out of glistening banana leaves that smell of the earth. But the ambience at Sunnyvale's Komala Vilas has, in fact, been engineered with an unusual marketing plan: to remind Indian engineers of their undergraduate years at their alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai, India.

When A. ``Nacha'' Narayanswami, the owner of Komala Vilas and an IIT alumnus himself, drew up the plan on his cutting board, he designed the operation like a chip company clean room so that it would be easy to keep the kitchen sparkling. ``See, you can sleep in my kitchen,'' he boasts.

A tiny white board by the door describes the day's menu in Tamil and in English. In the anteroom, designed like a common room back at IIT, guests can try their luck at Carrom (a popular board game in India), chess and other games. Narayanswami, a fast-talking engineer who worked at Johnson & Johnson for 20 years, wanted to serve authentic South Indian food. And as a member of the orthodox Brahmin caste from South India, he wanted to avoid onions and garlic.

Young men and women at lunch at Komala Vilas wear badges from Agilent, HP and Sun. They dig in, with their hands, to the low-fat Tamilian meal, which offers dishes including kootu (vegetables and lentils cooked with coconut sauce), sambhar (vegetables and lentils in a tamarind sauce), rasam (a peppery tamarind broth), curry (a generic term for steamed or sauteed vegetables), appalam (lentil wafers), pickle (spicy, marinated lemon pickle, in this case), rice and buttermilk.

``It's very close to home cooking,'' says Saratoga's Juggy Krishnamurthy.

The $8 lunch varies daily. While guests sit down to eat off shiny steel plates, the staff paces the dining room serving from traditional stainless-steel buckets and bowls. My ex-IIT husband basks in the attention.

Chandra Venkatraman of Saratoga says the best part of the all-you-can-eat meal is the appalams and spicy potato chips that are must-have accompaniments.

Kokila's kitchen:

Hot rotis at your table,

health lessons on the wall

Like Silicon Valley companies that brag about being players in the wireless space, Prakash Kanakia of Kokila's Kitchen claims to be the only player in the Indian vegan space. Kanakia is a health-food junkie and he tells his customers why they should be, too. Plastered on his walls are nuggets of information on how his wife, Kokila, substitutes tofu for paneer (Indian cheese).

Cupertino's Jana Seshadri stops by Kokila's Kitchen for hot-off-the-griddle, wafer-thin rotis, a specialty.

Indeed, Kokila Kanakia hails from the western Indian state of Gujarat, where women have made roti-making into an art form, rolling nanometer-thick bread in a nanosecond.

I remember years ago when Kokila Kanakia started catering Gujarati delicacies from her home in San Jose. She quickly became known in the South San Jose Indian community for her rotis, dhoklas (lentil bread served with mint chutney), shrikand (yogurt pudding) and oondhiu (vegetables stuffed with lentil masala and sauteed). Her Cupertino restaurant keeps the home-style tradition alive for those of us who dropped in at her place when our mouths watered for a methi thepla, a flat, roasted bread stuffed with fenugreek.

``The family-style atmosphere is relaxing, and their . . . shrikand is out of this world,'' says Sunnyvale's R. Jagannathan, who likes Kokila's Kitchen mainly because the simple Gujarati menu is a welcome change from the restaurant standards.