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82 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.16 THE DISH Mt. Everest View Restaurant & Bar 4109 Bardstown Road, #103 Photos by Casey Chalmers apextheatres.com crafthousebrews.com Thank you for voting us a fnalist for Best Beer on Tap Selection! 2 great locations Germantown & Crescent Hill crafthousebrews.com The plate presents itself as royal — perfect, red-velvet-hued cubes topped with emerald-green jalapeño pepper rings. The dish? Paneer 65, a South Indian snack of sautéed paneer cheese glistening in a spicy sauce. It may have gotten its name for the number of ingredients involved in the recipe, or the fact that one kilogram calls for 65 chiles. I will spend much of this meal alternating between bites of food, sips of ice water and dragon exhales. My fault. When asked how spicy I wanted my food, I crowed a cocky, "Spicy." I'm at Mt. Everest View, a one-year-old restaurant serving Nepalese and Indian cuisine. With a name just shy of a complete sentence, it is, in fact, completely shy of a bar (the owner's working on it) and hidden in one of Buechel's plentiful strip malls. During the lunch hour on a recent Wednesday, just one other table is occupied. CNBC mutters quietly in the background, as does a motion detector that mimics a parrot upon the slightest movements outside the glass doors or within the restaurant's dark-pink walls. I roll my Paneer 65 cubes into warm paratha, a bread similar to naan. Vegetable momo (dumplings) along with thukpa (a Nepalese noodle soup) fll the table. But the ugliest dish wins. Chatpate looks like twigs after tangling with a blender, yet the mix of puffed rice, potatoes, cucumber, cilantro, green chile and chickpeas surprises, tasting like a rich, nutritious confetti. I devour it in heaps and spoonfuls. Hasta Rai, a 33-year-old from Bhutan, opened Mt. Everest View with his brother last summer. Both arrived in Louisville by way of a refugee camp in Nepal. Rai wants Mt. Everest View to act as a gathering spot. He hosts Nepalese movie nights and has built a little stage in hopes of offering music once he secures a liquor license.