In a restful, airy room paying homage to their guru, peaceful servers please your body and soul with hearty, homey vegetarian fare.

The first thing you notice when you walk through the door of Jyoti Bihanga is how blue it is. The walls of the high-ceilinged, airy room are all painted the perfect pale blue of a cloudless spring day. Large portraits of Sri Chinmoy, the guru whose followers run this café, grace these walls, along with colorful art created by the guru. Smiling sari-wrapped servers glide through the room, tending to their casually-clad guests. Meditative ambient music tinkles in the background, and a bookshelf in the corner offers works by the Guru for borrowing and notecards for purchase.

None of this felt at all sanctimonious to me. In fact, it felt soothing, and even refreshingly innocent. How can you not be charmed when sunlight is streaming through big lace curtained windows on such cheerfully sky-blue walls?

The menu at Jyoti Bihanga is similarly charming and innocent, featuring a mix of comfort foods, forays into Eastern cuisines, and SoCal health-food classics, all vegetarian with numerous vegan options. Some of my foodist friends who scoff at vegetarian cuisine feel there's something especially dodgy about vegetarian dishes that seek to reproduce omnivore favorites like meatloaf and burgers. I say to these scoffers, hey, what does it matter as long as the food is good? At Jyoti Bihanga, they do 'em good, both the exotic and the vegetarian diner fare.

The menu proclaims their "Neatloaf" dinner as their best-seller. Now even carnivore loaves can be a dicey proposition in restaurants, often too dense and dry for any sauce to rescue. Jyoti Bihanga keeps their Neatloaf tender and moist by blending eggs and ricotta with brown rice and other grains, its savory seasoning offset with a tangy topping. It's worth noting here that Sri Chinmoy's followers are also fond of expressing their devotion through athletics such as track and field; the Neatloaf dinner is a carbo-loader's dream, offering a huge portion of the Neatloaf along with an equally-hefty serving of excellent mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, very good toasted whole-grain bread, and a choice of salad or soup (the a la carte version omits that last choice).

A specials board features a daily selection of soups, a curry of the day, and an additional daily special. On a recent visit, a cup of creamy zucchini soup was a springlike light-green concoction of the featured vegetable blended with cream and sour cream, snappy from lots of black pepper. Their idea of a cup of soup, by the way, is as generous as their idea of an entrée, big enough to pass for a bowl serving in other restaurants. Even the "small" house salad they serve with entrees is bountiful—and beautiful, too, a composed plate of very freshly-grated strands of beet and carrot nestled on greens, with a choice of inventive dressings.

It is also possible to eat lightly at Jyoti Bihanga, choosing from their selection of entrée salads, appetizers, sandwiches, and wraps. Beverage choices include a full range of teas both herbal and caffeinated, chai, organic coffee, natural sodas, and smoothies. Homey desserts like carrot cake and rice pudding round out the offerings.

Prices are modest, especially considering the huge portion sizes: full dinners hovering around $8 to $10, sandwiches and wraps in the $6-to-$8 range, and snackier items $5 and below. They are mainly open for lunches and dinners, but on two to three Sundays a month they also offer an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet (call ahead to find out this month's buffet dates).

I couldn't resist, at last, asking about the significance of all the blue, as another Sri Chinmoy-affiliated restaurant I'd know from my Seattle days was also awash in that color. My smiling server informed me the color signified "vastness" and "spirituality." Apparently it must also mean pleasing wholesome food in a restful environment. Hey, it's cheaper than a meditation retreat … and a lot more filling.

I do not have any connections with this business. I've been here more than ten times.