Karma Asian

This is a small, smart neighborhood restaurant that offers a broad overview of the best of several Asian cuisines. Although Karma tempts the fates by featuring a tangled, border-hopping board of fare, it respects boundaries, and most of the small plate/large plate menu holds to a strict division. As a result, each meal becomes a minor lesson in geography and history, offering an intriguing balance between the peasant heat of Korean food and the restrained subtlety of Japanese, the epic span of Chinese cooking's development and the relative simplicity of the traditional Vietnamese.