The Well-Fed Bong

You can now subscribe to the blog. I've been told it helps the poor of the world but that may not be entirely true. There's a text box and button on the sidebar that makes the magic possible, though I warn you it will automatically throw you into the arms of an Yahoo group (or should I say...group). At the moment it's all the way at the bottom of the sidebar but may relocate without warning or unnatural squeaking sounds.

I landed in Birmingham Alabama hungry, having been deprived of food since the night before. A quick drive got me from the airport to what the GPS told me was the center of the city, where I promptly started looking for a place to eat. Having cruised the crumbling and mostly shuttered city blocks of downtown Birmingham, a fine dining restaurant was the last thing I expected to find. I nearly chose chick-a-fil but last minute parking problems forced me to attempt the rather plain exterior of the oddly named Restaurant G . Once past the door, the change was dramatic. The plain glass Eurodiner gave way to valuted celings and original artwork. A soaring staircase led the previous group of four diners into the heavens while we soacked in the smile from our glamorous hostess and occupied a table at the window. The extremely pleasant space, it turns out, was matched by some marvelous food. Right off the bat, bread basket came with excellent sesame nut and walnut raisin breads. My choice of sp...

I have surrendered to crass commercialism. There are now advertisments in my blog. Luckily they seem to be highly intrusive and real money spinners. I promise to treat all readers to dinners with the accumulated wealth, so click away. And dream on...

Here are two places that I visited recently Bridge Cafe turns out to be the oldest surviving bar in New York, which is big in a city where some 99% fail in the first few years. Situated just below the Brooklyn bridge on Water street, it turned out to be a small, plain cafe that showed few signs of its ancient heritage. However, age is not the only reason to go there - we went for brunch and the food was very good, specially their apple-smoked honey bacon. They also have one of the best selections of single malt whisky in Manhattan, stretching three deep across half the bar. Von Singh was my midweek, a somewhat quirkily named store on West 8th and McDougal selling its own take on Indian kati rolls. As the name suggests, the menu aims at fusion. The rolls here come in tortilla-like baked flatbreads (which, in my opinion, is not ideal) and contain varieties of curried chicken, optionally topped with a few kinds of sauce. The effect is more pita or burrito than kati roll, but the chick...

I have often bemoaned in these columns (ok I haven't ever bemoaned and this isn't even a column but I think it makes me sound like I'm getting paid for this - lets not get distracted here) that Indian food abroad is a bit like Chinese food in India. Every restaurant sells the same menu, and most of those dishes dont even exist in traditional Indian cooking. Chicken Tikka Masala is firmly a British invention, almost certainly the fortuituous combination of Bangladeshi cook and tomato sauce. It is, in fact, so British that the British Council uses its history in an English lesson - I kid you not! It was with considerable admiration, therefore, that I stared at the menu of Babu . A vast expanse of nicely expensive paper made no mention of either tikka or tandoor, and vindaloo was mysteriously invisible. At first I though it was a trick of the dim lights (entirely candles) but no amount of blinking made any of the familiars appear. I was instead marooned with names like doi m...

A friend of mine recounts with much amusement how I once gave a long speech on cooking rice to some hapless woman at a grocery store. Here's the shortened version Rice is the staple of Indian cooking, so one should not treat it lightly. Basmati is the king, but making it as fragrant as the restaurant requires a little technique. There are four steps in cooking any kind of raw (as opposed to parboiled) rice - rinsing, soaking, cooking and fluffing. In India they would always rinse rice to make sure it was clean, but also to wash away the talc commonly used as a milling agent. Most rice today is clean and has no talc, so rinsing isn't required. Some of the surface starch gets washed away in the rinse, so you might want to do it anyway. Soaking is a 15-30 minute affair, where cleaned and rinsed rice is left to soak in warm water. It's supposed to soften the grains and release the flavor and should be done unless you're in a hurry. They say you should use the same water t...

I never expected to like large slabs of meat barely cooked and served with nothing, but steaks have a way of growing on you - sometimes literally. There are two steak joints of note inches from where I work - Rainwaters on Kettner and Ruth's Chris . One a resolutely independent steakhouse, one part of America's largest fine dining chain. Both, however, were very similar in appearance - dramatic curved stairways leading to a huge, heavily wood-panelled upstairs dining room. Ruth's has the advantage of better views, perched as it is just off Harbor drive, and also seemed busier than the very empty Rainwaters. I had the ribeye in both places (no, not on the same day, not even the same month - I'm not that fond of cholesterol). To start with, both steaks were excellent, but there are differences. Ruth's gave me a detailed writeup of the special oven, the New Orleans rags to riches story and placed a sizzling medium-rare steak floating in butter in front of me. the butte...

America is a land of choices. In India you go to a store, ask the guy there to give you a kilo of chicken, and he hands you a bag of the stuff that you go home and cook it. That doesn't work in America. In the land of the choices, you're faced with breasts, thighs, legs, wings, portions, skinless, boneless, ground, fry, stir-fry, roast, antibiotic, biotic, organic, free range (there's a rumour the average American has to pass an exam before he or she is allowed near the poultry aisle). So which one is the one to choose? Fear not, I have been there, done that research. Read on, if you're not chicken. First, if you dont know what cut of chicken is, then here is a guide from the original Spam guys. Online grocer FreshDirect has an excellent section on cuts of chicken complete with pictures but you have to put in a New York zip code (say 10016) to look at it. The absolute worst pieces to buy for most Indian food is breast. It is commonly recommended for western cooking...

As benefits a coastal town, San Diego is full of seafood restaurants, from hole-in-the-wall fish taco places to black-tie affairs. I've already written on some of them earlier, but I recently had a chance to go to the two that were the highest rated on downtown - Point Loma Seafoods and Top of the Market. Point Loma Seafoods is much away from the beaten restaurant track, serving salads, cocktails and fish plates amidst counters of fresh fish for sale. It was rated the number one in magazine reviews so I went there with high hopes and, well, came away very disappointed. The location seemed the only thing worth the effort; I wasn't impressed either with the quality of the fish or the cooking. Though the jetty next door gives the impression that the fish just came off the boat, many of the offerings at the counter had names starting with "Atlantic" and "farm raised". I tried their smoked fish, but its a very far cry from the stuff at, say, Katie's Smoke...