The Well-Fed Bong

I've been spending the last fortnight entertaining my mother and aunt, which means trying out some nice new restaurants. My travels took me to some new ones, and some old favorites. One of the new ones was Vong , the much reviewed restaurant from celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s chain of restaurants. It's hidden away under the lipstick building, and is populated entirely by Bangladeshi waiters, which made life much easier for us. I seem to be having French-Asian everywhere nowadays; cream sauces dusted with exotic spices and presented brilliantly. The interesting part is how they convert Asian street foods or communal serving to the plated paradigm, where each person gets a plate all his own all beautifully laid and not to be touched. Plated food always puts me in a bit of a tizzy. I have two worries; one is - am I supposed to eat all those things that make it look pretty? Do you put all of them in your mouth together (the perfect bite) or are there combinations t...

I've finally inspired other people. Here's the review (unedited except for links and capitalization) sent in a few days ago by the very friend of mine that fished in hell in with me. Last week, this foodie friend of mine suggested that we try sampling fare at restaurants/bars named after their addresses. I found the idea intriguing but we got drawn to the Osteria Gelsi fish (which was very very good), so today, when another friend came to the city from India I decided to try this place called 44 SW in Hell's Kitchen. It said ristorante and the menu outside seemed to have antipasti and insalata - so we walked in assuming they would have the usual entrees on the menu. The place turned out to be full of disappointments. First, they did not have half the wines on their list. The list itself was kind of sparse and uninformative. The pretty stewardess recommended something that turned out to be rather bland. More chicken than fish in an italian restaurant sounded like bad n...

I know you're running out of money. What better than a free magazine to recommend cheap joints, so here's the 2005 cheap&best list from Village Voice. And cheap&best was in fashion in earlier years too; here are the previous lists - Italian (2004) , Latin (2003), Asian (2002) and the Original List in 2001. No, I haven't eaten at all these places. I may be chubby but I am NOT FAT.

While Masoor starts life as pink, a little persuasion by hot water quickly converts it to a pale yellow. It's color makes it the easiest dal to recognise but people usually see the prepared version and go looking for a yellow dal. Bengalis use it a lot by itself while most other communities mix it with other dals. A light dal, it does not stand up well to heavy masalas. Here's my favorite recipe for it, which goes wonderfully well with spicy pickles and crunchy fries.

I found a good place to post formal recipes - RecipeGullet . They have a nice editor for entering recipes; it even comes out looking pretty (on the web page, at least). And, they have a fancy-shmancy search engine. Here, for instance, is my super-quick recipe for Aloo Golki .

Dal pretty much the core of Indian food. One could argue that it is more imporant that even rice, since many areas of India are wheat-centered. Dal is eaten everyday by pretty much all of India in some form or the other. Dals are pulses (dried food crops of of the legume family), and come either with or without skin. The skins make a considerable difference to the taste, so different recipes call for skinned or unskinned dal. It is also the generic name for the many kinds of soupy dishes made from one or more of those pulses. Just to confuse things, only the soupy dishes are called 'dal' - other things made with the same stuff are not. I'm eventually going to write an introduction to the dals - and there are a surprising variety of varieties. People get confused by which dal is what - even Indians. Identifying the dals by sight is not simple; that is traditionally the first test of a Bengali housewife (and it seems both my aunts failed). Luckily, they recovered so when I la...

Nothing quite defines the American food experience like the burger. And nothing quite defines the burger experience like a fast food chain. When I'm on the road driving the back roads, the only food I'm likely to get consistently is a burger. Sure, there's the occassional hippie who's opened a chai-latte place in the middle of a forest but dont count on that when looking for three meals a day. Even pizza pales in the face of the burger chain and its ubiquitious presence. My keen, inquisitive mind (not to mention huge stomach) naturally formulated the question - which is the fairest of them all, the best chain burger that exists, the best and the rest. The results of an extensive survey has a surprising answer. The best damn burger I've eaten at a chain is the Ciabatta burger from Jack-in-the-box . I know anything Italian is frowned on a true burger and In-N-Out is supposed to be really good, but that Ciabatta went wonderfully with two fat slabs of meat, cheese and...

The search has come to an end. The best Indian food in the continent is to be found in a strip mall on Red Hill Avenue in Tutsin CA. It's called Dosa Place , and produces dosas that would make most chefs in Chennai sweat. Luckily, its well hidden by Del Taco and Chinese takeouts. Ok, so its a little bit of a hyperbole. The place isn't the best Indian food but it is - and there's no question about it - the best dosas on the face of the ...ummm... continent. They make a lot of other stuff (including the unavoidable chicken tikka masala and lamb vindaloo) but stick fairly and squarely to their dosas and come away blessed. I'm not talking "authentic" or "really nice for America". I'm talking real dosas, the kinds that would divert attention from Chennai films and Andhra politics. A real, true brown work of genius. For those who dont know much about these matters, a dosa is a crepe made from fermented rice-lentil batter. The critical parts of a go...