mongo_jones

i am yet to go to a restaurant in boulder that hasn't won an award. whoever prints those things must be making a lot of money.

thanks rlm the fact that they too have won a best restaurant award in some category or the other gives me some pause--recent award-winners we've eaten at include luca luca and sherpa's. however, i am encouraged by the mention of a secret menu. perhaps we'll grab lunch there tomorrow on the way to the airport.

well, slap me across the face with a scrumptious six inch snail! i had no idea. is this specific to parts of bengal bong? a west bengali or east bengali thing? next you'll be telling me bengalis eat frogs too.

damn, now we've got to wait for july 10. talk about early momentum. i nominate amy to get us all excited about this again at the end of june.

thank you andrea--very informative indeed. i hadn't realized just how globally prevalent snail eating was. so is it just implements that cross-pollinated when two snail-eating cultures collided?

we will check this out when we get back from l.a on the 26th--we leave tomorrow, so look for long silence from me for a couple of weeks on the forum. it'll be great if there is a boulder branch since we usually go for chinese delivery when we're too lazy to cook.

so, family style, split down the middle? do we have a second? a third? does the motion carry? and are thematt, purplewiz, chezhoff, katzenjammy and other new members and those who didn't make it to event 1 coming? this time i won't just bring my digital camera, i'll even take pictures. edit: also i demand that lori address me as miss mongo

in that case amy, the first thing to be established is whether we're going to go family style or no. i'm all for this, and it really makes moot the question of splitting the bill. and i'm not coming if there's no egg timer.

weaning problems tryska?

if we end up at two tables perhaps those of us who want to go family style and sample a lot of things can go to one table. so who's doing the reservation and table mongering?

amy, your story makes me flash back to my days as a beginning copywriter for a a major ad agency in new delhi. occasionally we vermin would be invited out to chinese lunch with the creative-directors etc. they would always go to nice places, order lots to drink, expensive things to eat and then split the check down the middle. it took the two or three of us with marginal paychecks a couple of outings to realize that it was a better plan for us to also join in the big-time ordering rather than ordering cheap noodle dishes and then subsidizing the drinks bill of people who made 10 times more money than we did. i am fine with the equal splitting of the food bill myself--but everyone should be. always better to have gruntled rather than disgruntled company!

louisville? our experiences these first 9 months have been restricted to north and south boulder, aurora and a tiny bit of denver. does spice china have any particular regional emphasis? and is the good/bad meal thing completely random or connected to ordering particular dishes?

well, if we can agree that i, and only i, can get the noodle-bowl with stir-fried foie-gras topped with market-price crab and lobster, then sure. let's play this by ear--if we get there and someone absolutely wants to get something ultra fancy and someone else just wants to get spring rolls and soup it might be harsh to have the latter subsidize the former. of course if we, or a subset of us, want to go family-style that will make life very easy.

yes, that's it. do they have any kind of reputation? we passed through, ate the one thing and liked it.

this may invite ridicule (probably well-deserved) but when we were driving here from los angeles late last summer we stopped at grand junction for mexican lunch--i think it was a chain: dos something or the other. anyway, i got a burrito with an incredibly hot, piquant habanero chili. i remember looking when we first got to boulder to see if there was an outpost near us but there didn't seem to be. now if i could only remember the name...anyone know what i'm talking about? actually, it was a little after grand junction and is visible off the i70.

as far as i can tell boulder has no chinese restaurants worth mentioning--though i take great guilty pleasure in may wah's orange-chicken made extra spicy (i'm a huge chinese food snob but can't resist a crispy, spicy orange chicken). what's the story in denver? are there any good sichuan restaurants? the dim sum scene, i am sorry to say, i have found to be mostly underwhelming--i don't know if that says anything about the possibility of good regional chinese food. kris, how about a series in the post on the best restaurants for particular kinds of cuisines?

dalat, july 10, a la carte when we get there--do we have a time? how about 8 p.m? eating dinner while it is still light out seems wrong to me. count us in for two for the reservation count.

not to veer away from zany and funny restaurant names but one of the most beautiful names is that of the chinese restaurant at the taj palace hotel in new delhi: the teahouse of the august moon. haven't eaten there in more than 10 years but the food was pretty good and the decor stunning. back to the zany: there's a bbq place in the san fernando valley north of l.a called uncle hoggly woggly's tyler, texas barbecue crappy name: olive garden--don't olives grow in groves? i hate that name so much i can't bring myself to eat there either.

They serve food there? I thought it was just a place to see and be seen. people go to hooters to be seen?? Just the waitresses. you mean it isn't a chain for the discriminating owl-spotter?

not that i make it at home but some calcutta sweet-shops also sell chocolate shondesh. i have never had the desire to try this, however. one of my favorite treats growing up was eating hot parathas wrapped around chunks of slowly melting gur (jaggery)--it strikes me now that bitter chocolate might be a good substitute.

dr. josiam, an interesting article. unfortunately i will likely not have much internet access during your visit to egullet but i'm listing some inter-connected questions here that you will hopefully have time to answer: 1. how applicable do you think your data is to the u.s as a whole when you consider that the research was conducted entirely in minneapolis? i suspect, for example, that anglo customers in indian restaurants in california might rate the importance of vegetarian cuisine much more highly. also, might spice/heat tolerances in the upper-midwest be different than, say, in the south-west or the west? 2. i was amused to read that the question of "authenticity" was so important to the south-asians polled--do you have any thoughts on how this population codes "authenticity" given the divide between indian home and restaurant cooking? "authentic" here can't mean "like it is made at home". 3. following on from the above: do you have a sense of what the ethnic breakdown of the south-asian population itself in your survey was? i'm wondering to what extent a north-indian menu might be only somewhat less exotic to south-indians than to north-indians. (also, does minneapolis have a significant south-indian population?) 4. what do you make of the growing trend in indian restaurants in some major cities towards serving south-indian and street-food items? do you think this is being driven by the desires of an indian clientele or by restaurateur trying to present new dishes to signal "authenticity" or 'exotica" now that knowledgeable american diners have learned to scoff at chicken tikka masala etc.? 5. what do you think it will take for indian food in the u.s to become indigenized the way that mexican and chinese food have? will it have to stop worrying about 'authenticity' to make that move? or code it differently? 6. how widespread is the penetration of indian food in the u.s right now? do you know if there are any states that don't have any indian restaurants at all? 7. do you think regional indian cuisines will ever be anything other than a rarity in the u.s? udupi restaurants in areas (like artesia outside los angeles) that have high tam-brahm populations and so on--the occasional "regional" dish on the regular north-indian menu. if we look at the average chinese restaurant menu (outside of places like the san gabriel valley in greater los angeles--which, despite what deluded new yorkers think, is ground zero for chinese cuisines in the u.s) we see that it is largely cantonese with some sichuan and hunan recipes thrown in for good measure, but with not too much emphasis on regionality per se. most of these are topics we have discussed on egullet, but it will be interesting to get your thoughts as well. i look forward to reading your responses when i get back online in a few weeks (and maybe i'll be able to go online occasionally during the q&a as well). in any case, i hope you'll stick around and become a regular! regards, mongo

do they? you don't think genius, in the art-gallery or the kitchen, might be culturally determined and recognized?

depending on rum, neat, with water or with coke. the only rum cocktail i've ever enjoyed is this lethal thing called a "scorpion" that i was once served in maui. a melange of rums with a 150 proof monster floating on top.

this sounds vaguely dirty. painfully so, but dirty.

in my experience if you go in a large enough group (>8 people) you'll get a table much faster than if you're in a group of 4 people. this because most of the dim sum houses have large, medium and small tables and will not seat groups of 4 at large tables even if they've been waiting for an hour and a group of 7 only just walked in. this is why the numbers don't always get called in sequence. by the way, jschyun, the site those image-links you've attached to your post are from demands acceptance of a user-certificate each time a page with them on it is loaded.