mongo_jones

washing and rinsing dishes? making sure the uneaten food-bits get cleared away? loooxooory! when we were young we didn't have plates--father passed around a piece of bone and we took turns licking it. later when we had money we had a sink and hot water. the neighbours would bring all their dirty dishes to soak in it--we called it soup, i can still taste it.

for me nothing hits the spot like a thin gravy, almost soupy, chicken curry with potatoes and carrots--eaten with rice. alu parathas with hot mango achar comes close. as does rajma-chawal. there's another thing that starts with "m" and ends with "ngo", but it cannot be named.

oh i enjoy the hate mail tremendously--actually there isn't that much of it, just like to make myself sound more important than i am. so two strikes now against our jonathan? mission 261 and now this. what's it gonna take for you to repudiate him completely...

thanks a ton--will report on findings. i doubt we'll find any place better, since my wife's family is supremely uninterested in things like cookbooks.

yes, whatever happened to gold, the guy who not just knows where the best of everything is to be found but also the correct way to eat it? now think about how much crap we may have swallowed over the years about cuisines and food-practices we aren't intimately familiar with (korean for you, indian for me).

jschyun, you're seriously discounting gold's status as an "expert" on "ethnic" cuisines among foodies in l.a. i still get hate mail from my old journal for the piece i wrote about him.

i think it speaks more to the impoverished imagination of critics than to the trendiness of indian food.

well, jschyun, you know how i feel about the man's takes on "ethnic" cuisines. a good writer, has eaten a lot, but is nowhere close to being the expert he thinks he is. this kind of crap only flies because his readership (especially his addressed readership) is almost entirely hipster-anglo and craving a "guide who knows".

the rumors are false then: tommy does indeed show up in photographs

nothing to do with chocolate can ever be a cliche. white-chocolate, yes, but not real chocolate. wait, i take that back and nominate: chocolate covered strawberries. waste of strawberries, waste of chocolate.

yes, this is slightly out of context. i was speaking in terms of the changing valuations of certain traditional foods among younger urban people in india. things like pasta have more currency than traditional recipes, many of which are not making the generational transfer. as for pasta in india, it is almost entirely a restaurant phenomenon. it hasn't been incorporated into indian cuisine as such.

and yet home-grown new yorkers sell adny out every night, correct? and will likely do the same for per se as well? as for my comments about already existing convergences: i was thinking more of the placing of french food and french notions of "fine dining" at the top of the eating out pyramid. do you think the folks who shell out humongous bucks to eat at adny would shell out as much for a chinese or thai restaurant? how many non-french/derived restaurants are there at the top of the nyc food scene? i'm not a new yorker and thus likely uninformed but i can only think of nobu, and that's not exactly a traditional japanese restaurant either. returning to michelin: my suggestion is that the average sassy new yorker likely to take offense to some jerry lewis loving frenchmen telling them which nyc restaurants are the best is not eating at adny (or even a few steps below) anyway; that there's enough aspirational brand-recognition of michelin that lots of yuppies will go for it. but i suppose michelin's target audience isn't just the money-bags who eat at the starred restaurants, right? they'll need to appeal to regular folks too--and here too i don't think they'll live or die by their treatment of the top places; most regular folks can't afford to eat there anyway. if they are interested in these people (since there's more of them, they'll buy the most product) they'll need to displace zagat not the nytimes in their heads. this they may or may not be able to do--time will tell soon enough--but where some of their possible success with a part of their audience may be due to franco-philia i doubt any possible failure with the larger regular market will be due to franco-phobia or anything like that. i don't think people likely to buy the michelin guides get worked up about freedom fries. i don't think too many of those people even buy the zagat. edit to add: why can't they do both?

reviewers and food critics may have dumped on adny for all the reasons fatguy outlines but the more pertinent question may be "what has the paying public's response been?" i think we need to separate the investments and anxieties of food-writers, who may be suspicious of methodologies of particular publications, especially one with the weight of michelin, from the interests of potential customers (who i assume already patronize michelin when they go abroad). i suspect the average customer at the top restaurants in new york already subscribes to the ideology that sustains michelin. that being said, points raised about the ethnocentrism of the michelin guide are probably valid--i would ask to what extent the new york times star-system is innocent of similar practices. how many "ethnic" restaurants get 3 or 4 stars from the ny times? i don't know the answer to this question, it is a genuine one.

shurely shome mishtake--george bernard shaw

oooh memories--of boarding school, however and not college. major delicacy: take packet of maggi instant noodles; remove flavor packet; crush the noodles inside the packet so that they break into individual curly pieces of about 3 cm length; pour in contents of flavor packet; shake vigorously. now, that's good eats!

not in india, they don't. we call it "bean-curd" and it has been around for quite some time.

who is that one by again bong? i'm awaiting my "calcutta cookbook" from the penguin series. on my next trip home--i hope to be able to go for more than 3 weeks for a change--i want to sit down with my grandmother (a legendary cook) and my youngest aunt (who learned everything she knows from her, and added her own frills) and get them to talk about food and cooking. my eldest mamima--maternal uncle's wife--who'll be here in a month is also an amazing cook (and a treasure-trove of information--she was taught after marriage by my mother's widowed aunt and by family cooks) but i'll only have a few days with her and don't want to waste time that could be spent on practical instruction on talk!

monica, who knew you were so kinky? tofu in place of paneer? i'm telling your mother.

oh, i thought you were incredulous about the possibility of my being allowed to have students. the "pig drop" thing was a typo (she meant "pin"), but it is the kind of unexpected poetry that only comes our way due to the way technology has changed our approach to spell-checking (this is really a late 20th century phenomenon); another favorite: a student once referred to "the body pubic". i like "so quiet you could hear a pig drop" a lot. very evocative--a pig dropping from a height might make a lot of noise (imagine the squealing on the way down, the dull, meaty thud as it makes contact); on the other hand a pig keeling over from sunstroke or exhaustion might make not very much sound. so, anyone have any experience in dropping pigs?

the best chinese food in the world--outside of china and hong kong--is in the san gabriel valley just outside l.a. the best korean food outside korea is in koreatown near downtown l.a. there's also great salvadorean food, great mexican food, pretty good thai food. not a lot of this stuff is in santa monica though. (though i would recommend la cabana on the border of venice for mexican.) do you have a particular cuisine in mind? for very good, relatively unpretentious "fine-dining" try joe's in venice or michael's in santa monica. their menus should be available online.

yes. scary thought isn't it?

gujaratis eat haldars?! i thought they were mostly vegetarians. o.k. o.k, i apologize

since the beginning of time man has enjoyed grilled bacon-wrapped halibut. (is that even a cliche? i just wanted to use the "beginning of time" thing.) a student long ago once began a paper with the immortal line: "it was so quiet you could hear a pig drop"

can someone tell my wife?... drum-roll, maestro...

here's an ancient indian recipe developed in my kitchen: one whole red snapper--say about 1-1 1/2 lbs little juliennes of ginger 1/2 cup chopped cilantro leaves 1 medium tomato 1 tspn chilli powder 1/2 tspn turmeric 4 tspns vinegar 1 tspn sugar 1 tspn garam masala salt heat oven to 350 degrees. clean fish and make 3-4 incisions on each side (cut to but not through the bone). throw everything but the fish, ginger and cilantro in a blender and puree. take the puree and rub it into the cuts on the fish, all over and stuff the excess into the cavity. stick the julienned ginger into the cuts. sprinkle a little of the cilantro over the fish. shove in oven and remove when done. 5 minutes before done-ness sprinkle the rest of the cilantro over the fish. eat with steamed rice and a dal. eat the eyes. edit to add: whole pomfret, yellow croaker etc. can also be and to suggest: for great whole fish go to the biggest asian grocery in your area