mongo_jones

interesting indeed. though it might ruin my appetite to see anil kapoor's face on a magazine cover while eating.

I believe that this request would be a text book example of "hauling coals to Newcastle". Colorado has more breweries per capita than any state inthe country. There is good beer falling out of the trees and flowing in streams there (although Coors got in trouble for the streams thing, I thought that it didn't sound too bad-but it is apparently hard on the trout). completely forgot that i'd asked a question in this thread--yes, colorado has many fine breweries, and boulder has its fair share of great brews, but i did like the abita amber ale (i think that's what it was) i had in new orleans a couple of years ago and have unsuccessfully looked for it since. is it sold outside louisiana at all?

As I've said before, some folks will eat anything that doesen't crawl off their plates and escape into the nearest fetid swamp. does the swamp have to be fetid?

perhaps one way to think about this might be to ask the following questions: 1. muslims from all over india migrated to the new nation of pakistan taking with them various regional forms of their cuisine, some of which may have remained distinct in their new home and others of which may have blended/hybridized. in other words, could there be a pakistani shammi kabab which comes into existence after this population exchange? 2. in addition to the muslims migrating to pakistan, pakistan also encompasses existing regions: sindh, baluchistan, north-west frontier province etc. are there dishes from these regions that are much more distinct from dishes in what became india? 3. how have 1 and 2 themselves intermingled? of course, the same exercise can be done for parts of north india, bengal and east-pakistan/later bangladesh (one of the things we forget in thinking about bangladeshi culture is that lots of muslims from bihar and eastern u-p also moved to east-pakistan rather than west-pakistan--in other words east-pakistani/bangladeshi culture/cuisine isn't just east-bengali muslim).

me, i like the blood--especially cracking the bone and sucking it out with the marrow.

i don't know about chapli kababs but shammi kababs, haleem and nihari are not pakistani dishes per se--they're subcontinental muslim dishes, and you get very good variations wherever there are large concentrations of muslims. does anyone know how pakistani variants of these dishes differ from the different indian and bangladeshi ones?

i think what's happening in a number of these write-ups is that la hesser is ambiguously trying to suggest a deeper level of access than she might in reality have had. this desire for perceived proximity, if my perception is correct, may in fact have been successful and ironically has come back to bite her in the ass.

Said chef takes any successful or "signature" dishes with him/her--as well as any other good ideas/recipes picked up along the way. Also the more talented of the kitchen staff. so, is this generally an informal "procedure"? have there ever been cases of chefs and restaurants suing each other for continued preparations of recipes each claims is indelibly associated with either the restaurant or the chef?

hey, we hindus don't need to worry about the devil. he only has power over those of the judeo-christian variety.

laddus and halwas

somehow i don't think the presence of the sea or the esplanades is essential to the bhutta experience. i think we can all agree though that the best puchka/paani-puri is in calcutta, and the best mirchi-bhajjis in hyderabad.

i beg to differ. the best bhutta is in delhi and punjab. and bhelpuri, have you ever tried it with butter and black-salt?

this is inspired by recent news about suvir saran and hemant mathur's departure for amma. do chefs generally sign over ownership of any recipes and menus they create for a restaurant (or while affiliated with a restaurant) to its owners? if not, do they explicitly retain proprietary rights? what happens when a talented chef who has transformed a restaurant's meny leaves it?

i never cook from scratch--after what that smart-ass health inspector said i've started clipping my nails every month go out of my way? i'll go out of my way to run vegetarian family members over and then feed them their own mangled flesh in a sauce made from their blood. i usually draw my meal ideas on paper and in months when the checks haven't cashed that's all we eat. mmm mmm i can draw a mean steak--better than i can grill certainly. and we stopped exploring food after the missus got that nasty case of lockjaw while rappelling into the can of garbanzo beans tables are for french surrender monkeys what like to use fancy words like "repertoire"--we eat in the toilet in order to save time. and pappy always said a pie-hole's for pie not talking; we do our talking in court. we usually have guests over for dinner in their homes. or at least we did before the restraining orders showed up. and involve children in our entertainment? what kind of sick pervert are you? depends on whether you're talking about food or "food". we have a rule--no sex on the table; at least not till dinner's over

scott, 1. i am more amused than anything else by the things on the menu that caught my eye 2. i think a restaurant might want to decide which language it wants to use. interestingly most north indian restaurants call the dish "butter chicken"--it is restaurants in the u.s that trot out the formal sounding "murgh makhani". but if you're calling the chicken in one dish murgh, i find it a little amusing that somewhere else it is called chicken--it isn't as though these distinctions connote anything about the dishes themselves. 3. i'd resist the urge to fix the characteristics of chicken cooked with spinach (i've rarely encountered chicken cooked overwhelmingly with fenugreek/methi in india--which doesn't mean it isn't there--so won't speak about it). it is a rustic punjabi dish and doesn't have a set recipe. by a curious coincidence i made chicken with spinach tonight--in our house growing up we ate this preparation more with goat than chicken and we called it "saag wala meat"--for what it is worth. perhaps we hadn't received the memo about changing names back to indian ones once the british left. 4. as for this place's murgh methi and chicken spinach (or whatever they call them) i am again amused that their descriptions of the two are inter-changeable. you'd think on an online takeout menu (where a customer can't ask a waiter the difference) there might be a little more distinguishing information. regards, mongo

well malayalis may be coming close. and bengali food incorporates more coconut than you might think.

jason, to learn a little more about sri lankan food you could do worse than pick up a great novel by romesh gunesekeera (bhelpuri mentioned this in another thread) called "reef"--food is used as a metaphor of both sri lankan identity and for communication. it is set in the 60s and early 70s but will give you a sense of the place of fish and spice in sinhalese cuisine. and that brings me to something bhelpuri didn't go into in too much detail: apart from the various colonial influences it is important to also remember the general ethnic and religious breakdowns of sri lanka (especially given the violence that has racked the country since independence, and particularly in the last 25 years): the sinhalese majority is largely buddhist (though there are also christians); then there's the largely hindu tamils who've come in generally two waves--the first more than a millenia ago, and the second about a 100-150 years ago; then there's the tamil muslims (who apparently are more interested now in charting a separate religious identity rather than a cultural tamil one); finally there's the remnants of the burghers. michael ondaatje is perhaps the most well known sri-lankan burgher outside of sri lanka, and his memoir "running in the family" is an incredible read but there's also a great burgher writer who's never left: carl muller. he has a very good trilogy ("the jam-fruit tree", "yakada yaka" and i forget the title of the third one)--these might be harder to find but they will give you a great deal of insight into burgher sri lanka. given the sad history of ethnic violence it is hard to find accounts these days of a syncretic sri lankan culture but there has been and probably continues to be mixing (the writer shyam selvadurai, for instance, has a tamil father and a sinhalese mother), and i am sure this has played into food history as well. i'm not sure if sri lankan restaurants in the u.s maintain ethnic divisions on the menu as well or whether there is a pan-sri lankan cuisine that survives ethnic splits. and for the name issue, as you may know long before sri lanka was called sri lanka or ceylon it was known to european navigators as serendip. more on bangladeshi food and its relationship with bengali food later (by which i don't mean to imply that i know a lot about it). regards, mongo edit to add this link: http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=6607 an article on sri lankan food quoting a prominent sri lankan chef in a leading indian newpaper--the page takes a while to load but eventually shows up.

don't know about the comparative taste issue but the brain curry (goat as far as i know) at kake da dhaba on connaught circus in delhi was one of my faves as a kid. i haven't been there in almost 20 years--i wonder what its profile is now.

i think you might want to stop relying on that particular indian friend for information about things indian. chicken/murgh has almost no connection to bombay/mumbai--indians say chicken when they speak english and murgi/murgh or something else when they speak a different indian language. and to some extent chicken has also become a word in the lexicon of speakers of other indian languages in the same way that "telephone" has. these people would be very surprised to hear that they're supposed to be "changing back" to saying murgh, since only north-indians would say "murgh/murgi" to begin with.

no shit eh? so one would hope

it is a fairly fancy website as indian restaurant sites go, even if the menu itself seems like more of the same. i'm intrigued by two items on the menu: 1. the murgh methi--which is chicken with fenugreek, spinach and spices and 2. chicken saag--which is chicken with spinach, fenugreek and spices somebody in new jersey needs to order both these dishes and compare them. and also find out why one of them gets to be murgh while the other remains chicken.

That debt is common knowledge in Art History. I've certainly known about it for a really long time. "Westerners" used to call art from places like Africa and New Guinea "primitive art," and the influence of "primitive art" has long been cited as one of the major aspects of Modernism in art. If Picasso tried to suppress that debt, his efforts weren't successful for long. well, maybe not successful for long among art-historians, still successful for the general public. more to the point for the adria discussion, and the whole question of path-breaking european chefs looking to the cuisines of asia etc. for new inspirations/connections/exotica is the question of who/what gets to be inspiration or raw-material and who/what gets to be high art. i raised the picasso reference because it suggests to me that adria is consciously thinking about these issues, which i think is promising.

bux, i am not sure how you've used my posts in this thread to arrive at this as a difference in outlook between us. when i say i am not interested in fluff in restaurant reviews (in the details of the stove in the kitchen, the chef's views on the pace of life under late-capitalism etc.) i don't mean for it to translate to "i will eat only what the reviewer recommends". when i say i would rather "like" food than "appreciate" it i mean that eating for me is a sensual experience first, and only much later an intellectual one. getting the information for the intellectual "appreciation" is a supplement to sensual pleasure, not a necessary criterion for it. it is on this point that we may differ. i want a reviewer to tell me if they liked eating what they ate or not, and on what basis (which should preferably not comprise only or largely the chef's position in some personal hierarchy of iconoclasticism or what have you). in the meantime, it may alarm you, or at least disturb your location of our differences, to discover that i actually have the exact same attitude to eating while travelling that you describe. i don't just like to eat the things i can't get at home (and, by the way, i find this is better located by talking with waiters and owners of restaurants than by reading reviews) i also like to eat very simple things first. one of the most revelatory experiences for me on my one long trip to italy was eating basic preparations of pasta and tomato sauce and so on. regards, mongo

It may not take much expertise to open a bottle of wine, but in many high end dining establishments, a tremendous amount of time and expertise has gone into stocking the cellar. For example, there are small production wines on the list at places like Cafe Boulud and Daniel that a retail consumer will never get their hands on at any price (except perhaps at Auction). These sommeliers have often spent many years traveling the world's wine regions, building relationships with top vintners and trying to identify up-and-coming stars. They also go to great lengths to procure wine with a meticulous provenance and storage record (this is especially important for older vintages), and may even be able to procure older vintages directly from the cave of the producer. I don't mind paying a fairly hefty markup in exchange for access to an exceptional collection of wines built by a top sommelier. felonious, if you'll read a later paragraph of my post you'll see that i pretty much concede the point to restaurants of the type you cite. i'd love some responses to the non-markup part of my post--about the question of wine and food: is wine best enjoyed with food? is food best enjoyed with wine? and in either case what about people who eat cuisines that don't "go with wine"?

well, at the risk of veering way off topic (though when has this ever stopped me?): i don't know about including tribal cuisines in a taxonomy of "bengali" cuisine; given the ways in which tribal cultures all over indian have run parallel to the mainstreams suddenly yoking the tribes in bengal into a "bengali" identity begs all kinds of other questions. the first question would be whether you are defining "bengali" just in geographic terms? as in anyone who lives within the boundaries of the current state of west bengal. if so, you might include various tribes as well--as also calcutta marwaris etc. however, if you are defining "bengali" culturally i don't know that tribes like the sabars and santals think of themselves as "bengali" or are thought of that way by people who do think of themselves as bengali. also given the state of most tribal groups in bengal, assam and bihar (and probably elsewhere as well) talking about tribal "cuisine" may seem a little obscene. as for gautam: look for posts by v.gautam and send him a p.m. if his p.m alert is still being sent to a valid email address he'll probably respond. the man is an encyclopedia on the cultural history/geography of bengali food.