mongo_jones

for the purposes of this discussion i think this is largely irrelevant. in fact one of the points made in this thread was that "indian" food at the average curry house in england is probably way hotter than at analagous restaurants in india. similarly thai food at the average american thai restaurant is about as hot as a weekend with martha stewart.as long as you specify where you encountered the cuisine you're nominating we're in the clear.

this is all true but it still doesn't work as an analogy. doubtless care and selection goes into a restaurant's wine-cellar--i am not knocking either the vintner's or the sommelier's craft. however, people who couldn't microwave a frozen pasta meal can still open the same bottle of wine they might get at a restaurant with no effort (well, not some of my friends, but that's another story). they can even learn to serve it at the right temperature and in the right glass-ware by merely investing in equipment rather than, say, learning to cook well. the true analogy would be to compare the selection of wine with the selection of ingredients for a home-cooked meal; however, once you've selected the ingredients you'll still need to do something with them that still involves more art than uncorking a bottle (or soon, twisting its cap off). and if you believe that the average person who buys a bottle or glass of wine at a restaurant has truly selected the perfect wine for their meal, well then you know a much more wine-savvy class of people than i do. what is the average sommelier's recommendation to actual purchase average i wonder? at the high end places it may be higher (or people may know more about wine); but this argument probably doesn't even apply to people at these places. however, at the middle of the road places, where usually some pimply kid is the one making the wine recommendation, i don't see how much less of a crapshoot it is than if i go to a good wine-store and ask a staff-member to help me select a wine to go with x, y or z home-cooked dish. i suppose the larger question in this thread is whether wine can truly be enjoyed by itself or whether it needs to go with food. those who would say the latter will need to consider whether this means people who predominantly eat certain cuisines that are supposed to be extremely wine-unfriendly--say most indian cuisines--can have no relationship with wine. on the other hand if there are certain wines that are better enjoyed by themselves than others i'd like to know which ones they are. as i've said on a different thread in our home we eat indian dishes 60% of the time, korean 35% and other 5% of the time. should we just not bother with wine?

well, excuuuuuuuuse me. and if you'd ever seen me in vegas you'd know i can go plenty broke in 3 days.

probably a different story in colorado. as for failure--i wasn't anticipating my final, inevitable failure but the failures even the winner will go through before hitting on the winning recipe--unless everyone has a secret asparagus recipe already in their back-pocket.

amrish puri would be good, but i think we might want to cast people who actually look like they eat. how about shammi kapoor and anupam kher? especially since we need the bad father to seem good for some time. and of course the villain will need a good catchphrase. how about if he literally fries his enemies and says something "wah desi ghee, tera jawab nahin!". okay, that was pretty lame--and inconsistent since he's supposed to be a multinational crook transferring indian traditional knowledge to evil corporations. how about instead, "basmati toh theek hai, lekin texmati toh chic hai"? this after killing people with his ostentatiously american made guns--and he could wear a 10 gallon hat too. yes, shammi kapoor would be perfect for this.

Oh, mongo, you mean to tell me you've never heard of that early 1980's cult sci-fi classic "Time Bandits"? My suggestion was a play on the title of the movie itself. heheheh, a product of my childhood.... Time Bandits Don't say I didn't warn you. heheheh Soba oh i know about "time bandits"--i know more about the pythons, collectively and individually, than i should--i was commenting only that the idea of a bombay time-travel movie has also already been (very badly) done.

couldn't we do this contest with a less expensive vegetable? these would be some very expensive failures.

as for the granularity of bengali food the distinctions i am aware of are the east-bengal/west-bengal distinctions on the one hand (these would be regional-cultural); these are each doubtless themselves sliced further in terms of religion and caste. there are probably distinctions on a number of different axes but i am not aware of any formal taxonomy. then there's the whole question of bangladeshi food, which despite being in the territory of former east-bengal is not coterminous with the east-bengali food of west-bengal. once again your best bet would be the long-absconding v.gautam.

the point isn't really to achieve consensus (as you point out, impossible to achieve) but to have a discussion about what people find hot and to get a sense of the range of different expressions different cuisines find in different places.

slightly chewy, somewhere between smooth and granular, and with just a hint of sourness. what's almost more important is the quality of the sambhar and coconut chutney. but what do i know? i'm only a know-it-all bengali and the first idli i ever ate was at a small "restaurant" improbably called madras cafe, right outside the camp gates of air-force station adampur (a few miles from jalandhar)--even more improbable was the presence a few doors away of something called kerala cafe. of course they had the same menu as the madras cafe. (this was in the mid 70s.)

the analogy with a composer or a writer isn't exact because verdi didn't have to re-write "aida" every night; nor did manjit bawa have to paint the same thing over and over again (though critics of his work might wonder). a chef's work is more performative--dance might be a more appropriate art-form to compare it to. i am reminded of an anecdote about the rolling stones going to a club in new york to take in the early tony williams lifetime (this was on the "let it bleed" tour if i recall my apocryphal material correctly): a reporter or someone surprised to see them there asked watts what he thought of williams' so very different style and approach. watts replied to the effect that: "it is nothing i want to play but i like to go hear it sometimes". now if anyone wants to say that charlie watts is a boring drummer or that tony willliams was overly experimental, they'll have to go through me.

i doubt it highly--though i'll be interested to read your report. from all accounts zaika doesn't indianize the idea of fine-dining--merely serves indian food in a standard fine-dining context. if any indians showed up with their kids and let them loose, or if the adults start laughing loudly or something at jokes they don't know they shouldn't tell in fine restaurants, they might even get called "uncivilized" or something. then again i haven't been there.

which would you say are the top 10 italian restaurants in the u.s?

i'm cutting and pasting my response from the other thread in here since it is relevant: (by the way, i figured out why i used "goanese"--i've been re-reading "english, august" for professional reasons and chatterjee describes agastya's deceased mother as having been "goanese" instead of "goan". blame him, not me.) (edit to add: monica, do you think you might move the other relevant posts from the tea thread to this one?) --------------- i don't mean to answer for vikram--i'm not that foolhardy--but the sense in which i took his comment is the sense in which food in our home growing up (and in my wife and mine now) is "fused across traditions". my father was in the air-force and we lived all over india and everywhere we lived we had friends from all over india--both locals and other displaced airforce officers. thus after a certain time a lunch time meal cooked by my mother included certain classically bengali dishes along with dishes she'd learnt from people from other places, and also dishes from other places that got significant bengali accents. this kind of thing is not usually considered fusion since when we think about "fusion" we mostly think about "east-west" fusion. thus even that strip of konkan coast may normally comprise fairly discrete food-practices that are being made to speak to each other at swati, let alone the more radical mixing that can happen in the armed forces or other regularly displaced context in india. in our home here in colorado, this has taken on another dimension with my non-regional regional cooking meeting my wife's very excellent take on her own korean culinary tradition. thus our meal last night was punjabi style rajma, bengali alu-gobi, a take on a goanese pomfret dish, alongside korean panchan like kim-chi, toasted sea-weed and cold-spinach with garlic and sesame. mongo

touche mabelline--actually most of the really-well-done steak crowd i'm thinking of hailed from big cities in the midwest.

ah--but if you get the opportunity to eat at valentino's in santa monica you should not pass it up. i don't know how much involvement he still has with the kitchen but it serves excellent, excellent food--perhaps the best upscale italian i've eaten in the u.s--and on par with some of the fine meals i ate on my trip to italy 5 years ago (don't ask me for names--i wasn't an egulleter then and didn't bother remembering details). haven't eaten at any of his other restaurants though. what would "modern italian cuisine" be anyway--regardless of whose thigh it sprang from?

ah, so you can't get a table to yourself? unless there's enough people in your party to fill your table are you pretty likely to have someone seated with you?

the analogy fails: a home cook may not be able to cook the same dishes she gets at a restaurant. however, she can buy the exact same bottle from a store that she could at a restaurant.

was just looking at selvaggio's site. i've had the privilege of eating at valentino's--but is he really "the father of modern italian cuisine"? obviously there is a whole lot of vanity involved in such sites but is this a tenable claim?

here are the criteria: 1. $100 is the total (before tax) that will be spent 2. purchases must cover important varietals and wine-producing regions 3. the point of the purchase is to identify individual wines which later purchases can get into in greater depth 4. the wine will mostly be drunk on its own--the food cooked in this home is largely korean and indian (not the kind you get in restaurants in the u.s) scenario 1: 8 bottles (avg. price would be $12 but the range should be both over and under) scenario 2: 6 bottles (avg. price $16.50) scenario 3: 10 bottles (avg. price $10) and, oh yes, this is for a wine shopper in the u.s. thanks in advance! mongo

nor apparently that one has had "fresh" fish. by the way, bux, was this a typo: "but we should promote the misuse of food terms on eGullet" ?

that is not bad at all! i'm signing up for the next one. do i just call them to get on the mailing list?

how much?

as i think i may have said on other threads in this forum in the past i have friends who are hardcore beer snobs who swear by bud. everything in its place they say. maybe this is a residue of their college days, i don't know. i personally like heavier, tastier beers but when i'm stuck i will always go for a bud over its peer group in the u.s. i even prefer bud to rolling rock.

day old bud through 40 feet of 8 year old lines. mmmmmmm. Nah, the serving setup for this in the dome (I didn't drink any, but I am a beer guy by trade and check this stuff out like restaurant guys check out stoves and salamanders) was being served out of draft boxes and the lines are all of two feet long and the Dome require them to be cleaned once a week (which is a real pain in the ass, frankly, as I used to have to do it for Abita because the delivery guys couldn't do it because it took too much time out of their day. The Dome is very big and cleaning 6 draft boxes took a couple of hours because of all of the walking. It did give me the opportunity to take advantage and go enjoy a debris po boy at Mother's if I timed the cleaning job right ). speaking of abita, mayhaw man, can you do something about getting some of it here to colorado?