mongo_jones

jschyun, the reason i put korean food up there in my top 5 (in one of the earliest posts on this thread) is partly because on average it has a lot of dishes that are spicy (if not all that spicy--unlike say bengali which on average has dishes that are mild to sweet), and partly because the korean dishes that can get spicy can get really spicy (yook-gae-jiang, for instance); plus as you note koreans are among the people who eat raw green chillies for fun--my mother-in-law almost killed me with one of these on a family picnic; she kept telling me to eat one 'cos they weren't really spicy chillies, but wouldn't you know i got the one monstrous one on the plate; all the koreans present thought i was being a baby till she took a bite from it as well and had steam come out of her ears; i still think she was sending me a message. plus my wife cooks fairly spicy--then again she's taken to using my chilli powder. mongo

so, if i understand correctly if you aren't civilized you aren't in any danger of getting stuffy?

nor getting their steak anything close to rare

Do you guys remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer finds that the mafia milking rats for the school's milk? They were calling it Malk. SML i had the image of the rats all hooked up to the milking machines as my desk-top picture at work years ago--my fellow-workers petitioned to have it removed.

no, don't go that far for me, since i'm not legally allowed to build one. but others might take you up on it. as for wild animals--we have about 5 deer in our backyard at all times. i'm wondering what it'll take, once we have our grill, to get one of them to dress and marinate itself and hop on.

now all you need is an ice-cream truck don't let this guy drive it though: http://www.dailyrotten.com/articles/archive/127594.html

i'm opening a book to see how long it will be before someone posts all offended at the thought of your feeding wild creatures. anyone want to put any money down? your brick-pit looks cool though. here in colorado i don't think we're allowed such things--technically where we are we aren't even supposed to have charcoal grills (though judging by the aromas that blow by not everyone follows the letter of the law). as such our first grill is probably going to be a low-end gas-grill. but in any event can you say a little more about what it takes to build one of these or to modify one as you did--i'm guessing you have the knowhow to build one from scratch even if this one hadn't been there.

or it might be the water. or the wheat. or maybe the french bakers sneer at their dough in a way they never teach their american acolytes.

the funny thing about this whole story is the very strong possibility that we've all been had for some time now. i wonder how many professional sushi snobs, i mean gourmets have been eating super-frozen fish for years while holding forth on the obvious differences between fresh fish and any kind of refrigerated fish. if you think about it that way there really is a lot more at stake here than whether the fish is in fact safe for us or not, or whether this represents more misguided food paranoia. what next, those old-school japanese sushi chefs are actually from bhutan? and go to a special sushi-finishing school to learn how to yell in japanese at customers as they enter and leave restaurants? edited to fix typo

i once left an opened bottle of bud out for a day. it was horrible. i take it this isn't what they're talking about.

anyone eaten there yet? the denver post had a brief thing on it yesterday--apparently owned and co-chef'd by some recent millionaire who sold a food-based webservice to compaq for $307 million...in cash (!); the other chef is some guy who used to work with jamie oliver. not sure what the owner's chef credentials are. anyone?

clearly "sex and the city" has even more to answer for than i'd thought.

i'm just commenting on the definition of "appropriate behavior at a fine restaurant" as it appears to me from the posts in this thread. it wouldn't surprise me, based on some of the posts here, if activity much further down the middle of the continuum you describe would also be unacceptable to some people. i think in general children in the u.s are far more "disciplined" in the active sense than they are in most places in the world--there is an ideology of "young adultness"--"leave alone at a fine restaurant, kids shouldn't even run around at chuck-e-cheese's"--whatever happened to just being a kid? more adults should consider having a childhood again. (or maybe they should just read "the pickwick papers" more often--as great a novel about childhood and food as there is.) this aristocratic ideology of fine dining would also benefit from a revolution or two. is that because of the difference in money or something else? if you had a really fancy indian restaurant in new york or london--say suvir saran's amma taken up a few more levels--and they maintained an indian cultural attitude to the question of children (in india children are almost universally indulged and it is rare to find adults who will take umbrage at their behavior anywhere) would you say it wouldn't deserve 3 or 4 stars? in other words, is your definition of fine-dining predicated on it being a quiet zone? a place for only muted, stately celebrations? if so, restaurants should specify that--not turn on the ice and raised eye-brows if guests play by different rules.

'Goanese' is much worse than writing 'Parsee', and it's significantly worse than saying 'Keralan' instead of Malayali (or Keralite). At the wrong moment, it's a fighting word. The correct term (which I've also seen you use) is Goan. I know an entertaining old fellow, who when referred to as 'Goanese' in public always used to respond "Go an' ease yourself!" Kindly refrain. i can't believe i wrote that--all this keralese and not keralese must have gone to my brain. see, the things you describe would be examples of "forced" fusion to me--which is not to say that someone might not be able to do it well or interestingly. but we aren't stuffing hilsa with kimchi or cooking bulgogi in mustard oil (in those senses we're both very traditional--hilsa is never insulted by being stuffed with anything)--how these things fuse on our table is by simply being eaten together. some korean dishes and some bengali dishes go very well together. in india, for the most part, punjabis eat punjabi food and bengalis eat bengali food--there are very few contexts in which people encounter food from other regions (outside of the mughlai which is of no region) and even fewer in which the food of different regions mix on the same table or plate in a harmonious manner. and the kind of thing i was describing as my particular airforce food heritage is not an officers-colony tea-party mish-mash either. i'm suggesting instead a cross-pollination and adoption of different regional styles and foods due to a juxtaposition that is still fairly rare in indian society--though with the new corporate jobs people are moving away from comfort zones more frequently than before. as a result of eating in so many south indian homes my family both loves sambhar (my mother served it in place of mushoor dal with bengali dishes) and has come to use certain ingredients (like curry leaves) in otherwise bengali dishes. this sort of very indian fusion is much more interesting to me than french trained chefs tarting their dishes up with a little dash of roasted cumin or garam masala. as vikram has noted in an earlier thread (i think) this is a fairly contemporary phenomenon--and is something that perhaps is likelier to be driven by restaurants than home kitchens (which are usually more regionally fixed).

in an indian restaurant that is perfectly appropriate behavior. It's not appropriate behavior if that Indian restaurant is in the United States. It's called child endangerment. And on either continent, passing out is a symptom of alcohol poisoning.

well, yes. i take the point that there is a genre distinction between "fine dining" restaurants and "casual" restaurants which moves along the axes of behavior etc. as well as food and price, but jesus you people make it sound like fine dining restaurants should have funereal atmospheres--with hushed conversations--and that only people who've read the manual should be allowed in. if i want to celebrate a special occasion by spending many hundreds of dollars in a fine french restaurant (which luckily for most of you folks i don't ever seem to want to do) i would like to have the opportunity there to tell and be told a few jokes, appropriate responses to which wouldn't be prim titters but loud guffaws. perhaps fine restaurants should just provide some diners with noise-cancelling headphones? mongo

in an indian restaurant that is perfectly appropriate behavior. if you go to restaurants--even 5-star ones-- in india you'll see what a (to my mind refreshing) different atttitude to the experience of fine dining (and the presence of children etc.) most indians have: restaurants are noisy and raucous, kids literally run wild and no one really cares or objects. and yeah i was given lots of nips of beer when i was a kid--explains a lot probably.

hey, this isn't a jackie chan movie!

bhelpuri, 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

now, now, plently of mid-range and lower restaurants in north india add red food coloring like it is always holi in their kitchen. but in the u.s it has taken on the added burden of signifying spicy. it is a simulation become real. as vikram says cooks who can't get by on taste jazz it up with color--enough time goes by and the color becomes "real" and every tandoori chicken has to be red. and jason, technically tandoori chicken is just chicken cooked in a tandoor. while that reddish chicken has monopolized its every day definition it has no fixed claim to it.

as someone who's up at all hours and online at all hours i have to say i really get a kick out of seeing the european and indian shifts come online starting about 10 p.m to midnight my time. the web is a wonderful thing.

a very intriguing read--and, in my opinion a fitting presentation of the man. form and content are the same thing--some are just more comfortable with that idea than others. i'd be very interested in hearing more from adria on his relationship with asian cuisine--my antennae quiver in all kinds of contradictory ways from the few things i've read from/about him on the subject. his comment about traditional food now becoming the preserve of the professional kitchen also resonated with me, even though it is a very western-european statement at the moment (and mothers and grandmothers in italy etc. may still disagree). of course, in india this is a long way away from becoming reality but the move has begun. in this sense, adria emerges as a traditionalist--trying to preserve the old while still making it new. which is the way people who don't have impulses towards museumization or fetishization work. someone send me a lot of money, a translator and a plane ticket for spain. edit to add: i also really like his comment about picasso; too much of the picasso myth rests on suppressing what picasso himself suppressed: his debt to african folk art (which imperialism was sending back to the metropolitan centers). adria's acknowledgement of this in his favorite artist signals to me a recognition of the freighted contexts of global interaction--and sets up his interest in asian cuisines in a particular way.

monica, i agree with pan--very moving and good luck to you as you follow your dreams. but you do know, right, that india also has people who do lots of things other than medicine, law and corporate finance, right? and they haven't all devastated their families :-) there's even some food-writers and chefs there. mongo

you know what's hot? the stuff they eat on mars--that shit is crazy hot. and they don't even have water there.

but hopefully not to fresno