Foodie Rants

Sky Ice, Brooklyn NY

2011-08-15T20:47:00.009-04:00

There is something beautiful about reading newspapers. These days the only places I seem to read newspapers (not on a screen) are when I am on a plane. There is something about that moment of being asked if one wants a newspaper that marks the inauguration of an international flight. I never seem to get asked if I want newspapers when I fly domestically, hence this association. This May, on my way to Bangalore, I was offered a newspaper by the grumpy Delta attendant. Stating my preference for the New York Times, I was given the last copy and instructed to share it with the lady behind me. I desperately needed the paper, the physical newspaper, to separate me from the passenger seated next to me who had begun to establish herself as an over-sharer even before we left CVG. But lost in the folds of the pages of the newspaper that took up every last inch of space in my cramped coach seat seemed like a good place to be while flying over the Atlantic.

I love newspapers for the same reason I love library stacks. And bookstores. I love the serendipitous encounters with knowledge to be exhilarating. I spend so much time seeking out particular knowledges that it is so nice to happen on stories as one does in a newspaper. I also have a peculiar habit of reading from back to front (it feels easier for a south paw like myself to do that) so I usually read the dining and style sections attentively and am skimming the "news" section. So this is how I found out about Sky Ice. I was reading backwards and drawn to the food section where my eyes (and perhaps anticipation of horrendous food aboard Delta) drew me to the customary description of cool treats that usually appear in magazines, newspapers, blogs etc in May. My eye was drawn to a short paragraph about a place in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood that served mixed vegetable ice cream:

"Along with black sesame-seaweed, Thai coffee, coconut and the ubiquitous caramel sea salt, at Sky Ice in Park Slope, Brooklyn, there is even a mixed vegetable flavor and sorbets that include mangosteen and durian. The Chujit family, from Chiang Mai, Thailand, makes the ice cream and shave ice in this shop and cafe, and whips up curries, salads, crepes and desserts."

Nothing much more to go on, just an unlikely pairing that was deemed delicious. Since I couldn't tear the page out of the paper ( I had to SHARE the paper), I forgot about Sky Ice somewhere during the 18 hours of my trip. The subsequent weeks didn't remind me of Sky Ice either, and it was only when planning a trip to Brooklyn, for a friend's wedding that I remembered mixed vegetable ice cream.

Fast forward a few weeks to early August, and M and I decided (or rather I decided and dragged M along) to Sky Ice. I had feared long lines and interminable waiting, but pleasantly surprised to be among the first to arrive when the restaurant opened for business. The menu has two sides--savory and sweet--and has minimal description. Telling indeed, is the fact that the website lists the SWEET side first. (See here if you don't believe me!) And here.

And obviously, all with good reason. The SWEET side is absolutely amazing. In advance of going I had studied the menu and decided I would only eat sweets. And while I am a fan of other foods masquerading as other foods--candy shaped like sushi for example--I was wholly unprepared for the awesome of the kinds of innovation at Sky Ice.

Among the things I ordered were the mixed vegetable ice cream and the sushi platter. The sushi platter, was one such Baudrillardian food--one thing simulating another--that masterfully reinvented sushi to be all carbs and all deliciousness.
Fruit was placed inside of fresh spring roll wrappers, sliced to resemble sushi, served on sushi plates alongside a green tea sauce to mimic wasabi and a chocolate sauce to take the place of soy sauce. And all this for only $6.50!

Some of the most lauded restaurants such as WD-50 which I would visit later that night, are known for their playfulness with food. One of the items on their tasting menu was "everything bagel, smoked salmon threads, crispy cream cheese"--the bagel was made of ice cream and tasted like a bagel. It was truly wondrous. But at $12.00 it pretty much had to be. Plus, the waitress at Sky Ice was super nice while WD-40's choice was wait-staff started the tasting menu with an amuse bouche of snooty sarcasm. Still the food was so delicious, I forgive the idiot waiter for explaining to me what shiso was and defining a pilsner for M. But back to Sky Ice. This is a place that got only a paragraph in the New York Times within a larger article about ice cream in the city. WD-50 will get so much more press, and deservedly so, but it is a pity that one associates culinary innovation with celebrity in most cases. Apart from the beautiful presentation, the home made ice cream was delicious and original.

The reason I went to Sky Ice--mixed vegetable ice cream--was super yummy and worth every bit of the $3.00 I paid for one scoop. That day was a culinary life list kind of day. I had wanted to try WD-50 for ages and can cross that off my imaginary list of things to do, but inadvertently, my list stayed as long that day. Because I had to add a new item to that list. Eating ice cream at Sky Ice.

And to think that I would never have found out about this culinary wondrousness had it not been for taking refuge in a newspaper. Somewhere between Cincinnati and Paris, I tried to lose myself in prose. On the corner of Fifth Ave and a street name I don't remember in Brooklyn, I found poetry on a plate.

Pinoy Klasik, West Chester Ohio

2011-07-23T20:26:00.008-04:00

The face of Asian America is changing. I don't mean that in some trite way but in a way that signals to the ways in which food powerfully reshapes our landscapes. In the Cincinnati area, the heart of 'flyover' country, one scarcely expects to see lots of brown folks, let alone spaces with good brown people food. But if one looks, one can find culinary gems of all kinds. One such place is Pinoy Klasik, a small place in an unmarked storefront in a relatively nondescript suburb of Cincinnati.

I went there with some friends today and immediately fell in love with the food, the owner and the ethos of the store. For those familiar with Filipino food, all of the usual specials were there--chicken adobo, fried fish, calderata etc. Food is served cafeteria style on simple plates, heaped high with rice and generous portions of (in my case) two dishes of my choice. My friends ordered the same with different dishes to complement the rice. And to go along with it, of course, what else, but kalamansi juice!

The food was so wonderful and during our late lunch we turned to the topic of why food, with such complex flavors, is so often described as simple, or better yet as my pal Lisa put it, "rustic". What is it about incredibly complex stews with multiple ingredients, cooked at the right temperature for precise amounts of time and in the correct order that lends it the label of simple food? Apart from the obviously classed dimensions of this kind of statement, it also has a racialized tint--it is poor people of color who make rustic and simple food; we leave the complex stuff to the French (this comes from Jason, not me!).

Pinoy Klasik's food was robust in flavor, filling and just delicious. It was made even better by the wonderful ambiance in the store. People at neighboring tables were incredibly kind to us--one lady insisted we share some of her dessert, and others reminded us to friend the store on Facebook. But the owner also came over and brought us dessert, free of charge. To call any of this simple is, frankly, an oversimplification.

But what I liked best about Pinoy Klasik, and to get back to the idea I began this piece with, is the way in which it imagines life for Filipinos in southwestern Ohio. In addition to the simple set of cafeteria style food, there is a section for groceries and a desk from which to send remittances to the Philippines. The Balikbayan boxes as they are known, line the walls of the store, waiting for the owner to take them to send to the Philippines. Under one roof then, Pinoy Klasik serves an important function within the Filipino American Ohio community. It is a place to be fed, but also to feed nostalgia and to feed loved ones in the Philippines. One comes to such a space for a sense of community, but also for the convivial conversations, friendly faces and to be in a space where Tagalog is the language to speak. What I love is that this is a space that welcomes outsiders but also seriously takes on an important role in the diaspora. It is a place for Filipinos in a largely un Filipino city to find home or to make it easier to connect with home. In a sense, it is a different kind of Asian American subject who is interpellated by this store--it is not the one insistent on claiming America alone (though the store's location in a non-descript strip mall, next to a McDonalds' is a certain kind of Americanness) but one that recognizes and sustains the transnational affiliations that under gird lives of so many Asian Americans today.

I'm always felt more at home with other Filipinos than South Asians, so for me, this place was the first step in making me feel at home in my new city. I've yet to find an Indian restaurant I like but I feel at home in this little restaurant. Besides, they get pan de coco on Mondays, so I have to go back! And I also did promise the owner I'd return for their halo halo.

Karavalli, Bangalore India

2011-02-18T12:48:00.007-05:00

It has been a long time since I've written about restaurants and that really is not a good thing. I've had so many good eating adventures in the last few years and just neglected to blog about them. This post itself is long overdue. I ate at Karavalli in early June, 2010, and it has taken me until February to write about it. That is a bit FAIL.

I stumbled on Karavalli quite by accident and had it not been for some winning smiles, I may have missed my opportunity altogether. I arrived there with my friend Eric who had come to visit me in Bangalore for the day (from Delhi) the day before I left for the States. I had a day and a half to spare and it was really wonderful to get a chance to see an old friend in a new setting, far away from the staid lives of our former selves. Eric was only in town for a few hours so I wanted to avoid Bangalore's nightmarish traffic and stick close to the area I was staying while getting to eat something delicious that would brace me for the trip back to Ohio, and the 24 hour period of airplane and airport food.

My family is from Mangalore (or rather my mother is!) and I was hoping to try and introduce Eric to some good South Indian food that wasn't just idlis and sambar. Karavalli sells itself as a Mangalorean space. From its website, Karavalli is "inspired by a traditional Mangalorean house, featuring a wooden ceiling, furniture, antique seafarers maps, and a variety of antiques from times of the French and English occupation of India. For alfresco dining, the restaurant offers an open-air courtyard, a verandah and, garden." Make no mistake, Karavalli is also part of that famous group of hotels, The Taj, so there's some serious upscaling of the regional-rural experience at play in their culinary homage to this once sleepy town on the coast of Karnataka.

When we arrived, it was late even by Indian lunch standards: 2:45, a mere 15 minutes shy of their closing time. The restaurant very kindly accommodated us, but asked that we dine outdoors on the patio (Okay, easy enough--see pic above to see why this was not an imposition) and also that we order our food all in one go so that the chef could go on break (also perfectly reasonable!). Unfortunately, I don't recall the names of everything we ate, but I do remember the tastes, a wonderful array of complementary tastes--sweet, sour, hot, salty.

I do remember that we ordered veal which was probably beef, mostly because we were both delighted with the idea of beef in India. There were a range of other local specialties including a perfectly spiced rasam served in tiny little glasses covered in copper, fluffy appam and a wonderful spicy pineapple curry and an allepey fish curry. The rasam that we had is pictured to the left.

Though a far cry from the usual ways in which I've encountered banana leafs--usually at weddings or celebrations, rows of banana leaves arranged on the floor as we sit and eat food. At Karavalli, they maintain the tradition of the banana leaf but it is sanitized to the level that would not offend the foreign palate or sensibility. All of this was served on a banana leaf shaped copper plate on top of which a banana leaf had been placed. It was all very lovely, and the upscale version of food served on a banana leaf was so completely endearing, especially since the food itself was delicious. Banana leaves are such a wonderful template upon which to create culinary masterpieces, both because the striking green makes a visually appealing backdrop but also because the flavors of the banana leaf meld into the food, imparting just the gentlest hint of that raw banana flavor. It is also a wonderfully sustainable alternative--the only kind of plate that I know about that is biodegradable.

In the last few years, I've had a chance to explore India more on my terms. I love what my parents and family have showed me, but there is something limiting about that, and I've enjoyed getting to be host to my friends who have been kind enough to visit me while I've been in India and even more so to hosting M and getting to see India in a new way. I don't discount that I get a better experience and am treated better when I am traveling with white Americans, but when it comes to food, I'm so happy to get good food, I don't always pay enough attention to the classed implications of these racial hierarchies that allow me to enter and enjoy these spaces. I mean, I do, but there is a part of me that enjoys this a little too much.

Unlike in the US, India has a strong tradition of having good restaurants in hotels, at least in the places I've been. Karavalli is no exception and quite possibly one of the most thoughtful and innovative restaurants serving Mangalorean and Malabar coast food that I've had the pleasure to consume.

I like. . . cream donuts

2011-02-17T13:59:00.003-05:00

When I was in the 2nd grade in Moresby, my school had an assembly every week. Each week a class would do a performance of some kind--a play, songs, poetry etc. When it was time for 2J (my class with Mrs Crawford) to perform, one segment of our show included reciting poems that are sort of like haikus, but not really. They followed a rhythm of 2, 3, 3, 3. Each "poem" began with the line, "I like" and we would each list things we liked, as long as they fell into the correct syllabic rhythm. Ever the food obsessed, my poem (and perhaps one of the only poems I've ever written) was as follows:

I like--
cream dough-nuts
fresh but-ter
and hot toast

Accompanying this was the annoying sound of our clapping to keep the beat. I remember telling my mother about the poem and she was like, "Why, why must everything be about food?" Not exact words, but general sentiment. Truthfully I hated cream doughnuts that they sold at school in the tuck shop. I did not especially care for toast and having had fresh butter on dosas in India, I actually hated it. Clearly this was the assignment I phoned it in for, and maybe that is why I remember it so vividly.

Now the donuts that I really like were the ones with chocolate frosting. This might just be nostalgia and memory but only months before I had tasted what was probably my first donut. It was at Sydney's Taronga Zoo and was a chocolate glazed concoction with hundreds and thousands sprinkled on it (that would be sprinkles for my North American friends).That had become the benchmark for donuts for me at the age of (insert single digit number here). In PNG, donuts were not easy to come by and so when I was on my baking kick, I taught myself to make donuts.

I was never a big fan of the cream doughnuts at school, but I liked my donuts. When I moved to the US, I was enamored by all the donut places. When I moved to Massachusetts, I was amazed by the ubiquity of donuts. Now in Ohio, I see Krispy Kremes and think about going in; only once did we go, and of course the red sign was on. Tim Hortons persuades me less. But still, there is something about the donut that still feels like a treat to me. But they always feel so unredeemingly unhealthy. There is nothing really healthy in any way about the donut.

So imagine my delight when I found a recipe in Veganomicon for jelly donut CUPCAKES. This seemed like a gift from somewhere to imagine a healthy (okay only sort of) alternative to the evil donut. I made a batch yesterday and they turned out pretty good. Here is the recipe with my modifications:

Jelly Donut Cupcakes

1 cup milk (soy, rice, dairy---whichever you prefer)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 tbsps cornstarch
1 1/2 cups all purpose (plain) flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp fresh grated nutmeg.
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar
2 tsp good vanilla extract
raspberry jam, strawberry jam

Preheat oven to 350F. Pour milk, vinegar and cornstarch into a cup and set aside.
Mix dry ingredients together and make a well for wet ingredients.
Make sure the milk mixture is well combined and add to flour along with oil, sugar and vanilla. Stir only till well combined. Do not overbeat!
Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full of batter. Place heaping tsp of jam on center of each cupcake. The jam will sink in, you don't need to press it in.
Bake 21-23 mins until tops are firm. The jam inside will make a toothpick test useless.
Cool and then store someplace cool and dry uncovered. if you can wait up to 24 hours or overnight that will dry the cake out and make it a little more donut like. Sprinkle with confectioners sugar and voila--you have jelly cupcake donuts!

Little India Article

2010-04-21T06:43:00.002-04:00

An article I wrote for the Indian American publication, Little India, has just been published. Check it out!

An Ode to Ramen

2009-11-10T14:49:00.018-05:00

A few weeks after I started my job at MU, a student of mine who occasionally reads this blog asked to interview me about food. I was happy to oblige but still remain a little embarrassed that the best response I could give her was about how college students should not shun ramen noodles.. I'm still a little embarrassed that this is what people will know me for, assuming they paid attention. But there is another part of me that must stand up in defense of this humble, misunderstood and oft-maligned noodle. I grew up eating ramen. I ate ramen before I knew it was ramen. I ate it when all I knew was that it was called Maggi Instant Noodles. I ate it because there was an awesome spokesperson for the product in Malaysia called the Mammee Monster.

The Mammee monster was blue. Like the cookie monster. My other favorite monster. What is not to love about a product associated with a blue furry monster? It stands to reason that if you love cookies because you love the Cookie Monster, you will also love ramen for similar reasons.

But what I especially love about ramen was that it was flavorful. It was always a base upon which to build a dish not an end in and of itself. M sometimes eats ramen and he microwaves it in gobs of water. It seems so nasty that way. No wonder ramen has such a maligned reputation when prepared the way my beloved gringo husband does. The way I learned to prepare it was so much more (excuse the hyperbolic moment) sublime.

Eating ramen was almost a daily ritual for me. I would come home from school and my mom would always make me a snack-meal. The meals would vary from corn on the cob to cheese toast to bread pizza and then during my starvation phase, homemade coleslaw or salad. But ramen was always good. And I would never eat it plain. I would mix the flavor packets, which usually included flavoring plus chili powder plus a packet of sesame oil and then add extra chili sauce for good measure. When I would go to my friend Sharmila's house, we would fry up onions with mustard seeds and add the cooked noodles and mix in cheese. It was so versatile. Associated as it is with longing for my childhood/ adolescence, I can't fully separate the nostalgia out of this memory. But taste is 90% nostalgia and 10% flavor anyway, right?

When I first came to the US, I was appalled that they sold food in places like CVS and Walgreens. Even more surprised that ramen came in gringo flavors like 'roasted chicken.' And I was even more surprised that people did not know that there was a world of ramen out there and that no self-respecting Asian would eat just plain ramen. I mean, seriously. Look at the packaging and compare with the packaging from the Asian brands?The American ramen packets so BORING.

So now I've turned my love for ramen into something of an obsession. I don't eat it every day, or even every week. But after I teach, and come home for lunch, it still feels right to cook up some kimchee ramen and add a boiled egg for good measure. But my taste for ramen has actually taken me into the cultural representation of this humble noodle and has lead me to a few predictable places. The first is the classic film by Japanese director, Juzo Itami, Tampopo.. Tampopo, simply put is one of the smartest and most brilliant food films out there. It takes a very simple premise--what is a single mom who is the owner of a failing noodle shop to do--and makes ramen the star ingredient. One of my very favorite scenes in this movie full of sensual, sexual, repugnant and suggestive food scenes is one where a character explains how to eat ramen. When I watched it a few years ago, I immediately ran to the closest Japanese restaurant to partake in the ramen noodle soup they sold. Tampopo takes food seriously, and it also takes the craft of making ramen seriously.

It is fascinating to me that a food associated with speed and efficiency in the US is actually a labor intensive cuisine. Ramen is incredibly difficult to make from scratch and both Tampopo and the Oishinbo manga, Ramen and Gyoza, take this seriously.

In Ramen and Gyoza we learn numerous ways in which ramen titillates and its a remarkably smart and beautiful paean to this noodle.

So following my interest in ramen, I was delighted to come across a film, The Ramen Girl, . I watched it on Netflix instant viewing and from the beginning it just did not satisfy. First of all, it is a film that can best be described as Tampopo meets Lost in Translation. Since I did not like Lost in Translation it did not bode well that this film was about gringa alone in Tokyo who tries to find herself. The culture-clash narrative is trite and all of the humor comes from seeing how the Japanese sensei and the young Americaine can't communicate. Eventually of course, they become friends and she earns his respect and opens up her own noodlery in NYC, in the shadows of the Empire State Building. (Technically, the 34th street area south of Herald Square has more Korean eateries, not chi-chi ramen shops, but I’ll not quibble over that particular detail). What astounds me in the film is that ramen is all about her. She wants to learn how to make ramen because it makes her happy one evening. She is interested in becoming the perfect student, replicating her sensei's art. The reason the sensei teaches her is ostensibly because he has an estranged relationship with his son and wants her to take his place. Perhaps I'm just a cantankerous curmudgeon but details matter to me. Once Brittany Murphy learns how to perfect the art of ramen-making, she up and leaves for the US. Is this carrying on her sensei's legacy or has she merely appropriated another form of Asianness? Her restaurant is even called "The Ramen Girl" suggesting a kind of ownership that seems at odds with the film's supposed espousal of a cross-cultural ethos predicated on mutuality and respect. Just look at the stupid DVD cover of the film. Its as if ramen can't be interesting unless you can locate the white American girl dead in the center of the narrative, in this case the bowl of ramen.

But more than anything, I didn't love this film because the character has no 'authentic' relationship to ramen. She goes to the ramen shop to feel better. She wants to fill a void. She never enjoys the luxuriating flavors of the dish after her first time sampling the noodles. It could be ramen, but it could also be any other labor intensive culinary item.
Herein lies the difference. Ramen here, is merely the conceit to speak about cross-cultural exchanges whereas in Itami's film, ramen is the ingredient that drives the narrative forward. It is the star ingredient and is robust, multi-textured and complex.

I did enjoy the film, I won't lie. But its not as engaging as Tampopo. But even after all these years (I've been eating ramen for almost 30 years now), its still amazing to me that ramen can be such a powerful basis upon which to build narratives. In these films, ramen is that base and for me, my narratives were more culinary. But there was always a different story to tell, and with some good luck, there'll always be more stories to tell with ramen as the star ingredient.

Side note: After posting this, I noticed that said-student mentioned at beginning of this posting has also written about this film on her blog. Check it out!

Mango Ice Cream

2009-10-24T10:17:00.018-04:00

I've recently starting experimenting with ice cream flavors using the ice cream maker that my friends Kirk and Brenda gave me for my wedding. For anyone who loves ice cream, an ice cream maker is well worth the investment! For anyone who likes flavors that get rendered as 'exotic' but are just everyday flavors for us (I'm thinking mango, lychee, pineapple), an ice cream maker is a good choice, because lets face it, los gringos don't get the nuance or luxurious qualities of the tastes native to India, Southeast Asia etc. Even when I read about this recipe, it presented mango and lemon grass as trendy ingredients. I wish I had known they were trendy when I was growing up. I just thought they were 'normal.' Speaking of this construction of xotic and non-exotic, there is a cool ice cream shop in Chinatown NYC called The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. The menu is divided into exotic and regular. On the regular menu are things like red bean, mango, durian, lychee--you get the idea. On the exotic are vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. I love the way the shop deconstructs the language of exotic vs non-exotic:

But back to mangoes. Anytime I buy mango ice cream in the US, its either too sweet or not sweet enough. Don't even get me started on how sad it makes me feel to cut into those red and green skinned mangoes only to have to confront some kind of pale yellowy whiteness. No, its really more simple. You need to get your mangoes from an Indian grocery store AND you need to use the canned mango pulp. Canned mangoes may seem a counter-intuitive choice, but the canned mango pulp which uses Alphonso mangoes is so divine and rich, the flavors of which cannot be found in your run-of-the-mill Kroger or Stop n' Shop mango. Don't be all fake gourmand and say, "I can't use canned food"--you're just going to have an inferior result.

So in honor of the divine mango, I made a mango ice cream. I modified a recipe from epicurious.com and reproduce it here for you.

Mango Ice Cream

1 cup milk (2% works fine)
1 cup cream
2 tsps lemongrass paste
1 cup mango pulp
1/2 cup sugar
3 egg yolks

1. Combine milk, lemongrass and cream over low heat for about 5 mins. Do not allow to boil, just bring to a low simmer and remove from heat. Cool for 30 mins to allow lemongrass to steep, then strain the lemongrass out of the milk-cream infusion.

2. Combine yolks and sugar with a whisk until yellow, thick and creamy. Slowly mix into the cream mixture over a low heat. Stir over medium heat until custard thickens enough to leave path on back of spoon when finger is drawn across, about 5 minutes (do not boil). Cool custard 30 minutes.

3. Add mango pulp. Cool mixture for at least 2 hours. Pour mixture into your ice cream maker and proceed according to manufacturer's directions. Then place into container with lid and freeze until ready.

Diwali, or Why I'm a Skeptic of All the Celebranding

2009-10-23T12:20:00.003-04:00

Last week was the Hindu festival, Diwali, a date that in my 16 years in the US has largely been unremarkable, unnoticed, and uneventful. There are no firecrackers, no diyas lit in the houses around the neighborhood, no new clothes, and certainly no indulgent consumption of mithai and delicious eating. I always feel a twinge of sadness that I am not part of a larger Indian community. Driving past a gurudwara on Saturday, I felt a sadness in seeing the revelry of people with sparklers celebrating. It is not that I live in some impossibly white space with no brown people; it is just that I don’t have a large family here and without that connection, I’m less connected to a desi community. So usually, Diwali comes and goes. I’ll allow myself the indulgence of not turning the lights off for a day, but mostly, its business as usual. No new clothes. No mithai. Certainly no one besides my parents calling to wish me a happy Diwali.

This year was a little different. All over Face book people were wishing each other a happy Diwali. The secularists were chanting, “Diwali Mubarak”—it seemed that everyone with an advanced degree knew what Diwali was and were happily spreading good luck and cheer. Certainly, this legibility did not come from nowhere. When the first president of the United States that so many of us love (self included) spreads a Diwali message of good cheer, accurately exhorting all to enjoy mithai (sweets) its hard not to enter into this feel-good multiculturalism when Indians (I should say Hindus, by and large) are suddenly on the map in a very obvious way.

Having consumed my share of “Haterade” (a wonderful new term introduced to my lexicon by my friend Julie) I was one of the few who could not jump on the “Diwali is us” celebration. I certainly could not jump on the “Obama is so gracious and awesome because he recognizes our holiday” bandwagon, mostly because I think it’s a tad disingenuous to celebrate brown Indians in America, while ordering secret drone attacks on brown desis in Pakistan. I’ve just finished writing a book, which will be soon released, in which I express my discomfort with multiculturalism that is about sharing food and other innocuous aspects of culture. To me, this Diwali legibility is another version of the “Indo Chic” that made India cool and legible in the 1990s. Suddenly all the sartorial and cosmetic choices of Indian women that had long been mocked—those dots on the forehead, those funny outfits—were cool because Madonna, and later Gwen Stefani said so. I can’t help but feel this love of Diwali is a version of the same cultural logic whereby our new icon of cosmopolitanism recognizes Diwali and so everyone follows suit. It can’t be too long before it starts getting marketed as Hanukkah has been for Jewish communities. I can’t wait for the Hallmark card to hit shelves. It feels to me a little like when ethnic communities ‘get’ their own Barbie—is it good to be recognized, or is it problematic to be recognized within the framework of an always already fixed idea of multiculturalism?

Part of me is happy not to have to explain what Diwali is—“it’s the festival of lights, it celebrates when Rama returned with Sita having conquered Ravana. Its just like Christmas for Hindus.” And part of me is like, really? We’re celebrating this festival that celebrates Ram? The same dude who rejected his wife because she had been defiled by a man who tried to rape her? Really? We’re celebrating the return to ascendancy of the royal family? But like all good secular multiculturalists, I ignore the mytho-religious dimensions and say, its celebrated by all faiths (even though I don’t know if this is true).

My own celebration was a little quieter. M and I went to “Cuisine of India,” one of my favorite Indian restaurants in Columbus and enjoyed their buffet. I loved the quiet of it, and I loved the beautiful arrangement of mithai. gajjar halwa, burfi, rock sugar, jalebi, boondi ladoo, pyaasa and other delectables that skip my mind. We did listen to the Obama message, but we also watched Ohio State get clobbered by Purdue in football. To me it was also important to tell Michael why I wanted to call it “Deepavali.” See, I’m South Indian and we don’t’ say “Diwali”. In fact, in Malaysia, where I was born, and where there is a robust but maltreated Indian diaspora, they also say Deepavali. It’s a legacy of the influence of Tamil culture. I was more interested in using the day as an opportunity to think about the persistent hegemony of the Hindi language. See, even with inclusions, we create new orthodoxies, new exclusions.

Celebrations in our family are a little quieter than in most. We don’t do much in terms of observing holidays but last Saturday we used it as an opportunity to spend some time together, support a local business and learn a little more about each other. And hopefully, with the passing of another Deepavali comes the occasion to think a little more about how we can think of Indians outside of a framework of lights, sweets and revelrous excess.

Parsley, Or Perejil

2009-10-22T13:48:00.005-04:00

Parsley, in many ways is the most mundane of herbs, the most maligned, the most inconsequential. When I was growing up, parsley was always curly parsley, the kind of herb that looked unforgivably artificial, lodged unattractively on pieces of unidentifiable fruit in the little plastic bowls on in-flight dining. I didn’t think people actually ate parsley. It looked like astro turf for heavens sake. It would be years before I discovered that I would love the subtle flavors of parsley, combined with lemon juice to make tabouleh. It would be even longer until I discovered the flat-leaf version of parsley that would impart a delicate flavor to sauces. For years, after moving to the United States, parsley to this Indian girl, was always a trick. It was the green herb that sat unobtrusively next to cilantro, which, if in a rush, would accidentally end up in my supermarket cart, only to prove itself unpliable when I would turn to my lentils hoping to add cilantro. Saffron may be the queen of spices, but to Indians, cilantro is the everyday paesano, the necessary ingredient to render delicious eating. I can still remember the frustration of seeing parsley when I need cilantro. Madhur Jaffrey may have called it “Chinese parsley” in the 1960s but there’s nothing I can do with parsley in Indian dishes. Now that M cooks with me, I send him to buy herbs and worry that he’ll come back with parsley instead of cilantro, that he’ll bring back curly leaf parsley instead of flat leaf Italian parsley. And I think, how silly to think a little herb that doesn’t smell the way I need it to, can mess up my dish. And then I think about a poem by Rita Dove called “Parsley” and I think how tragic and fascinating that this one little herb, which can cause minor devastation in my kitchen, could be connected to so much blood, violence and hatred.

I am teaching Rita Dove’s poem “Parsley” in class as a bridge between two Dominican American texts. In the text I have just taught, no one can speak about the horror of Trujillo and the Parsley Massacre. It falls to a little girl, the littlest in her family, to refer to her Haitian nanny as a “real Haitian too and that’s why she couldn’t say certain words like the word for parsley” (218). Otherwise, this text so uncritical in its nostalgia for a nation-state still stained red by the blood of Haitian cane workers, remains silent on this history. It is Rita Dove who says:

“He will
order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word”

General Trujillo, knowing that Haitians could not say “perejil”, but would say “pelejil,” turned this innocuous herb into something that would devastate an entire people. For the sake of this word, which Dove rightly labels, “beautiful” so many would die. While I would joke in my head that it was never a matter of life or death if M confused cilantro and parsley, I think of the tragic lack of justice that in fact, it was a matter of life and death for so many, too many, who could not navigate the word parsley on their tongue. What felt like a foreign taste that refused to roll off my palate was a word that intractably refused to roll of the tongues of an entire people, even as they knew it was a matter of getting to live.

I love this poem for so many reasons. It takes a simple word, a simple herb that adds flavor to any dish, and considers the potential it had to devastate. This beautiful poem that refuses to be just a villanelle, just a sestina, makes parsley larger than life, more immense even than I can grasp.

I think then of my hatred for parsley. It is so often the wrong ingredient. In the wrong place at the wrong time when it shows up in my kitchen. And I think of how, not too long ago, it too was the wrong word and for all the wrong reasons.

Cooking with M

2009-09-19T14:48:00.004-04:00

I've been married to M now for a little over a year and its taken about that much time for us to start spending time in the kitchen. We recently moved from Columbus to Oxford where there are relatively few eating options within 10 minutes. As a result, M and I have been working together more in the kitchen to prepare meals. I still do the vast amount of the cooking, but he pitches in by doing things like clean up, getting things from the refrigerator, sauteeing onions--he's pleasantly surprised me with his willingness to help out and to learn to cook.

Last night we worked together on a recipe that my friend Nila posted to Facebook--her mom's recipe for potatoes. I'd post the recipe, but its not mine to share. But perhaps what I most like about cooking with M is that it is quality time we can spend together on something I love. I've spent months watching football with him, something I never, ever did prior to meeting him. Now I can watch a game by myself and understand what's going on, so is it that far-fetched to believe he might be able to learn how to cook at this stage in life?

Part of my renewed confidence in getting M into the kitchen comes from Julia Child. Julia is "in" again, largely owing to the Nora Ephron film but one thing I appreciate about Julia is that she was 37, only a few years older than I am now, when she started to cook. She of course embarked on much more complicated things but there is something so wonderfully inspired about someone in their mid-30s deciding to shift her focus entirely. But another part of me is sad. We've only just moved to Oxford and we've started a tradition of cooking together--so far we've made risotto, spicy Indian potatoes and then other simple things. And now M is moving back to Columbus and we'll be in a commuting relationship. While I will miss M and K terribly, I will also miss our new traditions of cooking together. I've always loved to cook for people but cooking with people is something new for me. The optimist in me thinks we will have weekends, holidays and those glorious summers which always remind me why I'm glad I wanted to be an academic and not a corporate maven.

I'm thinking that for now, maybe I can retool the way I use this blog so I can share a bit of what I've learned in the kitchen. And for now, the glorious potato dish.

Bodies in Motion

2009-08-05T19:11:00.004-04:00

I've recently finished my book about food and am in a kind of writerly limbo. I haven't done much in the last 9 years besides write about food. Its something that I started in September, 2000 when I moved to Boston, and ever since then I've been working on food in one form or the other--dissertation, articles, conference papers, the occasional syllabus, this blog, and then the book.

I've been trying to think about happiness, food, hunger a lot recently. And I've also been thinking about how annoying it is to realize after book is completed that there are all these GREAT books I could have written about. But anyone who has written a book knows that the last stretch involves some degree of willful blindness in the sense that one cannot pay attention to all the awesome new books out there. Otherwise, the book will asymptote fashion never quite reach a point of completion.

One such book I missed exploring in Culinary Fictions is Mary Anne Monhanraj's Bodies in Motion. It's a really interesting novel and some parts of it include food. I'm pasting some of my analysis of the book below in the hopes that I can get some feedback on ideas and thoughts.

Please don't reproduce ideas from here without my permission. I'm all for remixing but not for plagiarizing.
If you need a citation, you can list it as authored by me on this site.

The burgeoning interest in food studies has meant that a wide corpus of writing about food in diasporic contexts has now emerged within ethnic studies. One such work is Krishnendu Ray’s, Migrant’s Table, a sociological inquiry that maps the foodways of Bengali American households in the United States. Through a series of interviews and thick ethnographic research, Ray establishes the central desires and ideas at stake within the Bengali American culinary imaginary. But implicit in his analysis, as with several inquiries into foodways in the domestic space, is the notion that food preparation within the home is yoked to an unyielding form of heteronormativity. Whether they seek to reinforce or bring their own spin to Bengali home cooking, cooks within the homes are almost always “wives” and “mothers”, such that South Asian diasporic foodways are mapped by an implicit heteronormativity.

But a simple question lurks within the kitchen and spaces of the culinary—to what extent is it the gendered kitchen also a space in which women cook for another and with one another? To what extent is the kitchen always already a homosocial space that allows for articulations of same-sex intimacy to emerge through and against the strictures of regimented kind of heteronormativity? Culinary narratives are particularly rich sites for examining the queer potentialities and the promises of desire precisely because cooking is heavily invested in the ideologies of heteronormativity. Food and kinship are undergirded by a compulsory heterosexuality that has the privilege of being considered the norm within the home. And yet homes are deeply sexualized spaces, even in instances, or particularly in instances when queer identified subjects find the home to be hostile spaces. But, to ask a simple question with far reaching political consequences, what happens when characters use food to forge a queer relationship that works both with and against the regulatory heteronormative logic of the home site? Compelling attempts to grapple with the complexities of this question emerge from a range of cultural forms—film, novels and short stories—in which intimate bonds of queer kinship are established through the act of food preparation within the heterosexually coded home space.

This paper is part of a longer article on queerness and food; I presented the first section at last year’s AAAS, and so this continues and develops my argument about Pratibha Parmar’s film, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, a film that examines how cooking buttresses rather than undermines queer love. In this presentation, I focus on two key moments in the novel Bodies in Motion, by Sri Lankan American author, Mary Anne Mohanraj. In particular I examine two chapters, which refuse a narrative of compulsory heterosexuality within the kitchen. In the first instance, I use the term refuse to signal a rejection in favor of alternative epistemologies; and in the second instance, I use the word refuse to signal a re-fusing of ideology, one that creates a different kind of assemblage to negotiate the heterotopic space of the kitchen. In short, how she queers cooking will be the focus of this paper. This paper is still a work in progress so I welcome any and all critiques/ comments in the spirit of promoting vigorous and thoughtful dialogue.

Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion, a multi-generational novel spanning several decades chronicles the stories of two extended families as they live from Sri Lanka, Britain and the United States. In Mohanraj’s novel, the possibility of inhabiting queerness is enabled by the workings of the culinary. Through a series of interlocking stories spanning the six decades from 1939 to 2002, Mohanraj’s novel weaves the story of two families, the Vallipurams and the Kandiahs. In their search for a place to feel at home in the world, the characters in Mohanraj’s novel continually negotiate the vicissitudes of immigration, war and displacement that vitally impact their everyday lives. From the onset, the heterosexual seams that stitch together the tapestry of this sprawling extended family is carefully unraveled. Through the course of the novel, it becomes clear that marriage rarely acts as a guarantor of unyielding heteronormativity. Instead moments of queerness gently chip away at the edifice of heterosexuality around which the architecture of familial life is built. One such narrative in the novel emerges through the character, Mangai Vallipuram, a woman who remains unmarried into her old age. Like most of the characters in this novel, Mangai’s story occupies little space within the larger narrative; only two distinct vignettes among the twenty that make up the novel are specifically focused on Mangai. Introduced in the chapter titled Seven Cups of Water, her story is completed in the final chapter, “Monsoon Day.” We first encounter her character in 1948 when Mangai is 17 and don’t see her enter the narrative for another 48 years, when she is 65 years old. Spatially, the novel makes an analogous move; whereas Mangai is first introduced in the northern city of Jaffna, the final section takes place in Colombo. From the first chapter where her character is introduced, Mangai is marked as a queer subject. In the early days of Mangai’s brother, Sundar’s marriage, his new wife, Sushila finds herself unfulfilled, affectively and sexually by her husband. Sushila thirsts for intimacy, and ach night after the household goes to sleep, she enters the kitchen in search of water to quench that desire.. Over the week, the exchange of water becomes decidedly more erotically charged, moving from a literal embodiment of thirst to a more figuratively rendered one. Mangai describes the intimacy of sharing water as follows:

I picked up the cup, raise it to my lips. I filled my mouth with water, soaking the dry roof of my parched tongue. I turned to face her, still enclosed in the circle of her arms. I leaned forward, placed my lips on hers, and gave her water. She sucked the water deep down her throat, swallowed, and I felt the motion in my lips., making each mouthful smaller and smaller, each transfer taking longer and longer, until the cup was not just empty, but dry” (30).

Sushila might be able to slake her thirst, but Mangai also feeds her sexual appetite, such that it quickly becomes apparent that these clandestine nightly encounters quickly begin to work through and against the implicit heteronormative logic of the domestic culinary space. When slaking thirst alone is not enough, Mangai resorts to ever more creative ways to engender thirst. Creating a paste of red chili peppers, she applies the fiery substance to Sushila’s body. The burning sensations on Sushila’s body are calmed by careful caresses as water alone is not an effective salve to the incendiary pain. For Mangai, intolerant of spicy food, the swirling of chili paste on her tongue combines intense pain and pleasure. “I wanted to suffer for her,” she explains, articulating the sting of the pain with the pleasure of intimacy. While these encounters are short lived—Sushila is resolutely unwilling to leave her husband for Mangai for fear of social censure—they haunt Mangai through her life. More importantly, they begin to cleave a space to think about the queer potentialities of the kitchen even as Sushila vehemently foreclose the possibility of entering a visible kind of relationship. Important to emphasize about this moment is how it gestures to the ways in which queer consumption cannot be so easily contained. Just as the water spills out of the container, so too does queerness spill into and over the edges of the heteronormative home. While Mangai and Sushila never cross paths again, the strategic placement of this vignette early in the narrative, one of the few centered in the kitchen, is important in terms of gesturing towards the queer intimacies enabled through shared palatal preferences.

In the epilogue to the novel, Mangai’s narrative is reintroduced and the narrative centers on Mangai’s weekly ritual which involves preparing an elaborate meal of rice, fish, leeks, potatoes and eggs, large enough, Mangai notes, “to feed a man four times her size” (275) that only she will consume. Mangai’s meal, the final meal of the novel, the final scene of the novel, is an elaborate act of producing a kind of culinary perfection that is not about creating a network of care in a conventional sense. She is most decidedly not the kind of maternal caretaker who cooks for the heteronormative family, and she is always aware that she is under a form of surveillance from her community. Each week as she prepares meals, she is aware that the neighborhood girls gather around the perimeter of her home, “peer[ing] in through cracks, over windowsills” (268) as she cooks. And yet despite the voyeurism embedded in this act, Mangai is comfortable with this gesture and “waits until they are settled before she begins to cook. It is another part of the unspoken bargain with her neighbors.” (268). As she cooks, the girls look on in delight. But meal preparation is only part of what makes this moment of gastro pornography interesting. As she cooks, Mangai begins to disrobes; as she stirs the potatoes, she undoes the hooks on her sari blouse; while the leeks slow cook in a pan with turmeric and salt, she unwraps the layers of sari. Bit by bit, she prepares the meal, removing articles of clothing along the way, such that when her meal is prepared, she is completely naked in the kitchen, and completely mindful that she is under the watchful gaze of the children the whole time. At no point are the children ever invited to join her meal, but Mangai performs for them nonetheless. But I would suggest that in the solitary gesture of refusing to cook for children, she refuses to become wedded into an ideological system that would deem that women’s labor must resolutely engage in a kind of pedagogy—teaching the next generation of ‘wives’ and cooks to prepare meals for their families. Rather, her pedagogical moves involve inviting a network of girls to contemplate that cooking can be about bodily pleasure and sensual self-affirmation; that cooking is not about becoming good wives to future husband; that cooking can be about pleasure and communing with the self. In no uncertain terms the text notes, “Mangai could tell the girl that this kind of cooking is not learned by watching, or even by teaching—that it is only the passage of time that grinds the lessons into the muscles and bones. But she cannot be bothered.” (271). In addition to framing cooking as a learned bodily knowledge, the absence of caring about how others feel, the disinterest she so patently feels in feeding others might be understood as part of what her a resiliently queer figure. Consider the closing words of the novel:

When the fish is ready, Mangai turns off the last burner. She takes a plate down from the shelf, battered tin. She fills a tin cup with cold water. She serves herself rice, fish, leeks, potatoes, eggs. There is enough on her plate to feel a man four times her size. She undoes the tie on her underskirt and lets it fall to the floor. Mangai carries the plate and cup over to the wall; she sits down, cross-legged on the dirt floor, with her naked back against the wall, wit the water sliding down, running along her wrinkled skin, over her ribs, pooling in the hollows of her hips. She takes a drink from the cup, and a sharpened edge cuts the corner of her lip. She balances the plate on her bony right knee, and, shuddering with pleasure, she eats (275).

Though there is clear pleasure that she derives from this solitary act of eating, one might consider this a form of disaffection in the terms my esteemed panelist Martin Manalansan proposes. For Manalansan, disaffection is an alternative mode of domesticity; as he puts it, “it is not resplendent in its heteronormative structurations, but is fraught with the intrusions and intersections of contradictory non-maternal feeling, interests and desires that emerge out of the banal repetitive routines of domestic labor.” Mangai resolutely enjoys cooking but she is not interested in cooking for others; in this sense she displays traces of disaffection that inhabit an alternative mode of domesticity. And yet, this space becomes one of female intimacy, not because Mangai necessarily wishes it to be so. As Mangai puts it, there are no boys outside, only girls. That is one of the rules, strictly enforced, by the parents, not by Mangai. Only girls outside, to see what they will become in time. . .she brings her neighbors more pleasure as present scandal than she ever could as past expulsion. It is at times like this that they have an excuse to tell her story again…It will give them something to talk about for days….In a way, it’s almost a gift she gives them. Perhaps they know it, but she does not do it for them.” (272).

Read in this way, it becomes apparent that Mangai is not a figure to pity, or even to celebrate for triumphing over adversity. Rather than viewing her as a failed subject who falls out of narratives of normative couple hood, I would suggest that she is a queer figure whose everyday demeanor embodies a kind of resilience . Her cooking which as she puts it is about “sustain[ing] her in a normal day” (269) positions her as a subject who has managed to overcome various kinds of violence, both as a result of her position as an ethnic Tamil and as a queer woman. While neither vignette discloses what happens to Mangai in full detail, we learn that during the intervening years, she was shot during the civil war and that the neighbors, scandalized by the “woman who had lived with her servant Daya , for decades, in a house with only one bed. A woman they had insulted, behind her back, and to her face” (273) left her for dead bleeding out on the floor of her home while they looked the other way. In this way, it becomes uncertain whether her crime is of being of the wrong ethnicity or for not being in a conventionally normative relationship. Indeed, there is a re-fusing of what violence looks like—the censure against the ethnicized body becomes linked to homophobic violence. In either case, she is that queer figure, an assemblage, whose very presence disturbs the community in which she lives. She refuses to allow the failure of entering into coupledom to exile her from the kitchen. Though she may not be a conventional figure, preparing food within the home space to reproduce a kind of culinary nationalism, she does not stop cooking. Indeed, she almost takes an intense pleasure in cooking only for herself, thus embodying a kind of culinary resilience. According to literary scholar Madelyn Detloff, the concept of resilience stands in opposition to resistance as a mode of engaging trauma. As she notes, “resilient writing differs from redemptive writing in its refusal to make loss into a metaphor for something else. It diverges from the ‘unspeakable’ hypothesis by recognizing the attempts of survivors to invent, if necessary, new methods of recognizing and communication sugaring, without suggesting that those methods are always and only symptom’s of trauma’s inescapable hold. Another way to describe resilient writing would be to suggest that it respects the dynamic relationships between the particularity of suffering and the temporality of living, of continuing on after, even in the midst of, suffering. Resilience then might be seen as a complex adaptation to traumatic circumstances—but an adaptation that does not “get over” or transcend the past as redemptive narratives imply. Rater, the past, like the ‘patch’ becomes part of the continuously emerging present.”

Braiding together these two moments in the novel, it becomes clear that Mangai’s affective landscape negotiates between a sense of disaffection and resilience. Disaffection, because her work is about a kind of queer pleasure that does not simply seek to reproduce culinary subjects in the next generation and resilience because she is not interested in being redeemed through her cooking, but because she continues to live, even after she negotiates the difficulties of everyday living in a homophobic and xenophobic context. Mohanraj’s novel thus resituates the figure of the cooks within the home, so that her pedagogical imperative is not always about being a are almost always “wife” or “mother” or for that matter a partner in a coupled situation. In remapping the contours of South Asian foodways, Mohanraj allows for other topographies, not circumscribed by an implicit heteronormativity. Food becomes an index of a kind of queer resilience in this novel, then, precisely because it is through and against the act of preparing meals that Mangai, amid this narrative of a sprawling family, gets to have the last word in the novel.

Another White Food Network Star

2009-08-03T10:10:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago M asked me why I don't watch the Food Network more. Its a channel I used to watch with some regularity about 10 years ago. But that was when Ming Tsai was on. Padma Lakshmi had a bad cooking show. Iron Chef was the actual Japanese version of the show. In short, it was a place where I could go to see a little bit of culinary diversity from around America and from around the world. In recent years I've stopped watching it as much mostly because I'm not interested in seeing cooking shows that are about making food through short cuts all the time. I also do not need to feel like the only people who can teach people how to cook are white ladies. There are a few people of color, here and there, but by and large, the hosts on the Food Network are white ladies and few of them are as quirky and interesting as Nigella Lawson.

I started watching The Next Food Network Star a few weeks ago, and it seemed to have a little promise to me--there was Jamika, the African American, Debbie the Korean American and Jeffrey, who had a really interesting idea for a show. All in all, I was kind of hopeful that there might be some potential to see a bit more diversity. Surely among these potentials, the Food Network would jump at the chance to do its bit for multiculturalism and have a Korean American, or a Lebanese American or an African American woman host a show? Its not exactly like that market is saturated.

But once I started watching Melissa D'Arabian talk, I knew she was going to win. The whitest contestant, the most cliche and obvious and boring contestant--not because she has no culinary training but because she is a stay-at-home mom with 4 children (4? Who has 4 children anymore?) who then purports to claim that this demographic is some kind of blighted minority. She actually presented herself as someone who could speak to and for a supposedly ignored group, and meanwhile, I'm thinking, really? moms are ignored on the Food Network? Really? There are no products that are designed for moms? Really? No one addresses YOUR needs? But her rhetoric is so powerful because it seems in a knee-jerk fashion that someone like Melissa D'Arabian is in the minority, when in reality she emblematizes everything about mainstream America. She is the person to whom everything in the food world, or at least on super-market shelves, is marketed.

I'm reminded here of what Anthony Bourdain says about Rachael Ray:

Complain all you want. It's like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can't cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She's selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She's a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that "Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!" Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, "Hell...I could do that. I ain't gonna...but I could--if I wanted! Now where's my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?" Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. "You're doing just fine. You don't even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing...Just sit there. Have another Triscuit..Sleep...sleep..

Melissa D'Arabian certainly seems to be able to cook, but like RR, she also seems to want to smugly reassure us that we need to bring middle America back to the center of the world, except that it is already there. Honestly, I can't fault Melissa--she's a shrewd business-woman who knows what will sell. She knows that America can only tolerate diversity in bits and pieces and that they'd rather have a recipe for chicken cooked in lemon, ver 34.0 than try cooking with something else, say harissa.

I wasn't that big of a fan of Jeffrey, but I loved the concept of using a different ingredient and cooking with that. There's really nothing like that on Food Network, and it would perhaps open our minds up to more ingredients and possibilities (sure, there are definitely other issues that might surface with that approach) but apparently we needed another show hosted by Sara Moulton look-alike who will tell us how to prepare dinner using recipes that we could find on the back of a can of green beans.

I know there are a few people of color who host cooking shows on The Food Network but they are not the stars. Sure, Aaron McCargo was a past winner, but most people don't know who he is or that his show was cancelled. But bean counting should not be the way to go--the logic of "but so and so has a show and is a person of color" is lame. The basic paradigm of white hosts rules and the only way we ever see any diversity is of the culinary adventuring genre in which white men are able to host shows which take them around the world. People of color remain firmly rooted in contexts that are always an elsewhere, never in the studios of the Food Network for any length of time. Ming Tsai may come and go, but Rachael Ray, Giada de Laurentiis, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee remain. And now Melissa D'Arabian can join the ranks of the white ladies of the Food Network.

I'm disappointed again. But disappointment is a familiar feeling when you want to see a little diversity and variety. But on the Food Network, white is right. And once again, the suburban mom can claim to be marginalized and prove just how much cultural power she has in the United States.

Zen Cha, Columbus OHIO

2009-06-29T20:18:00.005-04:00

I've been meaning to blog about Zen Cha for some time now. It became a favorite about a year or so ago, but I some how never got around to blogging about it. Now that my time in Columbus is coming to an end, and I probably won't be able to drive to Zen Cha whenever I fancy, I find myself wanting to reflect about it here. For those of you who know me as a caustic and often embittered foodieranter, I think you'll be disappointed here. I'm shamelessly in love with Zen Cha and not being able to go there after I move to Oxford is going to make me feel really sad.

For those of you in Columbus who have not been to Zen Cha, that needs to change! Zen Cha is quite easily one of the best places to get a really good cup of tea, not just in Columbus, or central Ohio, but really anywhere in the US. I've yet to find a place that does tea as effortlessly and with as much integrity as Zen Cha. In the year that I've been going, I've probably sampled every type of tea on their menu, ranging from the coconut chai, hazelnut chai, rose latte, jasmine latte, mango bubble tea, rooibos, almond milk tea, summer fruit tea blend. I've also eaten everything on their menu from the miso ramen, tandoori lettuce wraps, Russian turkey sandwich, spicy tuna rolls, lavender creme brulee, masala chai waffles, Arabian honey waffles with orange, Japanese style savory pancakes. Quite simply, the food is beautifully made and the tea is always brewed to perfection.

But what I especially love about Zen Cha is that it really is a serene space and a place that encourages and supports quiet reflection. When I needed to escape from myself and my impending wedding last summer, I found refuge in Zen Cha. I'm definitely the kind of person who can become incredibly vexed about my writing and thinking space. I can grade almost anywhere but I've rarely wanted, or been able to write in the same spaces where I grade. There is something sacred about writing for me, and at the risk of sounding obnoxious, I am unwilling to combine spaces of writing with places where I might grade. But more often than not, that division of space becomes impossible to sustain because of the practicalities of time etc. But some how Zen Cha seemed to be a space where I could not grade. But, I was able to think and write there. Within the space of the restaurant, I was able to work quietly to put the finishing touches on my manuscript before I sent it off to be reviewed. When I got my copy edits back a few weeks ago, Zen Cha was the only place I wanted to go to complete my review of those edits. And complete them I did--sometimes in 2 hour blocks, but more often, in 4 hour blocks, all the while feeling like I belonged in this space and feeling like the tea was nurturing my mind and soul, allowing me to access the kind of calm and focus I needed to get through that odious process. I'm about to send my copyedits back to the press and I would be lying if I said I did not feel a twinge of sadness that I am leaving Columbus and Zen Cha, and that the book is almost over and I don't have the same excuse to go to Zen Cha. It'll be a while before I am at this stage again of writing a book. And by then, I might have found another place, but it won't be the same, I know...

For this feminist, who loves both Virginia Woolf and Gloria Anzaldua, it has been equally important for me to have a room of my own in which to write AND a room where I can eat and do the things that women of color do. Woolf famously exhorts women to find a room of their own in which to write; Anzaldua suggests instead, "Forget the room of one’s own--write in the kitchen." I like to think that Zen Cha is a space that would have made both Gloria and Virginia happy. Almost everytime I go there, I am in the company of quiet reflection. I see women working, I see women chatting, I see women drinking tea.

I thought about including an acknowledgment in Culinary Fictions to Zen Cha, but I think that's not so necessary. But what I will do, instead, is to offer this humble attempt up for others in the hope that others, like me, might find comfort, quiet and inspiration with a cup of chai in Zen Cha.

Alice's Tea Cup, or Why I'm Glad I Don't Live on the Upper East Side..

2009-06-28T15:23:00.007-04:00

Last week M and I were in NYC for a few days and I managed to convince him to come with me to a place called "Alice's Tea Cup." There are three locations in the city but we opted for the Upper East Side, partly because we were already at the MET. and partly because I'm a glutton for punishment and enjoy being around the superciliousness of the Upper East Side.

Alice's Tea Cup did not disappoint in terms of culinary offerings. It had the potential to be a little too cutesy in its paean to Lewis Carroll's tale but it actually pulled off the idea of tea very well. I liked that the china was not matchy-matchy and I loved the feel of the space. The food itself was amazing. M and I opted for something called the "Mad hatter's Tea", a smattering of buttery-warm scones, nicely made sandwiches and petit fours to end. Of course, everything came with a pot of tea. M and I ordered the pumpkin glaze, chocolate chip and buttermilk scones-yummy, buttery, flaky goodness. The sandwiches we got, the chopped tea-egg salad with watercress and herbed mayonnaise on seven grain and the BLT with Stilton on black bread were beautifully done. The tea was perfectly made, even if they did put honey into chai, which as a Desi I find really suspect. So what about all this wonderful food makes me swear never to return? I mean, what could possibly keep me away from amazing scones, great tea and tasty sandwiches? The annoying diners I might possibly encounter if I were to return to Alice's Tea Cup.

So when we arrived at the restaurant, we were given a nice seat in the window area and immediately it was clear we were a little different than most of the clientele, most of whom were young, twenty-something women who either live the life of Gossip Girls Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf, or wish that they did. When we got to the restaurant, M and I spent a good ten minutes trying not to make eye contact because we could not believe the inane nature of the conversation around us. There was a pair of friends, a brunette and a blond--so very Blair and Serena--who spoke (apparently for the benefit of the entire restaurant) about their plans to travel. Brunette (we'll call her Blair) was explaining how her family was building a house in Buenos Aires and was telling blondie (hereafter, Serena) that she had to go there. After all, it was Blair's favorite city in the world. Then it slowly came out that Blair and Serena are not upper Eastsiders but actually go to graduate school in Georgetown. Both were apparently single and kept discussing how they could not tell if so-and-so was gay: "Is he gay? He dresses so well, and I just get along so well with him!" Fortunately, this conversation had to come to a halt as Serena and Blair had to leave.

We were able to order and eat about 2/3rds of our meal in peace, before Serena and Blair, ver 2.0 showed up. This particular installation promised to speak as loudly and obnoxiously about their vacations, boyfriends and importance of detoxifying so as soon as I could, I had to nip it in the bud. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I mentioned insipid white girls audibly and magically, these girls became less chatty after that. But this was not before I was forced to listen to Serena, ver 2.0 tell Blair ver 2.0 that she admired her so much because she was SO independent. Her exact words, which M recalls, "You're just so fiercely independent! When did you first leave home?" Blair then responds, that yes, she was so independent, she had been flying on her own since she was 15. I tuned out for a little (actually, I had to try to not laugh out loud at how stupid these girls sounded) and then had to make my well-timed obnoxious comment to Michael about insipid white girls. Soon thereafter we left, but what was stunningly apparent is how hard these girls were trying to impress each other and to fit into some narrative about what it means to be an Upper Eastsider.

Now I must admit to being a Gossip Girl fan. I will definitely be checking out the Anna Sui line when it hits Target in September:

But, Gossip Girl, in my humble estimation is a little tongue in cheek. It does seem to tap into the excess of a particular zipcode in NYC but it is also show that seems to engage in a kind of wish-fulfillment: teenagers who wish to live such lives, people who are the same age as the actors (not their characters) who have a kind of 'ersatz nostalgia' for the narrative Gossip Girl produces and then then there are people my age who seem to watch the show for reasons I am still trying to figure out. So back to Alice's Tea Cup--I am a little bemused to see what I read as people trying to insert themselves into a narrative and their apparent need for an audience. This ritual of going to tea at Alice's Tea Cup seemed to be a kind of performance for both sets of Serena- Blair knockoffs, evidenced by the fact that they were very much engaged in a kind of performance that was as much for themselves, for each other and for us in a bizarre way.

In an article titled,"Playing Dress-Up: Digital Fashion and Gamic Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl’s Second Life," Louisa Stein takes a look into an online game called Second Life in which fans can simulate the life of Gossip Girl. She writes:

[GGSL] invites viewers to enter the Gossip Girl world and take on the mantle of an inhabitant of the Upper East Side, where they dress themselves to fit into the elite word of Manhattan private school–goers. Once virtually dressed for the part, players can attend parties, map out the social and geographic landscape, and explore the minute details of the living spaces of their favorite characters.

Second Life is far from the first videogame that fans have used to insert themselves into (or wrest control of)the spaces and narratives of their favorite storyworlds (119).

Stein's article brings attention to the numerous kinds of fan spaces for viewers of Gossip Girl, and admittedly, I am curious whether we might also consider that kind of role-playing to be plausible in other non-virtual spaces. The easy answer is yes, this happens all the time. Certainly, one could also reasonably consider the new Target line of GG inspired fashion, even the reality-show NYC Prep to be manifestations of GG-mania. But I guess the question which interests me is why. Perhaps it is not fair for me to view these civilian restaurant goers who I did not interact with as emulating a kind of GG ethos, but I think its hard not to see the parallels and not to wonder if spaces like Alice's Tea Cup benefit, or suffer from these new narratives into which people which to insert themselves.

Going to restaurants always has an element of performativity to it--we inhabit different roles, different subject positions. We do step through the proverbial looking glass or travel down the rabbit hole to have alternative experiences, but at least for me, this particular convergence of other people's fantasy and my desire to enjoy tea albeit in the kitsch of Alice's Wonderland, makes me feel a little uncomfortable about being in other people's performative spaces. Certainly, this girl is not interested in being at someone else's tea party, especially when I'm made to be a part of someone else's wish fulfillment fantasy where Alice in Wonderland meets Gossip Girl.

References:

Stein, Louisa Ellen. "Playing Dress-Up: Digital Fashion and Gamic Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl’s Second Life" Cinema Journal 48.3 (2009): 116-122.

Masala Kraft, Bombay

2009-04-19T11:29:00.013-04:00

In March, M and I took a short trip to India. It was his first time to India. His first time to Asia. It was my first time to be in the role of host in India. It was my first time in Bombay without my parents. As an avid foodie, there was much I wanted to show my husband about the cuisine I love the most. I wanted him to savor the taste of mangoes. I wanted him to see that bananas come in multiple colors, shapes, tastes and do not have to look like the elongated oversized bright yellow, wooody-textured things that are bananas in the US. I wanted him to try piping hot chai. I wanted him to try fresh lime juice and fresh lime soda. Sugar cane juice. Guavas. Indian style Chinese food. Pizza Hut in India. Chaat. Samosas. Mango Ice Cream. Kulfi. Falooda.Tender coconut water. Cool filtered water on a hot day.The list was endless. Wanting him to share that food was wanting him to see a piece of my soul, a piece of who I am, who I have become.

But in a sense, what I wanted the most for him and for me was to taste street food. years of becoming a bonafide 'foreigner' has weakened my gastric capabilities. I cannot eat pani puri like I used to as a child. I cannot eat street food. But what I can do is to show him that food can enliven a place; it can define a city as it can define a state, a country. Even without his cherished beef, I wanted to show him that India could satisfy and nourish his palate and soul.

In recent years, I have become intrigued by the street-scapes of Mumbai. In particular, I like the various everyday things that can exist nowhere but Mumbai. One of those features of Mumbai life I adore and wanted to include in my book was the dabba-wallas, a veritable institution of that city. Much has been written about the dabbawallas, and there is tons of information on the internet that I don't feel I need to revisit the basics of that here. At least not now. The few days in Bombay did not give Michael the opportunity to see any dabba-wallas in action, which disappointed me. I felt this was something he needed to see and I felt so sad that he could not see that. But in truth all these things he "had" to see were more about me than him. I thought I wanted to see India through M's eyes, but I really wanted him to see India through my eyes.

On the last day we were in Bombay, our last day in India, we were both a little melancholic. I am always sad to leave India and M was also a little sad to be leaving. It was our first extended trip away from home together, without anyone else but ourselves for company, and his longest trip away from the United States. I wanted our last meal to be a good one, and having dined at Morimoto in Mumbai the night before, it was hard to imagine a meal topping that one. For one thing, M finally got to eat some beef and the largest shrimp--prawns is perhaps better--that he had ever had.

We opted to eat at one of the restuarants in the Taj which had recently re-opened, Masala Kraft. I knew little about it other than that one of its specialties was innovative Indian cooking. When we arrived at the restaurant, I could immediately tell from the menu that this would not be a meal to forget easily. For one thing, I got to taste sugarcane juice which I had not been able to get anywhere on this trip. Even though it was absurdly priced at over Rs 1000, I had to have some. I suspect the sugarcane juice I had was the sanitized version for gringos who wanted to try streetfood but were too shit-scared to do so--how quickly I had fallen into that category, huh?

But the item on the menu that really got my attention was the 'tiffin', Mumbai-style. When I asked the waiter for a description, he explained that it would be like a thali but that instead of being presented on a large thali, it would be presented in the form of a tiffin box. Needless to say I was intrigued.

When the dish finally arrived, it was perhaps the most beautifully presented meal I had encountered in an Indian meal. Rather than appearing like the standard stainless steel tiffin dabba, this was a deconstructed tiffin box, with each individual dish assymterically arranged on a holder. The waiter then disassembled the dishes laying them out in front of me. The meal itself was exquisite. The flavors were subtle, the meats were perfectly cooked, the rice was seemingly endless and fresh hot roti was prepared to my liking by a cook in the middle of the restaurant.

To me, the dabba-meal at Masala Kraft was a kind of culinary artistry, the likes of which are rarely seen in the US. Translating the complexity of Bombay streetculture is tough and this type of dish would not 'translate' well to American eaters, save for perhaps some of the more erudite foodies. Or maybe I am wrong? But what is more, the dabba meal fits on a broader canvas of contemporary Indian 'art' that uses the iconic image of the dabbawalla to conjure up a nostalgic vision of Bombay. Artist Bose Krishnmachari's art installation, GHOST TRANSMEMOIR uses this icon to make a larger commentary about Mumbai public culture. Swapna Vora's article describes his installation more eloquently than I am able to. There is also another artist, Krsna Mehta (who never responded to my sycophantic message on Facebook. Harrumph) who uses the image on his pillows to evoke a stylized Bombay. The list can probably go on, but these are artists who use the dabba in a way that pos tribute to the power of this icon to conserve, but also re-member the cultural legacy of this amazing city.

So the meal we had was wonderful, but when I returned to the US I was appalled to find (appalled may be too strong a word) to find that the tiffin box had arrived in the US. Not only does Crate and Barrel have its version of the tiffin box:

but mommies around America are also being sold on the advantages of using the "tiffin-box" to send their kids to school with lunch intact. This new kiddie kitsch version of the tiffin box comes in all kinds of colors and deisgns to satisfy the American desire for 'variety' that just make me feel sad.

I was just reading an article by Sandip Roy today and his sentiments capture how I feel about this transformation of the tiffin box. He writes:

When I first came to America, Americans asked me about that “dot on the forehead.” Now Madonna wears a bindi. Bollywood would borrow Hollywood plotlines (well, two or three for one 3 hour film). Now the Kronos Quartet reinterprets Bollywood composer R.D.Burman. Birthday cards are reproducing old kitschy Indian matchbox covers. Tight body hugging t-shirtsworn by gay boys in the Castro say San Francisco in Devnagari script. There are even Bollywood appreciation classes in American universities. My kitsch has become their cool.

Yes, our kitsch has become their cool. I don't know how I feel about this. Well, maybe I do. I don't like to see Crate and Barrel, the whitest of white spaces use this tiffin box as their clever twist on summer dishware for whitey.

Certainly the icon has traveled and mutated but what I like more about what Krishmachari, Masala Kraft and Mehta do is that they layer the history of this institution with their reinvention of this icon.

I guess what I wanted to show M was a context for all I hold dear. I didn't get to show him a real-live dabbawalla, the real behind my fetish, but I hope that his trip to India has allowed him to add and form layers to what he sees about the pieces of India that now travel to the US so easily.

"Going out for an English": A Take on Humor and "Goodness Gracious Me"

2009-02-10T07:14:00.011-05:00

Those of you who know me are aware that I am hopelessly addicted to Facebook. As an antidote to that, I've decided to take up blogging again. Yesterday I posted a short commentary about an English pub and I realized I didn't fully develop my thinking about that. I've become more and more uncomfortable with viewing Asian subjects as ones from whom culture and ideas is unilaterally appropriated and have thus, become much more interested in the place humor plays in intervening into these types of discourse.

There is clearly a lot of power in humor and satire and within circuits of South Asian diasporic culture, the sketch comedy "Goodness Gracious Me", based in Britain, is an excellent example of how humor can be mobilized to point out the inconsistencies in cultural appropriation etc.

In the skit titled, "Going out for an English". Its been rated one of the top comedy sketch's of all time and deservedly so. I want to share my ideas about this here, but given that I'm writing a book and am worried about things like, oh copyright, and having my ideas taken, I'm going to quote a lengthy section from a rather brilliant reading of this particular sketch written by English media scholar, Ben Highmore:

"Such a scene of bravado, inebriation, trepidation, ignorance and hunger are given a brilliant reverse-image in the British-Asian television comedy show Goodness Gracious Me. In its pilot episode the comedy team staged a reversal of the white enthusiastic aggression towards South Asian food. With a prelude that mimicked 1970s cinema advertising, the sketch started with an invitation to eat at the Mountbatten restaurant in Bombay for ‘‘the authentic taste of England right here in India’’. Once inside the restaurant a raucous group of Indians are getting ready to order. Asking themselves why the come here every Friday one of them replies, ‘‘You go out, get tanked up on lassis and go out for an English. It wouldn’t be Friday night without going for an English.’’ Clearly drunk and patronising towards the waiter (who is called James, but who the customers call Ja¯hme´s) the two conscious men (one man is slumped face down on the table) ask what the ‘‘blandest thing on the menu is’’, the waiter replies that ‘‘the scampi is particularly bland’’. One of the men goes as far as to order scampi with a prawn cocktail on the side, much to the consternation of some of his friends. The women want to order a ‘chicken curry’ but are cajoled into ordering something English, with the compromise being that they can order something that isn’t ‘completely bland’" (385).

The article has much more to it (obviously!) and is really a very thoughtful reading of the psychic dimensions of going out for Indian food and seeking out the most extreme forms of cuisine.

But if you get a chance to view this skit and are able to comment about it here, I'd love to start a conversation about it.

The full citation for the article quoted above is:
Highmore, Ben(2008)'Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism',Journal of Intercultural Studies,29:4,381 — 398

The Pub, Columbus OH

2009-02-09T20:09:00.003-05:00

M recently began to write restaurant and bar reviews for a city-guide website and I've been lucky enough to accompany him on a couple of these visits. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to blog about these places, especially since I seem to have been afflicting by the blah-blogging syndrome. I mean, what else do you call an affliction that prevents you from blogging for over two years?

I was interested in blogging about The Pub, a new English-style pub that has just opened near the Polaris mall in Columbus. The first thing that struck me as I went into the restaurant is how much it plays up the "Cool Britannia" vibe--its certainly trying to show that Englishness is not stodgy and just for old guys looking to eat bland food. Its decidedly working to draw in the hipster crowd and the menu is more "international" than I expected. Two things on the menu (perhaps because I ordered them) stood out--the Jamaican cheesecake and the curry and chips. The food was generally good but isn't it stunning how these food items are now being brought into the fold of Englishness? I know that England has a far more complex of what constitutes English fare than what we think of it in the US. But this is precisely what intrigues me. Does the idea of Indian influence and Jamaican influence make sense to Americans? Do they fully get the idea that "curry" has some complicated connection to India because of colonialism, and do they get that Jamaica was a part of the British empire because of the desire among the English for sugar?

The questions the Pub raised for me are hardly novel--people have been speculating on what it means for curry to be subsumed under British or English for years. Just this weekend, I was reading two very interesting articles about the history of Indian food in Britain and one of the authors, Ben Highmore, also has this wonderful reading of how to think about the fact that a recent British world cup song was called "Vindaloo" or why British pub goers so frequently go out for an Indian.

Part of me is curious about this. Indian food in Britain is seen as post-pub fare, right? It's the kind of food people go to after drinking and there's a lot of masculine bravado about eating in excessive terms--wanting the 'hottest' dish, the most 'spicy' dish. So what does it mean that The Pub in Polaris (and I'm sure countless other places) imagine curry (a British invention anyway) to be part of the culinary offerings in this place that celebrates Englishness in America?

Clearly, multiculturalism is not about whether India and Jamaica can happily coexist with "English" on a menu; it can never be that simple. But at some level it bothers me to see these foods so easily appear on the menu at the Pub like colonialism is the same thing as going on vacation and getting a recipe from some 'ethnic' and then adding it to make one's palate more interesting.

Again, I know I'm not treading new ground here, but I really just want to think through these issues and try to understand why and how an English pub can do well in Columbus given this crappy economy.

An Omnivore's List of Hundred

2008-10-27T19:35:00.003-04:00

I read about this post on Kyla Tompkins blog and thought I'd add it to mine. Being allergic to shellfish, I can never make it to 100 but I'll do my best with the others:)
I'd love to know what governs taste, outside of allergies. I don't think there is anything on here I would not try, at least once except for things which will induce anaphylaxis.

The Omnivore's Hundred
Here’s a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Various cafes, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, Australia

2007-07-11T07:19:00.002-04:00

I've been hosting a guest writer, Sugi Ganeshananthan at my college for the past few days and have been inspired to start blogging again. Sugi blogs for Sepiamutiny
(and I won't even go into how jealous that makes me) and that really
pushed me to think about why I haven't blogged in so long. Certainly it
is a commitment and one that I had to consciously step away from while
I was trying to finish my book manuscript. I've now completed it and
its under review, but I'm really not done with food. I guess I don't
know how to be done with food. Its not the same as other types of
intellectual work where one can work on it for a while and then move
into a different direction and the simplistic and reductive side of me
thinks it is because food is more than intellectual--we don't have the
option of opting out without serious consequences, and, its also
visceral and reminds us of the past even when we don't want to.

I was looking through the backlog of things I have to blog about and
decided to start with blogging about eating in Sydney because, frankly,
food in Sydney makes me happy.

The Sydney I visited in '07 is not the Sydney I remember from the 80s. Sydney is a much more Asian city now and I had no problem finding delicious Malaysian food like
beefrendang and Korean bi bim bap. That simply didn't exist back in the
80s in Australia to the same degree. But for some reason during my week
in Sydney, I kept being drawn back to the Queen Victoria Building--I
must have passed through everyday and for no real good reason, shopping
wise. I did buy a fabulous outfit from Witchery, which a year later, I
have still to wear but that's a digression...

I think what I most loved about the QVB was the abundance of cafes that were in the in-between spaces--tables arranged around the edges of the stairwells, tables in the center of the mall: very different than the food court experience in the US where
food is on the basement or in a separate space from shopping. I was
first drawn to the bakeries and cafes inQVB, honestly, to satisfy cravings for food from my childhood. I was in Australia for 10 days and I had to have a meatpie, sausage roll and a lamington dammit--no two ways about it. While that got me to the point of eating food, what kept me coming back to this space was a curious phenomenon I noticed at 5-6 pm. In Australia, shops close at around 5 or 6 in the
evening, and that's it--everyone goes home or whatever. But what I
noticed after 2 days was that professional women did not go straight
home, nor did they automatically head for the bar to drink their stress
and woes away. They would rush to these cafes and meet other women and
eat cake and coffee: an honest to goodness snack. This might emerge out
of the British tradition of tea and finger sandwiches, but also, it
strikes me as so healthy. Its so healthy to not go from work to the
store but to sit, drink a nice cup of coffee and chat with a friend.
Even though I was mostly alone, save for the days whenPasandi and Jody, friends from PNG came to spend time with me, I found myself returning to these cafes at
5pm just to be around another type of socializing. Its so wonderful to
think of people taking time to eat cake and coffee. I am an academic,
so I don't worry about the 9-5 hustle, but if I did, I think it'd be
amazingly therapeutic to know that the stores are all closed and that
people are slowing down for a bit, and that its okay to have that extra
hour before I have to be home or going grocery shopping. I know I'm
romanticizing a wee bit, but there's something very healthy, sane and
just nice about this life: it refreshed me for the few days of my
vacation before heading back to the States and its the one experience
in the US I crave for in some way or form..

Bharat: Canberra, Australia

2007-07-11T07:18:00.000-04:00

This post is for my "uncle" Desh, aunty "Anil" and Sandeep--none of them are my blood family, but desis will understand the use of the term uncle and aunty.

When last I was in Canberra--some 22 odd years ago--all I remember about it was how wretchedly cold it was. That, and the fact that there were no real Indian restaurants. Even as an 11 year old, I would pore through pages of restaurant guides trying to find the type of food I wanted to eat. Initially, my attention would go to novel cuisines--things my parents would not want to eat--Polish, German, French etc. Then I'd look for the familiar things. Growing up in Papua New Guinea where there were no Indian restaurants, I also had a strong love for Indian restaurant food. So when my family moved to follow my dad on his sabbatical to Canberra, I fully expected to find all manner of Indian food. This was the "West"--a civilized place where one could find tandoori chicken and the rest. But sadly, I was disappointed for there was not an Indian restaurant in sight in the sub-zero inhospitable climate of Canberra. The closes we got was going to a Sri Lankan restaurant between lunch and dinner. There, we chatted to the owner; as a fellow diasporic, he offered up appam and invited us to pay the next time we came back. That--we never did. And I don't know why.

So imagine my surprise and delight, when 22 years later Anil aunty and Desh uncle suggested we go to Bharat for lunch. Bharat? In Canberra? What was this little piece of India in this parochial capital city down under? As I soon found out, Bharat is a unique treasure, well worth the trip. Bharat is an Indian grocery store, the likes of which dominate ethnic neighborhoods in various nodes of the South Asian diaspora. I might well be revealing my own ignorance here, but I've also never really encountered a grocery store with a semi full-fledged eating area. Granted, we're not talking Tabla style decor here--its basic white nondescript furniture. But we are talking amazing food. Arguably, even the best Indian food I've had anywhere. Now maybe that speaks to the poverty of my culinary experiences, but I tend to doubt that narrative. What I loved about Bharat was that it signalled a radical shift in the way the Indian community imagined itself. Here was a space where immigrants and Indian-Australians came to buy spices, but also stopped to eat.In the 1980s, my mother would have given ANYTHING to have access to a place like that. What my mother wanted, in short, was an Indian community.

In her wonderful ethnography of bay area grocery stores, Purnima Mankekar identifies Indian grocery stores as important cultural sites for the production of Indian culture, and where the commodities the stores sell are “deeply enmeshed in the social lives and identities of Indians in the Bay Area.” (211). For Mankekar, the commodities sold in Indian grocery stores are significant, not because they feed immigrant nostalgia for the fabled homeland, but because they enact a form of “polyvocality”—engendering complex emotions amongst its consumers: pleasure, ambivalence and in some cases hostility." (210.) Central to the drama of the grocery store, if one can call it ‘dramatic’ in an everyday sense, are not the foods per se, but the dynamic forms of exchange and community constructed around the commodities within the space of the store.

Thus, what I appreciated about Bharat was that it lent a particular form of polyvocality to the Indian community in Canberra. Too often Indians are invisible, but here was a way that Indians were not only not invisible, but also making it clear that there was a space for articulating home in this cold and soul-less city. Sorry, I still can't love Canberra. So thank you uncle and aunty for taking me to the little piece of India that is in Canberra, and for what might well have been the nicest impromptu birthday celebration I've had in many a year!

ps. "Bharat" in Hindi, means India.
pps. Duh.

Latitude 41, Columbus, OH

2007-06-02T08:55:00.000-04:00

Latitude 41 in downtown Columbus describes itself as a 'destination' restaurant. Such stupider words have never been used to describe a restaurant. What is a destination restaurant? Is it like a vacation? Can you stay there forever? Does it mean that it is the highpoint in culinary dining; once one has arrived at Latitude 41, one will never need another place to go? I highly doubt it.

First up, Latitude 41 thinks it is something it is not. The bread basket, I'll admit, was fabulous. The gazpacho, pretty much rocked my socks. But the entree: I was a sucker and lured by the description of pork tenderloin and pasta with chevre. Little did I know that it was Pork with macaroni and cheese. Why on earth should anyone pay that kind of money for something that comes in a blue and yellow box, even if it has been elevated for les gourmands? Latitude 41, for me, is like the opposite of a good wine; the more and more my experience of going there ages, the more annoyed I get at the fact that I even bothered to go there.

I should have known better than to go to a restaurant inside a hotel. There are so many better options for good eating in Columbus: skip Latitude 41 and save the 41 dollars and go some place less in love with itself that also serves food that is worth spending money on. Anyone who knows me knows I will spend money on food. But this was an insult in so many ways. The only good thing about Latitude 41 is that I got 100 dining points on Opentable.com

The Laughing Seed, Asheville NC

2007-05-11T22:54:00.003-04:00

On the way back from South Carolina I took it upon myself to not repeat the mistake we made on our way down.Stopping at the side of the highway to eat whatever because one didn't have time to look up a place is a grave, grave mistake. Indeed, one can 'eat' at terrible places like Shoneys if one is not careful to plan.

I wanted to stop in Asheville for purely arbitrary reasons; I'm on a idiosyncratic quest to visit all US states and am up to 35 or something like that, and I thought Asheville might be an okay town. Googling places, I landed on Laughing Seed because it was vegetarian, and after a tip away, I always eat too much meat and need to detoxify and vegetarian food always sounds good.

Laughing Seed, to those not from the Asheville area , simply put, rocks. I'm not one for discussing restaurant websites: I'm not promoting the restaurants I eat at, but am interested in thinking what their cuisine offers for a critical culinary sensibility. But I will depart from my convention, and quote the opening to the website which explains what the restaurant name means:

"On the Indonesian island of Bouton there is the legend of the Laughing Seed. This plant was sacred to the people of the Spice Islands for centuries. When the seeds of this plant were consumed, the people were intoxicated with laughter and able to communicate with the gods. It is said that this wondrous food satisfied the appetite and created a sense of fullness and well-being which lasted for many days"

I simply love this notion of laughter, food, community and intoxication. This concept is one that truly works and it also proves that vegetarian food is complex and interesting.

I don't have much else to say; Asheville seems like a pretty awesome little town, and in this day and age of meat, more meat, and more meat, Laughing Seed is an awesome alternative.

I post below just some of the descriptions of food listed on their menu. I'm not trying to promote the food, per se, but trying to make it clear that I for one, appreciate the notion, that vegetarianism is not some random, crunchy-granola weirdness but a thoughtful and inspired way to prepare food.

Check it out:

Reuben:
The classic. Marinated organic three-grain tempeh, sauerkraut, grilled onions and Swiss cheese on organic multi-grain bread, grilled and topped with vegan Russian dressing.

Hempnut Burger:
This hearty burger of hempnuts and millet is a nutritional powerhouse as well as a fantastic veggie burger. Nutty and moist, it’s delicately seasoned, grilled and served on a toasted bun with basil aioli, lettuce, tomato, red onion, grated organic carrots, grated red cabbage, and onion sprouts.

Havana Cuban Sandwich:
Crispy, batter-dipped organic three-grain tempeh, black bean spread, tomatoes, caramelized onions, dill pickles, and spicy mustard, grilled with Gruyere cheese on a fresh torta roll. A new Laughing Seed favorite.

Sloppy Jo:
Our version of an American favorite. Sweet and tangy tofu barbecue served on a whole wheat bun with lettuce, carrots, cabbage, sprouts, and tahini mustard sauce.

Tempecado:
Layers of marinated tempeh, avocado, lettuce, tomatoes, grated carrots, red cabbage

Gullah Cuisine and Magnolia's, Mt Pleasant and Charleston, South Carolina

2007-05-11T22:53:00.001-04:00

I've decided to team up on posting, because honestly, I don't always think of restaurants in isolation, but put them in conversation with other places too. Blame it on my comparatist training if you must. During the weekend M and I spent visiting his mom in South Carolina, two restaurants stand out. The one, perhaps an obvious choice is Magnolia's, a much famed restaurant in downtown Charleston. Gullah Cuisine, in stark contrast, is one of those places that one can so easily overlook if one is not paying attention. In fact, had I not googled for an area restaurant in advance of our trip to visit M's mom in Mt Pleasant, SC, I might never have found out about this treasure. Actually, I think I would have noticed it--it is after all, located next to a Cat Bakery or Cat Clinic which caught my eye.

Magnolia's is everything I'd hoped it would be; it took Southern cuisine and made it into something so delectably unique and richly layered. Brunch there was simply amazing. Salmon on grits with fried green tomatoes is every bit as amazing as it sounds; the flavors work well together, and there is really a lovely blending of flavors that keep the richness of Southern flavor without all the stereotypically requisite fat and lard that leads to that "I've eated a deep fried cow and am suffering the consequences" feeling. Indeed, for me to continue to write about Magnolia's is kind of pointless because it knows its identity and it has the reputation to keep people coming back for more. I am not the type to buy a cookbook after going to a restaurant, but the Magnolia's cookbook was a good investment--at least I hope it will be:)

Gullah Cuisine, on the other hand is non-descript, and not the kind to show up on Opentable.com anytime soon. I, honestly was curious to find a place in our short weekend trip that we could go to which is owned and patronized by African Americans. It just seems egregiously wrong to go to South Carolina and to see only what white Southerners have done.

Unlike Magnolia's, GC does not really 'dress up' its food. Its a simple buffet, although an extensive one, full of Southern yumminess. I've always been a big fan of buffets, but GC takes the cake. I don't know Southern Black food terribly well, but the food at Gullah Cuisine is to die for. It has everything this novice could dream of--fried chicken, collards, dirty rice, okra and rice, sweet tea, banana pudding with vanilla wafers, bread pudding.

Thinking about Gullah Cuisine and Magnolia's makes me think of the difference in South Indian food at places like Udipi Cafe and Dosa. Dosa is fancier, because to some very real extent, it imagines its clientele as a cosmopolitan one that is not exclusively immigrant in origins. Udipi, on the other hand, make no pretensions towards fancier food because immigrants would laugh at chutney drizzled attractively on dosa. Its just not why one would go to Udipi Cafe in the first place.

I can't help but think that Magnolia's is good Black food, but it is for white people who need the luxury of fried green tomatoes without the black people there. GC on the other hand is not quite FUBU cuisine, but it is for the community and those comfortable enough with themselves to eat Black people's food with Black people. It worries me that food, despite being seen as the great equalizer, is still such a charged racial arena. After all, eating corn bread and collard greens, to paraphrase Frank Wu, is not the same as breaking bread with black people.

Why do so many of our cuisines by people of color need to be fused with whiteness to be rendered palatable? I'm not saying Magnolia's food is not amazing, that is not my point at all. But rather, it occurs to me that the same questions I ask about fusion in a South Asian frame also apply to the way we might think of food in other contexts. We're still careful about what we mix and how we mix food. Ive been reading Stanley Fish this week and his notion of boutique multiculturalism is really interesting and relevant here. Fish argues that there are two types of mutliculturalists. The boutique version of multiculturalism is one in which one might enjoy food, fashion etc. while being intolerant of the real differences people inhabit. Fusion cuisine, it seems is boutique multiculturalism par excellence. Its a socially sanctioned way to take what we want, and leave behind the rest. At some level, GC is not providing unmediated access to Black Southerness; there is after all, no such thing as an unmediated access to authenticity. But it is worth considering what is brought to the table, who brings it to the table and how it is presented. These are just some of the questions/ ideas that come to mind as I process my two similar but yet so different culinary experiences in Mt Pleasant and Charleston South Carolina.

Puebla, Mexico

2007-05-11T22:52:00.001-04:00

Disclaimer: since the food in Puebla was uniformly fabulous, I see no reason to go into details about how awesome the food was. Honestly, while eating in the varied places in Puebla, I was charmed by the food and the complexity of flavors, but also could not help but do something quite annoying. While in Mexico, I developed an annoying habit of comparing everything to India. This, I've realized is something Indians do a lot; we see Indianness in everything from the smell of bathrooms, to the sounds on the streets to the placement of trees :)

But what I especially loved about the similarities between Mexico and India, is the notion that you do not charge extra for large groups of people! As a kid, the only times we went out for food was with large groups of people. Often it was two families, sometimes a group of friends, sometimes the whole extended Mannur clan. Whatever the case, food was shared by a large group and restaurants didn't balk at that or complain about what a pain we'd be as a group. I noticed this pattern to also be true in Puebla; large groups (and not just the conference peoples) would be eating together, the way one ought.

on a more serious it about Mexico that made me want to compare it so much to India? I know Octavio Paz has written about it at length; perhaps in my case it is a perverse habit. But I also think the reason so many people think it is amusing is because we're not really aware of the deep connections between the two spaces. For one, the famous China Poblana is fabled to be an Indian lady. Evelyn HuDeHart and Rohni Rustomji have written more about her, but I find the connections to be quite stunning. I don't want to post the article in its entirety here, but here is a link to Evelyn's article.
http://clave.org/lachinapoblana.pdf

But in terms of food, the connections also go back far connecting India and the New World.It would surprise many Indians to learn that cashews, tomatoes, chili peppers and tea are not native to the Indian subcontinent, but were brought to India from South America via Portugal and Spain between the 1500’s and 1800’s as a result of colonial expansion into the “New World.” Given the non-native origins of many “Indian” foods, does it matter then that many intrinsically Indian foods such as maize, chili originate from “elsewhere” ? Does it matter that the actual words used to refer to food items in Indian languages can be etymologically linked with the languages of the colonized and colonizers in the “New World”? Pineapple, known in Hindi, Kannada and other South Asian languages as ‘ananas’ is derived from the Portuguese “ananas”; “tamatar,” the Hindi word for “tomato” comes from the Nahuatl “tomatl”; “caju,” or cashew comes from the Tepic “acaju”; the South Indian “sapota”, and North Indian “chiku” is derived from the Meso American “Chicosapote” and “achar,” the sub-continental referent for pickles bears a similarity to the Carib term for chile peppers (axi or achi).

Given this history of connection between Mexican and Indian food, perhaps it is not so strange I looked for the connections. Maybe it is just a way to more accurately honor our braided histories.

The Magnolia Bakery, New York

2007-04-18T21:57:00.002-04:00

Dude, so if anyone told me at the age of 3o-something I would stand in line to buy a cupcake for 30 minutes, I would have been in some serious surprise. But, yes, among the million things I could have done in NYC, I chose to stand in line at the Magnolia Bakery for 30 minutes to buy a cupcake. The fact that it was the day before Easter Sunday probably led to some of the mad rush for cupcakes, but maybe cupcakes warrant that kind of passion.

What strikes me as interesting about cupcakes is that they've suddenly become a huge thing. Granted, I'm defining 'sudden' rather loosely, to encompass, oh the last 10 years.... But seriously, cupcakes are huge! I had a student in my Food and Culture last year submit the most amazing research paper, organized as a cookbook on the history of cupcakes. That was sheer genius!
There are also entire cookbooks on the ins and outs of cupcakes. Last year, I too fell prey to the allure of the cutesy cupcake by buying the Williams-Sonoma cupcake mould that makes cupcakes which look like ice-cream cones. Of course, the cupcake blog, "All Cupcakes All The Time" is probably the biggest tribute to the love for cupcakes.

But what strikes me as fascinating and disturbing is how cupcakes are so associated with childhood (how many times did I have to learn to make cupcakes in school, or bring cupcakes to school, or buy cupcakes at school) There is something both delightful and deeply disturbing about grown women going ga-ga over little bitty cakes. A little self-infantilizing?

OK, but onto Magnolia, the cupcakes seriously ROCK. M and I bought 4 cupcakes and brought them back with us to our hotel room and like children, we sat on the floor and ate all 4 of these cupcakes, laden with the most delicious frosting ever, in under 10 minutes. I want to say, well cupcakes are just fun, but just because I like cupcakes does not mean the infantilizing factor is not valid. I can't buy the narrative that cupcakes remind us of a happier time etc. Who is that time happier for? While Magnolia may bring all kinds of joy and happiness to cupcake munching persons, I also think of the beautiful Asian American woman who was slaving away behind the scenes of Magnolia making cupcakes. To her, I doubt cupcakes are romantic and sweet; they might be a source of income, but the way she had to work, sweating to death, spreading frosting on cupcakes at break-neck speed certainly reduced the sweetness for me, as it ought. I can't be a self-deluded consumer who thinks cupcakes frost themselves; there is a person who has to individually make these delectables. Even though I did not do more than say hi to her, while we waited for our cupcakes to be boxed, I hope in whatever small way to send her a thank you. Without her sweat and labor, I would not have been able to taste the most delicious cupcakes I have ever had .

Fatty Crab, New York

2007-04-18T21:57:00.001-04:00

Okay, let's get one thing straight. I am the biggest proponent of family-style eating especially when it comes to Asian food. It does not make sense when going out to eat Indonesian, Thai, Chinese or Indian food to order an entire dish and not share it with the table. One of the ways one achieves balance in one's diet is to order a vegetable, some meat, some rice and to share it. Pure and simple--you do not order General Tso's Chicken and eat it all by yourself. Apart from that being about 1000 calories, it is also really gross.

That said, Fatty Crab in the West Village does nothing to further the cause of family style. Don't get me wrong--the food was delicious, but it just didn't work to serve the food family style and then bring the food out whenever the dishes are ready. For family-style to work, well, you have to serve all the food at once!

The highlight of the meal was getting to have two of my distinct worlds collide--I got to introduce M to two of my former students, May and Justin. I do love the name of the restaurant, though, and it really does serve good food. I just can't get beyond my sense of feeling peeved that the place set me back in my eternal argument with M that family-style is perfectly acceptable for restaurant eating. See, he is under the impression that family style is good for home cooking, and not for restaurants. I disagree in such a fundamental way b/c it occurs to me that a way of eating that works in two of the largest nations in the world are excellent things we can export. When you share food, you can actually talk and commune and feel connected. There is a sense that your choices are important because you have to care what the other person can and cannot eat. You learn about others by going to eat out with them because your food tastes affect their palatal options and vice versa. I'll never concede that family style is a bad option. I love to eat out because I love my friends. Food and friends go in logical categories of togetherness--now I just have to convince M that it ain't so bad. Taking him to Fatty Crab was not a good idea so I have to recover. So as advice to anyone trying to 'sell' family-style, make sure it is done properly. It helps all of us in the long run!

Aquavit, New York

2007-04-18T21:55:00.000-04:00

Thanks to opentable, I have now become completely indiscriminating in my choice of restaurants; the more points I can accrue for a single meal, the better. I have found out the hard way that this is not always a wise choice--simply because one can get points for eating at an establishment, does not mean one ought eat there. What one earns in points, one makes up for in other ways.
This, however, was not the case for Aquavit. While I found Aquavit accessible via opentable, I forgot to register through my account. But what I lost in points, I made up for in terms of the most exceptional meal I've had in years. If you'd asked me if I would like a restaurant specializing in Swedish food, I would have said, okay. Honestly, my exposure to Swedish food comes from Ikea. I love the meatballs, lingonberries and mashed potatoes you can get at the Ikea cafe but never thought my horizons would expand beyond this particular framework.

I have to admit, I was intrigued by Aquavit because of Marcus Samuelsson; I love the idea of an Ethiopian adoptee being the person who puts Swedish food on the map for many Americans. I love the idea of a person of color putting an extremely homogeneous country on the map.

But this aside, I have to say, Aquavit is truly transcendentally amazing in its food. I know this sounds cheesy but sometimes cheesiness is the best truth one has, and this is one of those times. It wasn't just that the food was amazing, but that the portions were just right and the price was right. I was also glad that we decided to order Aquavit, the signature beverage. The vodka is distilled a number of times and then infused with amazing flavors--I had something with mango, because well, if it has mango, I have to have it.

I actually ended up ordering Aquavit's version of the Ikea meal, but I love that this fancy place is not above presenting the same food one finds in a particle-board furniture store. Sure, they charge a little more at Aquavit, but they do it well.

My advice--skip the restaurant, and go to the cafe. Its half the price and the food is amazing and worth every penny, even if opentable won't honor my request to retroactively get credit for completing my reservation there :)

Arroz con Pollo, Buckeye Style

2007-01-02T19:09:00.000-05:00

A year ago, I could not have even dreamed of devoting an entire blog posting to football. I will either blame, or credit Michael, who may well be the BIGGEST buckeye fan around, for this new affliction that had me rooting for underdog Boise State to crush OU last night. (My usual thing is to root for the team with the most p.o.c or the underdog..)

But, for now, all eyes on the big game on the 8th. In honor of the event, I have promised M I will partake in festivities only if I can give it my own twist. My suggested mode is to make the favorite dish of one of the minorities on the BUCKEYE side, Anthony Gonzalez. He is of Cuban heritage, and one of his favorite dishes is Arroz Con pollo, "Rice with chicken"--and here is a recipe I found online.

One of Anthony Gonzalez's favorite recipes:

• 10 chicken pieces (I usually use drumsticks and boneless, skinless thighs)
• Garlic powder
• Salt and pepper
• Cumin powder
• 6 cloves garlic -- chopped
• Bouillon cubes
• 3 cups rice
• 8 cups water
• 2 packets of Azafran seasoning packet (Can substitute 1 pinch safffron for 2 tbsp azafran)
• One can petite peas, drained
• One small jar diced pimento
• One can beer
Season the chicken with spices. Fry in extra-virgin olive oil and
garlic until the chicken is almost done (about 25 minutes). Add rice,
water, seasoning packet and bouillon cubes. Let cook until the water
is almost gone and you can see the rice. Add the can of beer.
Cover and let cook on low for about 45 minutes.
Add peas (drained) and pimento on top.

Its Me!

2007-01-02T18:46:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't been blogging for a while--write it off to a seriously busy semester. I'm slowly catching up on my old posts, but for now, I wanted to share an audio clip. I was interviewed to talk about fusion cuisine about 2 years ago by WBAI in NYC, the Pacifica Radio affiliate. Last November, they re-aired the segment, so I'm attaching the link here.

Love to hear thoughts on my debut radio performance.

http://www.asiapacificforum.org/show-detail.php?show_id=49

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Taste of Bali, Columbus

2007-01-02T18:45:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons I absolutely love Columbus is that it has these secret culinary gems (I like to think of them as secret) that one does not expect in "Ohio." Let me rephrase that--it is not that a generic "someone" does not expect, but many who are of the East and West coast persuasion who subscribe to the largely unsubstantiated assertion that the "Midwest"--monolithicaally constructed--is a culinary wasteland. To my detractors who have never encountered the Midwest except for spaces like DTW, MSP, ORD, CIN, CMH (yes, the airport versions of the Midwest, en route to the west and east), I say, "you is dead wrong!"

One thing that surprised me when I returned to the Midwest is how many really awesome restaurants are tucked away in strip malls. That might account for my sense that they are 'secret spaces' but more than that, these places often look nondescript from the outside and are really spaces to get excellent food.

Consider Taste of Bali. I only found out about it because I am a committed dollar movie aficionado (not as much as Michael) and on a trip to the Bethel Road Dollar movie place I noticed Taste of Bali. To me, Indonesian food is one of the most sublime forms of Asian food--mind you, I'm not objective. As a child, born and raised in Malaysia, the tastes of Indonesian food ( also part of Malay food repertoire) are more than familiar to me--they are downright nostalgic.

I'm not uncritical of nostalgia guiding taste, but I know that it is what brings me back to Taste of Bali time and time again. I miss having tastes I took for granted as an 8 year old readily available--things like mee hoon, roti chanai, bee hoon, nasi lemak, nasi goreng, pisang goreng and of course cendol. These are all dishes I weaned my palate on, and they are tastes I thought would be relegated to the realm of distant memory, but now there is a place I can go to feed my nostalgia.

Perhaps this is an oversimplification, but part of what I like about eating Malay food is that it reminds me that I have a complicated history, one that cannot be encompassed by a simple term, Indian-American, with or without the hyphen. Malaysia is a vital part of who I am; its where I was born and in that sense it makes me different than other Indian immigrants and other Indian Americans. India is not my 'motherland' in the same way (although Malaysia is not that either) but in claiming part of Malaysian identity (problematic as it may be to do this through food) I can remind myself that binary identity categories are just that; binary. They do not account for a sense of polyculturalism in the same way as I imagine myself to be.

I realize I've slipped from Indonesian to Malay, but the foods are similar and I feel that rhetorically there is a connection that allows me to feel kinship to Malaysianness via an Indonesian restaurant. The other part of this is that I then spent the next 11 years of my life growing up in Papua New Guinea, a country that shares its only physical border with Irian Jaya, a space (thought much contested) under Indonesia.

So for me, A Taste of Bali is the kind of place that is worth returning to, not just because of fabulous food, but because it helps remind me of who I am and the histories I've left behind to become the person I am today.

Morimoto, Philadelphia

2007-01-02T18:45:00.000-05:00

For some, the only real restaurants are those owned and managed by high profile/ celebrity chefs. Certainly, Morimoto would fit the bill. And who knows: maybe there is something to that notion. While I seriously doubt that there is a food meritocracy in the restaurant world, one cannot deny the absolutely fabulous nature of the food at a place like Morimoto.

I've only recently begun to partake in the wonder that is the tasting menu--prior to now, I've often found it an extravagance of unnecessary proportions to eat that much food. I wanted to do the the tasting menu but found out that my shellfish allergy was too much for the chef toaccommodate, so alas it was not for me. I did, however, get to do the next best thing which was to try the sushi and sashimi platter--all fish of course. In truth, there is little I could say about Morimoto that is not patently obvious; the food is amazing, but it is to be expected.

Instead, some six months later, as I find myself thinking about Morimoto and what I loved about it, I find myself returning to a rather minor episode--eating dessert. I know very little about the types of desserts Morimoto offers, but the item that caught my eye was the mango mille feuille. Dessert aficionados will know that mille feuille literally translates to "thousand sheets" and refers to a type of pastry which is made of puff pastry usually encasing some kind of cream. The version atMorimoto is spectacular, and I ordered it because I had never really had a good mille feuille, and I had not had mille feuille since a colleague told me a fabulous story about mille feuille in India.

As the story goes, the person had grown up in Kashmir eating something he knew as malfi cake. He did not know how to spell it, but why was that important? Malfi cake was something to eat, not spell. For years, he had known this flaky pastry concoction as malfi cake, and it was only upon migrating to the West some years later that he re-encountered this fabled cake of his youth, only to find that it wasn't called malfi cake, but mille feuille; over the years, mille feuille had been translated to Indian ears as malfi cake. And why not? Haven't the Europeans been changing names left, right and center? Kanpur/ Cawnpore; Mumbai/ Bombay; Kannada/ Canara--the list goes on. What is it about a Kashmiri re-rendering of a French sounding dessert that strikes me as a precious, even cute narrative?

I like this story at numerous levels, not least of which is my sense that the malfi/ mille feuille transaction speaks to an interesting way in which European cultures are domesticated when they are fused with other cultural contexts. If we can have mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire sauce, kedgeree and rice pilaf, why notmalfi cake?

So again, my posting has nothing to do with Morimoto, save that his dessert offering leads me to make another kind of cross-cultural connection. I do believe that mille-feuille represents part of the offerings in Morimoto that speak to a tradition of fusion cuisine. And honestly, as I look up the menu and read the exact description of what I ate that night, "mango-shiso mille feuille white chocolate mousse, mango with shiso and black sesame, kataifi," it is palpably evident that Morimoto has made mille-feuille a truly fused dessert in which Japanese tastes blend wonderfully with
this flaky pastry concoction. That it reminds me a story of malfi-cake in Kashmir is just all that much sweeter.

Tabla, NYC

2006-10-22T07:57:00.000-04:00

I don't feel it is appropriate for me to post my entry on Tabla here, but if you are interested, I write about Tabla in an article about Indian fusion cuisine. The essay, titled "Excessively Indian? Navigating the Flavors and Contours of Fusion Cuisine" will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal, The Subcontinental.
Stay posted for more details!!!

Bombay Talkie, New York

2006-10-22T07:54:00.000-04:00

I've been working through some ideas about food and cinephilia,so this posting reveals some of my thinking on this topic. While I've been interested in food and film for a while, it was only when my good friend Dale persuaded me to think about how my work might connect to the idea ofcinephilia that I began to seriously think about what happens in restaurants devoted to particular film styles.

My journey through Hindi film and Indian food begins in Manhattan at Bombay Talkie, an Indian restaurant in Manhattan, located in the increasingly chic neighborhood of Chelsea. As one enters the restaurant, one cannot help but notice the large murals of Hindi film scenes. On the bar level of the restaurant is a large canvas reminiscent of the type of painted film hoardings peculiar to India. At the back of the room is the bar, where mounted on a wall, is a small screen which plays Hindi films from the 1950s-1980s; alongside the screen is the bar menu which sells fusion-style cocktails named for Hindi films. There is the “Umrao Jaan” described as a “cocktail enough to drown any sorrow” made of Bombay gin, lime juice and saffron syrup; the Satyam Shivam Sundaram,a treasured keepsake made of “jasmine tea infused with fresh apple cider, apple pucker, 99 Banana, Bacardi and fresh lime juice garnished with a drunken apple. And my favorite, the chandrasena. Described as India’s Shakespeare and a poetic paean to India, the drink consists of mango puree, pineapple juice and vodka over pineapple granite. Upstairs is the main dining area and the walls, too, are adorned with canvases painted by the Chennai based J.P. Krishna, president of the TamilNadu Artist Association. While Krishna’s name may not be known, his canvases are recognizable to many in the Chennai area, as he is an artist who painted many of the types of film hoardings that were common sights on Indian street corners through to the mid to late 1990s.

For Krishna, the digitization of film hoardings over the last two years has negatively impacted his ability to continue with his art. As noted in the April 16, 2006 issue of the Hindu,, “Elections are now their only season of business.” He has had to look for income to painting election based art. But with the decision to ban wall paintings, election based art has also not proved to be a financially viable option.

This background is essential for understanding the narrative which emerges in Bombay Talkie, for Krishna’s canvases adorn the walls of Bombay Talkie. The canvases, notably, hearken to an earlier era of film,pre-digitization of film hoardings and thus depict non contemporary Hindi films. The likes of Aishwarya Rai are nowhere to be seen; instead the images are iconic scenes from Hindi film such as Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Umrao Jaan. Stylistically, the canvases are rendered to evoke the film hoardings which were ubiquitous in Bombay. Owner of the restaurant, Sunitha Ramiah is quick to note that the restaurant is not a “Bollywood theme spot”: she notes, “the canvases important to the restaurant because they reflect the spirit of the Indian cafes, which use the cinema posters to brighten and add energy. Bollywood billboards are on every street, every street corner in India. They are inextricably linked to Indian life. To omit them would be unthinkable.”

Ramiah’s rejoinder is fascinating for the ways in which it simultaneously acknowledges and disavows Hindi cinema as a possible mode of entry into the restaurant. In its very naming, the restaurant recruits consumers who might flock to a space called Bombay Talkie precisely because of an interest inBollywood cinema. While the name “Bombay Talkie” might call to mind the space of the film talkie, it also calls to mind the Merchant-Ivory 1970 meta-narrative and homage to Bombay cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The canvases in the restaurant, additionally, bear
witness to the narrative of this era of Hindi cinema as do the cocktails named for this earlier era of film. The very logic of namings betray a particularlycinephilic sensibility woven through with a palpable nostalgia for an era of purportedly pre -commercialized Hindi film in the years constructed to be untouched by the taint of globalization. Here, then, the particular version ofcinephilia being enacted in the space of Bombay Talkie bears close resemblance to Paul Willemen’s definition of cinephilia. He notes that cinephilia bears “overtones of necrophilia, of relating to something that is dead, past, but alive in memory. So there’s a kind of necrophilia involved but I don’t mean it negatively.” More than an artistic rendering of Hindi films, Krishna’s canvases conjure up an earlier Bombay of the past, one replete with film hoardings in an era prior to the emergence of multiplexes and the globalization which has ushered in a new type of Hindi film. But in placing these canvases ubiquitously through the restaurant, this art which the artist J.P. Krishna
describes as a dead art, the restaurant resurrects the dead while simultaneously also romanticizing the earlier era of film as free of commercialism in ways that I’ll continue to think through, but for now, this is all this chica can manage:)

Dosa, San Francisco

2006-10-15T00:19:00.001-04:00

Dosa, dosa, dosa! Why does every non-South Indian fetishize dosas, and why do I have an unnatural love-hate relationship with dosas. I wrote about South Indian cuisine when I blogged about Udipi Cafe and now find myself thinking about deeper issues concerning South Indianness than I would have had I not stumbled upon Dosa while walking around SF's Mission area with my friend, the Korean American sociologist, who shall remain nameless because he would reel in horror to know I mentioned him, by name in a blog....

As a kid, I was always annoyed/ ashamed by my South Indianness. I attribute it to a particular inflection of racial shame one experiences at being a minority. It was 'bad' enough being Indian, but to be associated with less cosmopolitan (not true) and less attractive (again not true) than our fellow desis to the North, there was no reward to being South Indian. Simply put, being South Indian was not chic in the same way that Hindi movies, Bollywood, bhangra, garba, tandoori have come to signify a particular Indian-desi cool.

Even though I've long since gotten rid of the 'tude against South Indianness, it still annoys me to hear people make fun of South Indians for being 'dark, ugly, conservative, consumers of peppery-hot food, coffee drinkers, rice eaters and not to forget, universally speakers of Tamil (to say nothing of oh, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam).

But in the past few years, South India has arrived on the map in peculiar and interesting ways. Least interesting to me is the arrival on the scene of Aishwarya Rai, born in Mangalore, my mom's hometown--in Karnataka! "Udipi-style' restaurants have cropped up, but more often than not, these are hole-in-the-wall establishments, and not the upscale places which some Indian restaurants have become.

Dosa, thus completely stunned me when I ran into the super chic restaurant smack in the middle of the fashionable part of the Mission. I wanted to go there but it was a bit early so we walked around a bit--I bought M a copy of The Namesake--and then we returned to Dosa. I always love introducing good friends to good restaurants I love, and even more to flavors and tastes I love. I can think of no one better than a vegetarian to introduce South Indian food. Because, after all, if there is one thing Indians do well, and that South Indians do even better, it is vegetarian food. What made me happy about Dosa was that it actually kept a nice atmosphere without sacrificing taste; granted the menu descriptions are a bit overdone, but I leave that for you to discover:)

But I guess there is a voice that nags at me, asking why we need to dress up our food with fancy plates, drizzled sauces and track lighting to make food desirable? What's wrong with a good old metal thali and chutney in a bowl? I'm sure Dosa will earn the love of the food review folks and maybe even get some exciting label--best "New" Indian, what have you. But at any rate, for now, I've found a place I'll happily return to the next time I'm in SF. And , my Korean American friend, if you're reading, aren't you glad I finally found a place with nice decor and good food?!?!

Chez Panisse, Berkeley

2006-10-15T00:18:00.000-04:00

This is truly disgraceful. I cannot believe that it has been more than 6 months since I have posted to my food blog. But if I am to restart blogging, I can't imagine a better place to begin than with Chez Panisse. Although some eight months later, I no longer remember the specificities of what I ate, I know one thing--Chez Panisse is worth the hype. There are few restaurants that can legitimately claim to do what Chez Panisse does. I did not have the foresight to make reservations months in advance, so I had to make do with the Cafe section since that was all that was open a week in advance. But it was, in so many ways, just as wonderful.

There is something truly wonderful about being able to order off a menu, even though a tasting menu or a fixed price menu is more the thing to do; my friend Susan and I went to CP together, and were able to orchestrate the most wonderful meal. Because the tables at CP are so close together, we also struck up a casual friendship with the lovely couple next to us. More than the individual flavors, I remembered that the man sitting next to me was eating what Susan did and the man sitting next to her had the same thing I did. We followed them through the courses, but at dessert, we split ways and disrupted the lovely chiasmus we had unwittingly created. But I can't help but feel that the back and forthing of banter would have been different had we been part of the tasting menu regime.

On another level, eating at Chez Panisse was the equivalent of shopping at Whole Foods in the sense that one could taste the haricots verts, baby lettuces, the rhubarb, the free range chicken, much in the same way that one can smell the tang of oranges and lemons while in the produce section of WF. With summer around the corner, it makes me all that more aware of how important it is to savor the foods and their organic and authentic tastes. In this day and age of bio-engineered foods, places like Chez Panisse strike me as vital. They remind us, if nothing else, that food has distincitive flavors and that put together carefully, one can create stunning and flavorful dishes by just eating food with a greater degree of organicity and with fewer preservatives.

Twinkies, Oreos and Coconuts

2006-08-27T15:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've posted. I think after the onslaught of travelling and eating in Inja, I'm overloaded with thinking about food for a while. I found this comic strip recently, and decided I must post it. It is by Tak Toshiyama aka Secret Asian Man. The use of the term oreo and twinkie made me think of something I'm working on in the intro of my book, so I'm going to post the comic and a section of my intro here.

Any input/ advice about the use of the term coconut is welcome.

“I was looking for some kind of symbol which would represent the success of Indians abroad, something that would symbolize what they have gone through in their long history. Today, browsing through the New York Times, I came across an advertisement and said 'Eureka, that's what I was looking for'. It's an ad by the New York Times Knowledge Network. It just has a picture of a cluster of coconut trees and below, it says

'New York Times Knowledge Network'. But look at it metaphorically. Indians have gone abroad, have lived in the most challenging environments in the world and they have done well. Indian coconuts have done very well abroad.

Now, what is the coconut famous for? It grows on sandy soil, requires very little water, and requires virtually no maintenance. In other words, send an Indian anywhere, just let them be, with minimum nourishment and watch the tree grow taller and taller until it dominates the landscape. That is what I think the Indian Diaspora is like”—Lalit Mansingh

On December 12, 2003, the current Indian amabassador to the United States, Lalit Mansingh delivered a speech to a crowd of Indian Americans at the annual awards banquet of the weekly news magazine, India Abroad. During the speech, Mansingh spoke in no uncertain terms about the lofty achievements of the Indian diaspora, especially that strand of the diaspora located in the United States. In speaking of the purported resilience of the Indian character, Mansingh suggests the coconut is an apt metaphor for Indians because “it grows on sandy soil, requires very little water, and requires virtually no maintenance” ( ) Here, the coconut stands in for all that rings stereotypic about Indian Americans: the notion that the community is uniformly flourishing, and has made the better of oftentimes hostile environments. Mansingh’s narrative certainly privileges the experiences of upwardly mobile and middle to upper class Indian Americans, ignoring the experiences of those Indian Americans who do not flourish in the United States.

At another level, the use of the term coconut is, at the very least, an intriguing choice. Typically used to reference assimilatory moves among Indian Americans and South Asian Americans, the term “coconut” is more colloquially used to identify individuals who might identify as “white.” Certainly, this term is overdetermined, for at the very least, it suggests that there are more authentic and less authentic ways to be Indian. Looking Indian, being brown on the outside, and having a particular set of tastes and preferences that don’t necessarily correspond to predetermined notions of what it means tobe Indian, may lead to one being labeled a coconut--white on the inside and brown on the outside Indeed, other communities of color, frequently apply culinary metaphors to speak of similar narratives of ethnic betrayal. Within the African American community, the favored term is “oreo”; among East Asian Americans, the terms “banana” and “twinkie” are analogues to the oreo, and for Native Americans, the term “apple” serves a similar function. Woven through each of these metaphors is a narrative of ethnic betrayal: the notion that one might be colored brown, black, yellow or red on the outside, and white on the inside. Mansingh’s speech, surprisingly, seems ignorant of this complex history behind the term coconut: instead he only identifies the coconut in the most positive terms. But Underlying Mansingh’s glib assertions about Indianness is a rather simple truism: the notiton that when it comes to thinking about South Asian bodies, food is never far. Outside of Mansingh’s assertions, much of the positive valorization of Indianness is linked to the growing popularity of Indian food, and the popularity of India-inspired clothing, fashion and commodities within spaces and communities that have become South Asian diasporic sites. Despite the fact that the . Discursively, the terms by which we imagine “Indianness” almost always mobilizes a culinary idiom, and food, more often than not, becomes situated within narratives about racial and ethnic indeitity. Food, as we will see, shows up as a symbol of ethnicity and race in the most unlikely places. While Mansingh’s assertions may take on a unique character, he is by no means the only political figure to link food with cultural and ethnic identity, particularly as it related to Indian bodies. Only two years prior to Mansingh’s speech, another political figure—this time on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean—connected culinary symbols with race and ethnicity.

On the eve of my departure...

2006-06-15T12:36:00.000-04:00

a possible reason to return to the subcontinent in a few months. This looks amazingly interesting, and relevant.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Three-Day International Conference on FOOD: REPRESENTATION, IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS
Department of English, Jadavpur University
Kolkata, India

The Centre for Advanced Studies, Department ofEnglish, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, is
organizing a three-day international conference titled Food: Representation, Ideology And Politics on 16, 17 and 18 November, 2006. Food is a central part of our lives. However, in all
cultures food has always represented more than just a means of survival. Sharing food, eating salt, breaking bread, raising a toast, picnics in the wild, formal dinners, all have certain ideological, political and social significances. Some foods are taboo, designated filthy or circumscribed. Some foods are endowed with holiness or endow the eater with purity.
Foods have also triggered colonial expansionism. The Spice Route was one of the earliest trade networks. Revolts and revolutions have been sparked by the absence of food. Marie Antoinette’s famous comment advising the peasants to eat cake began a new era in world history, while wars have been lost because of hungry soldiers.

Globalisation and consumer cultures have added new dimensions to the act of eating in restaurants and the kinds of cuisine available in various parts of the world, while brands like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca Cola or Pepsi have often been the targets of anti-imperialist protests in India and elsewhere. The representation of food, eating practices, last
suppers, and other aspects of food culture has also been central to many texts.
Abstracts are invited for this seminar. They should not be longer that 500 words and may be sent by electronic mail to the addresses given below or to:

Food: Representation, Ideology And Politics,
CAS Coordinator,
Department of English,
Jadavpur University,
Kolkata 700 032, India

Themes may include, but are not necessarily limited to:

# Representations of Food and Eating Practices in Literature
# Cross-Cultural Exchanges in the Area of Food
# Food as a Marker in Defining Identity
# Representation of Political or Social Movements
Related to Food
# Food in Popular Culture
# The Gendering of Food-Related Practices

Nilanjana Gupta nilaguptaju_at_yahoo.com
Amlan Dasgupta amlan04_at_gmail.com
Rimi B. Chatterjee rimibchatterjee_at_yahoo.co.in

I'm worthy of a blog entry..

2006-06-14T10:14:00.000-04:00

This is tasteless and tacky, but I just found a posting (yes, my googling has led me to look for myself on Google Blogs) about my article, "Model Minorities Can Cook."

An exciting day for moi.

Here is the posting:

http://satsumabug.livejournal.com/272866.html?view=324834#t324834

Amul Rawks!!!

2006-06-13T05:51:00.000-04:00

As a kid, I remember driving in the back of Ambassador and Fiat taxis and looking at the all the cool painted billboards that adorned the Bombay roads. A lot of these have disappeared, only to be replaced with more snazzy, high quality billboards. One of the ad campaigns I remember the best were the ones for Amul butter. The ads appealed to me as a kid because of the cartoonish look, but as I got older, I started to appreciate them in all kinds of ways. First up, they're clever. Called "topicals," the advertisments don't sell the product, butter, as much as they sell the brand. Each week/ month/ whatever, a new "topical" would be put up, inevitably with some commentary about contemporary politics. Second, they're awesome because they demand multilingual engagement: many of the ads are funny, or punny, if one is fluent in both Hindi and English.
I think that is a brilliant way to use language and to provide on going social commentary.

The topicals have been around since 1976, and here are some of my favorites from the last two years. Admittedly, these tend to have filmi undertones, but I liked them the best! Check out the website (www.amul.com) for more topicals.

Bollywood film Fanaa release help up in Gujarat due to agitation over star's comments on Narmada Dam Project - June '06

On the latest Hindi film `Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham' - Jan. 2002

On enjoyable Bollywood film 'Rang De Basanti' which has good review and audience response - February '06

Mistress of Spices

2006-06-11T13:21:00.000-04:00

As part of my foodie research, I’ve had to overcome my absolute hatred for the genre of food writing. Paradoxical as it seems, my interest in food is less about a love of all manner of culinaria, than it is about a concerted probing interest in why food touches so many peoples’ lives in so many ways. When I got to India in early May, the film version of Mistress of Spices was playing at Bombay’s somewhat fabled Eros Theater. I knew I had to see the film sooner or later, and also as a minor film buff, I wanted to check out a film at Eros. Mistress of Spices did not disappoint, but only because I did not expect much of it. I’ve been working for a while on trying to find a way to offer an enabling reading of the novel—and it has been tough. Much of the novel is shrouded in a kind of mysticism around food, and the magic of spices. Where Divakaruni fails in the novel, one might argue, is in trying to incorporate a story of how spices have an ameliorative function in a world that is so rife with racial and ethnic tensions. The basic premise is that certain spices can help people to solve particular traumas in their life: this is not unlike some ayurvedic ideas, but what is egregiously offensive to many about the way Divakaruni sets this in motion is that the problems these characters face are so PARTICULAR to being an ethnic minority in the US. I can’t be bothered to rehearse my argument here—I’ve written about this in Kent Ono’s Collection, After Critical Mass. Maybe I just want to be different, but unlike some of Divakaruni’s detractors, I do think she ought to be commended for including working class desis as characters in her novels. But where she fails is in her recourse to heterosexual romance as the answer to all.

As someone trained in close reading, I can find moments of engagement, moments of complexity in her novel—ultimately they do give way to a more palatable narrative, but those moments are there, however fleeting they might be. In the novel after all, if one is a discerning reader, who doesn’t take the kind of broad platitudes that a lot of macroscopic thinkers tend to, one will notice that spices, per se, do not help the characters overcome racial traumas. It is collective action and community solidarity. The film version, however, is bound to disappoint, because it cannot contain that kind of narrative complexity especially given that darling Ash is cast as the mistress of spices. I was sorely disappointed to see that some of the more complex narratives in the novel were removed, and the focus was almost entirely on Aishwarya Rai’s character. One of the most complex characters in the novel is Lalitha, a battered wife. She extricates herself form a cycle of abuse, because the fennel Tilo gives her comes wrapped in a newspaper on which is the number for a domestic abuse help line. It is only by calling that number that she brings an end to the abuse. This narrative is not even presented in the film and I was sorely disappointed to see this. The film pathetically offers all these sumptuous glimpses of food but it seems to not have gotten one of the main issues in the book namely that Tilo, Ash’s character, is supposed to be a muglee hag and not a former Miss India. I’m not sure if anyone has seen the film, but I’m desperately in need of some critical conversation about it. I’ve read the reviews in Time Out Mumbai as well as Outlook but I wants more. I needs more!!!!!

I can’t help but read this film, directed by Paul Mayeda Berges, alongside his partner, Gurinder Chadha’s other films, notably Bride and Prejudice and also Bend it Like Beckham. It seems like each of these films nudge the narrative closer to America. In Beckham, America promises to be the terrain to allow Jess, a desi to play soccer without any prejudices. (Ha! As if the sporting world in the US is somehow free of racism.) Then, Bride and Prejudice is the film that presents Darcy, the rehabilitated American as the one that will magically take the free spirited Lalita (Ash) back to the US where all will be good. And then, here, in Mistress, the film is set in Oakland—an amazing site upon which to locate analyses of race- but the film just does not go anywhere with this thread. The film becomes very new agey in its ideals about how to overcome racism and tension: look within for the solutions to the traumas one encounters on the rough terrain of racism? That is just not socially responsible film, and frankly, I expect more from someone who collaborated on making films like Bhaji on the Beach.

Food, I agree, is lovely to look at, and I mean please, I agree that Ash is gorgeous, but why must I see shot after shot of her having an orgasm over spices? What does that add to the narrative? Sure, the characters have to face racism, but in the end all is resolved. I honestly don’t know what to do with this film. It’s very pretty—and some of the scenes made me want to visit Kerala, but that is not good enough. Where is the vision of race that the film might have offered? I’m very disappointed in the film. I want to like it: I want to read it against the grain, but all I end up with is my head being chaffed against the least nourishing film I've seen in years.

Clever Marketeering

2006-06-10T00:46:00.000-04:00

McDonalds has always been rather brilliant when it comes to convicing nations they are truly creating a product that is fundamentally of that country. I found this image in an article (I'll find the url when I'm less sleep deprived) and was stunned by the way the image presents something like a burger as being a tribute or amalgam of all that is unique to the richness of Indian agriculture. You've got to love their sneakiness when it comes to selling themselves as part of the nation, and part of la familia.

In Memoriam: Carmina Fugaban 1974-2006

2006-06-07T06:14:00.000-04:00

I have no business blogging about this, but it is all that I can think about right now. I just learned that Carmina Fugaban, someone who had been my best friend for about 3-4 months between 11th and 12th grade passed away on the 6th of June. Carmina had been diagnosed in 2004 with schizophrenia, and had been on medication ever since that time. She took her life two days ago. I want to try and navigate the sense of loss, that is obviously far greater for her family and friends, those in the Philippines who know her, and have been a part of her life in the last 14 years in ways that I have simply not. In times like this, one perhaps tries to rustle memories up of people we loved and knew. For most people I can conjure up many memories: Carmina is no exception. I remember her quietly stated eloquence: she was a natural poet, who had such a way with words, I remember even now, some 16 years later, words she used in describing how society failed Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember her elegant penmanship. I remember her seriousness. I remember her laugh. I remember making fun of her because she was so short. I remember the lilt of her voice. I remember her grace. I remember her poise. But most of all, I remember how she hurt me. How she decided not to be my friend and never gave me a reason. How she decided not to come to my 18th birthday sleepover party at the last minute, leaving me in tears that she too had bailed on me. I had been having a tough time with friends that year (she was 1 of 2 guests), and losing a friend like Carmina for no apparent reason was devastating to me, in ways that I've been reluctant to acknowledge. Today, I also remember, how in mid 2004, perhaps the time she was diagnosed with her illness, that she wrote me a personal message in response to a short message I'd sent her, after learning she'd joined the recently formed yahoogroups site for POMHI class of 1992.

Here is her email to me:

Dear Anita,

It is lovely to come back into contact with you in this way!

I have many apologies to make to you personally, so please do pop
into my mailbox when you get the chance.

As a writer, it is a pure pleasure to meet with someone with your
quality of understanding!

It is wonderful, also, to hear about your work in the academic world!
I would love to hear more about your writing, teaching and research
interests!

I do recall that pastiche we did for Ms Rowe's IB Higher World Lit
class, and have been thinking of incorporating it into a novel i'm
currently planning and writing, A FAMILY PORTRAIT, which will be
partly set on an IS campus, and will include, among many characters,
a violin-and-piano-playing prodigy, a cricket-mad playwright with
springy black curls, a tv-smashing, banana-mashing poet masquerading
as an IT technician, a wild Dutchman, a blue-eyed, blond-haired
musician searching relentlessly for himself through his passion for
the martial arts, a jet-setting academic, an attractive divorcee with
a bewitching smile, a courageous Finnish pilot with the Royal
Australian Air Force, an Iranian-American film director, two twins
with a passion for adventure, an intelligent, well-read design editor
with a quirky sense of humor, a beautiful psychologist working with
kids in special ed., a noisy, happy-go-lucky, newly-married, six-pack
guzzling brax, a voyeurish DJ, a quiet Sri Lankan woman, an African
with a magical, musical voice, and many more!

I'm not sure how much of my vision or sensibility has been formed by
Fil-Am writing - i do try to avoid categorizing as far as my writing
is concerned. Most of my insights about Phil. life have come
primarily through direct observation over the last twelve years - i
don't know whether i resist influences out of laziness or out of a
desire to maintain an idiosyncratic vision. I do read a lot of
contemporary world lit., including Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer,
Junichiro Tanizaki, Octavio Paz, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima, Jose
Saramago, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Knut Hamsun, Saul
Bellow, Toni Morrison, and Hermann Hesse, but my staple are the
classics, and i do reread and reread. I owe a great deal too to
Russian Lit. Tops on my list of great authors are Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, and i also have some odd favorites like the satirical
writer, Yuri Olyesha, whose imaginative eye and playfulness in the
face of tyranny are wondrous and exhilarating!

Current writers: You might want to keep an eye out for a young Fil-
Canadian writer, Miguel (Chuck) Syjuco, who is very talented and has
a genuine voice. He has published widely in Manila and makes frequent
forays into the NY poetry-slam scene, and whose poetic sensibility
has led him into some run-ins with the law. I'm not sure where he is
at the moment - he did some editorial work after college, and the
last i heard, he had gone back to school. He has yet to come out with
his first serious collection, and is still groping for his own voice,
but his sensibility is genuine, and i think he's going to make it in
the long run. He comes from Vancouver, returned to Manila at the same
time i did (we were in the same English class in college), and began
writing in college. Our paths have taken widely different ways, but
amongst current writers in the Phil. lit. scene, he's definitely one
whose work i would want to read in the future.

I would love to see some of my stuff published in such a critical and
discerning journal like the Massachusetts Review, and will send some
manuscripts on over the next few months!

Please do continue to keep in contact!

It is really lovely to meet you again in this way, Anita!

All the best,
Carmina

ps. What do you think of Zadie Smith? I've only recently discovered
White Teeth, and her writing is awesome!

I am struck by the way she remembers me: a cricket-mad playwright with
springy black curls.

She captures a part of who I was and no longer am. I straighten my hair and don't watch cricket, nor do I write plays for fun anymore. She reminds me of who I am and who I was. And still, while 2 yrs ago, this gesture felt like too-little too-late, today, two days after her death, I am grateful she sent me these words and that I had the good sense to save her message.

That night that Carmina did not come to my 18th birthday sleepover party, July 1, 1992, remained etched in my mind as the saddest birthday I ever had. But what I do remember are some of the nicer things of that evening. Rachel, on vacation from her school in Wales, still came over, and we had silly drinks with umbrellas and ate cheese and bread. We drank Baileys in my room, and we devoured the mousse she and I had made earlier in the day in my kitchen. That recipe became the first recipe I ever wrote down in my handwritten recipe book that is now 200 pages long. When I open the recipe book, now 14 years old, I always think of Rachel, but I also think of Carmina and how she never got to eat that mousse because she didn't come to the party. When I open that recipe book: it is the first recipe in my book, and also the easiest recipe in my book. Yet, ironic as it might be, I have never used that recipe in the intervening 14 years.

My blog may be about food, but it is also about the things in my world. I don't have much to remember her by, except for that email from mid 2004. What I do have is the recipe Rachel and I made for my 18 birthday, and while it may be too late in ways that matter, I want to share the recipe for what is written in the first page of my recipe book, in memory of Carmina, her spirit and the friendship she and I shared for all too brief a time.

Pulfer-Mannur Super Simple Chocolatey Mousse

egg whites
good dark chocolate, cut up into bits.

Beat the egg whites until they form stiff picks. Mix in the chocolate which should be melted in the microwave. Pour into dishes and refrigerate until cold. Serve cold.

Koshy's, Bangalore

2006-06-07T06:11:00.002-04:00

I've never really used a posting about a food thingy to write about people I ate with in the way I want to with this posting. Who knows, maybe I'll get into trouble, but I don't really care. But my requisite comment about Koshy's is that it rocked. I ate on both sides: the non smoking 'family' area with good good food, and the smoking funner area with amazing desserts. Koshy's came highly reccomended by friend Amit, so when Ayisha suggested meeting there, I was more than happy to agree to that venue. I guess since I missed the appam and stew that is apparently this places defining trait, it is also appropriate for me to blog on the other claim to fame of Koshy's--namely that it is a space to meet with Bangalore's literati and interesting folks. So, apart from the fish curry and rice, the murgh massalam, the creme caramel and hot coffee, the real treat of the afternoon visit to Koshy's was getting to meet and talk to Ayisha Abraham, a film maker based in Bangalore. I had tagged along on a visit with her that my friend Dale had arranged upon learning we were going to be in Bangalore, but I was just blown away by her and her presence.

I'm a vapid googler, so I found a nice write up about her art and vision, so I'm posting it here.
I think its great to learn about the vast tradition of independent artists in India (instead of all that trashy Bollywood hype).

I later saw her film Straight 8 on DVD.

(Straight 8, as the Goethe Institut in Bangalore says, " is an attempt to revisit a collection of home movies that dates back to the 1940s, in and around Bangalore." and even for a filmic neophyte like moi, the film was stunning and lovely. )

This article is brought to you by:
http://www.onlinebangalore.com/life/art/ayisha.html

Ayisha Abraham

Traveling between cultures, traversing boundaries and refusing the comfortable unities offered by the idea of national "roots' can serve as a powerful visual impetus. The rootlessness of movement, and not always movements of choice, is taken up as a challenge by Ayisha Abraham, and has been made to yield an artistic practice that unsettles the certainties of everyday objects: of "looking" at family photographs, of "hearing' the taped telephone message or of using" those tactile, artifacts of Indian modernity such as the railway bridge India has been the location to which Ayisha has frequently journeyed from England. where she was born in 1963 and from the U.S.A in 1995, more specifically New York where her artistic sensibilities were recast. Her journeys between such disparate spaces as Delhi, Vadodara (Baroda), Harlem, and Bangalore have produced an unembarassed embrace of the fragment, the discontinuous, the

decentered, that in turn produces altogether new unities. But there have equally been journeys into the past, though they are unmarked by any nostalgia or yearning for some continuous, unbroken history, as in her correspondence with the family past in 'The Doll'.

A course in Studio Art at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 1991-92 formalized a break with Ayisha's previous training in painting received while an undergraduate at the acclaimed Faculty of Fine Arts M.S. University (Maharaja Sayaji rao University) at Vadodara, India The paralyzing effects of the blank white ("heroic") canvas have since been replaced by an exhilarating multiplicity of mediums that are taken from the everyday more important, Ayisha has evolved a mode of conceptualizing and executing work that relates theoretical insights with visual practices, her effort at re- reading the family album, and indeed the colonial-missionary endeavour in 'Looks the Other Way'- (1993-94) was founded on theoretical critiques of the anthropological project, In the fragment of the computer manipulated photograph that is 'The Doll', we are presented, all at once with the structures of our (Indian) modernity, the elegant but far from timid, patriarchal finger, the poised feminine foot and the soft glow of the commodity (doll).

By the processes of splicing, decentering ,repeating images and sounds and transforming the scale, Ayisha produces only the most tenuous of unities: consider the baffling array of Indian languages that threaten to undo the technological neutrality of the telephone message in her more recent 'Calling the Nation' (cat no 7). The formidable if reassuring bulk of the steel girder and the railway bridge is undermined by deliberately trite textual interventions and by a shift in scale, namely miniaturization.There is no artless or depoliticized celebration of trivia in Ayisha's work, rather there is the critical engagement with the everyday in at least two ways. First, through the careful translation of the familiar into unfamiliar contexts, jolting the viewer into rethinking the relationships between symbols of power such as the boot/feet in 'Double Helix' (cat. no. 1). This is what, once more, animates the repetitive insistence in the series of photographs that compose 'Thoughts of the Void' (Boots) (cat no.5)where masculinist power is underwritten by race and militarism. Second,through the active use, indeed " manipulation" of the technologies of our time, such as computer generated recreations of photographs a production of doubly mediated representations, as for instance in the deliberately pointed shots of the television image in 'Fugitive Dreams'.

There is a sense in which Ayisha's productions can be seen to bear the marks of global, rather than local, processes the lasting and profound dislocations of colonialism on the one hand and the alienating experience of capitalism on the other. The preferred form of communication is therefore dislocation rather than seamless narrative, although the fractal images and surfaces of daily life are treated as symptoms of more stable structures that govern the contemporary. Yet the narrative mode, and the local focus, has not altogether been forsaken, as in the anguished poem/visual (Dry Run, 1997) that takes the everyday journalistic photograph as a starting point for a reflection on a very specific kind of violence. The lonely heroism of the Sri Lankan suicide bomber in her combination of text and visuals. her commitment to reading theory and re-reading visual practices, Ayisha Abraham represents an emerging though as yet hesitant trend in Indian art that is conceptual and thoroughly urban, while addressed to an international audience.

(Janaki Nair)
(Courtesy- Private Mythology: Contemprary Art from India
The Japan Foundation Asia Center

Mavalli Tiffin Room, Bangalore

2006-06-07T06:11:00.001-04:00

As a South Indian, I had grown up hearing about the wondrousness that is the Mavalli Tiffin Room, a long-standing Bangalore establishment that dishes up staple South Indian breakfast/ tiffin to literally hordes of people. I don’t know if there was a time in my life that I did not know about MTR. Well before mass marketing had made all manner of difficult foods easy to prepare via the “add water and stir” genre, MTR has been selling packets of “ready to eat” masala for years and years and years. As a diasporic baccha, I grew up eating things like MTR masala (thing like ethnic gourmet, Haldirams etc would only show up once I hit graduate school). On trips to Bangalore, my father would suggest eating at MTR, and I’d only resist. Later, he himself thought it a bad idea to go to MTR, if only because the sheer reputation of the place had meant that the place was overrun by throngs of tourists. This impression lives on, of course, because everyone I spoke to about my desire to go to MTR warned me to go early.

I finally did go to MTR, partly because I had my gora friend visiting me from the US, and thought I should be a good postcolonial host and show him local specialties, but more because I could no longer conscionably avoid a place like MTR given my research topix. Much as I hate to admit it, I am not a dosa fan. I am blessed with a mother who knows how to make dosa from scratch, but I have always hated them. I don’t know why, because I love just about everything else I’ve eaten within the south Indian culinary repertoires—Kerala cuisine, Karnataka food, Tamil food, Andhra food—what have you. But when it comes to eating dosas, I’m a whiney brat who will refuse to eat them.

Just a week ago, in fact, when visiting Pune, my friend Radhika and her brother Milind had suggested we go to Vaishali’s, an Udipi place. There too, I had agreed to eat dosa only because Milind did not forewarn me, when suggesting Vaishali’s, that it was a masala dosa, idli-vada establishment. Else, I would have protested.

So back to MTR….I think I might be a changed woman. MTR only has about three things on its menu: idli, dosa and khara bath (upma). I opted for the masala dosa and oh man, I kid you not—but it was the BEST masala dosa I have ever had in my life. The experience of joy I had over eating a steak at Mitchell’s in April when I met Michael’s family was rivaled only by this dosa eating experience. Maybe it was just the fact that I had eaten a masala dosa at the mother ship, at the place that did masala dosas with verve and panache. Maybe my love for the dosa came out of my own sense that my dislike for dosa was utterly foolish, given that I’m much more of a rice eater than my dad is

The truth is, I don’t know why I hate dosas so much. I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that every freaking North Indian I meet loves dosai. These are the same North Indians who monolithically represent the “South” as a monoculture as if we all Tamil-speaking rice eaters, as if we only eat fiery spicy curries, and as if we are all uniformly devout Hindus and orthodox to boot. Perhaps it is because dosais are the one thing they seem to positively valorize that I so vehemently reject them as a favored dish. It is usually the only concession I will get towards being South Indian. Punjabi friends will say, “Oh you’re so lucky to be from the south: your mother must make excellent dosas.” Usually, I want to say, “Well yes, she does, but that’s because she’s a great cook who had to learn all this stuff when she migrated from India, not because a knowledge of how to turn parboiled rice into paper thin dosas seeps from her south Indian pores. Patriarchy has more to do with her excellent culinary skills than her geographical roots.” But this is my cynical poco response. As a kid, I probably did not know how to respond to what I read as a disparaging attitude towards South India, and so I sublimated my unease with that attitude into a hatred for the one thing North Indians loved about us. And the dosai became my sworn culinary enemy.

As I’m older now, I’ve learned that I don’t need to punish my taste buds for foolish regionalism. I’ve got a quick-witted sensibility and can sucker punch someone with my snarky attitude: perhaps that will be my defense. After all, as a nice Brahmani South Indian girl, why shouldn’t I have my dosai too?

Sukh Sagar, Gandhinagar, Bangalore

2006-06-07T06:11:00.000-04:00

I have to admit, I need a new hook when bloggering. This idea of blogging about restaurants etc., is draining my creative energies. I feel like a poor man's Calvin Trillin, writing my food reviews of places that mostly don't merit reviewing.

Okay, so that is not necessarily the case of Sukh Sagar's restaurant. I had been curious to eat at one of the restaurants in the hotel of same name b/c I'd been staying in said establishment in Gandhinagar for the two days of my 48 hour sojourn in Bangalore.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not a big idli-dosa fan, although it is growing on me. At any rate, one of the things that does fascinate me is how the "East" imagines the "West" and one of the best ways to do this, in my humble estimation, is not to go to fancy schmancy restaurants in Bombay and Delhi, but to go to the mundane places in seemingly out of the way places. Sukh Sagar was one such venue.

We were about to embark on an 8 hour night bus to Mangalore, so perhaps, not the best time to be adventurous, but still, after perusing the room service menu, I had to go to the continental food restaurant in the hotel.

Can I just say, the menu was absolutely charming in its complete obliviousness towards any of the categories of national definition we are so used to in the United States? Take this for example: I wanted an enchilada, and it came covered in something called "Italian sauce"--which I learned was a white sauce. Dale, my gringo friend, wanted to order a pizza--so he ordered a Mexican pizza covered with something called "China Sauce." None of these names really meant anything, we learned, after the food arrived. In fact, my enchilada was pretty much a direct translation of what Dale ordered except that it came wrapped in a tortilla rather than baked atop a pizza crust. Of course, part of my delight about this place, is that it was nothing like anything I'd ever seen. But the true joy for me about this place, is that it makes no apologies for the food it produces. This is its version of fusion: in the culinary universe created by SS, there is no reason not to combine things that might taste good together, and to call them by any name. Here, the versions of fusion dispense entirely with the judgment imposed by the west to create its own logic about what goes with what. Part of me wonders if this is the type of fusion I've been looking for. The kind of fusion that is so completely illegible to white folks that the firangi has no choice but to deem it nonsense combinations--an indication of how badly India has produced its version of modernity.

I tend to think something else is at play here. The restaurant is certainly producing its own version of modernity, but it is one that does not see the ethos of the Western culinary palate as the one to reproduce. It is not quite anything goes, but it is a response, in its own way, to rendering "Western" food absurd. Let me essplain. Whenever I see muligatawny or pilaf or what have you on menus in the US, I cringe. CRINGE. There are colonial roots to these foods, but people always seem to think these foods evolved separately and are not bad imitations of Indian food. Well, I beg to differ. In a word, these things SUCK. But still, what is more offensive to me is the way that restaurants feel they can invent these dishes as they wish. They can add apples to curried chicken salad and its not egregiously offensive. They can call something curry and its not offensive. So why, then, should I be offended when some place in Bangalore, aware of how the world has changed its city, also chooses to capitalize on this, and to reimagine the world on its terms? What is wrong with China Sauce? What is wrong with Mexican pizza? I'm starting to think these creative recreations are not so bad, and maybe, if I am to really think about what I mean by alternative models of modernity, then I need to be slower to jump on the bandwagon that deems this food weird and illegible. Perhaps, I too, need to see just how interesting and radical these dishes might be.

Tiger Bay, Bangalore

2006-06-07T06:10:00.001-04:00

Moi, and the silly unstirred drink...

Apparently Sachin Tendulkar, Feroze Khan and I have something in common. We’ve all eaten at Tiger Bay in Bangalore. A rave review of the restaurant in Deccan Herald states, “Sachin Tendulkar orders their scampi and prawn malai curry while in Bangalore and actor Feroze Khan loves their grilled spiced bekti and oysters” as a testament to this seafood restaurant located on the top floor of the building housing the Bombay Store on M.G. Road. I went to the restaurant on the recommendation of friends, as well as by the information located on any number of websites extolling the virtues of this place. A caveat: I loved the food, but eating at Tiger Bay proved to be one of the most irritating experiences I’ve had. I did quite like the food, and I even liked my pretty Planters Punch cocktail, which no one informed me I had to mix myself—so I ended up having to buy extra pineapple juice with which to mix my rum. Here’s why I found the place irritating. When I go to a fancy restaurant, I expect that the wait staff and all others will kind respond to my requests. Fancy restaurants in India have this really annoying practice of serving you the food. Every time your plate seems to empty, the waiter rushes over to add rice or curry or what have you to your plate: its extremely attentive service, and yet something I’ve always hated. I don’t go to restaurants to be reminded of how much I am eating, or to be consistently aware of the wait staff. Most times, I go to hang out with my friends and am paying (at fancy restaurants) for the food and ambience, classist as that will inevitably sound

At Tiger Bay, I told the waiter we would be happy to serve ourselves and he could leave us alone. apparently such a request seemed like alienspeak because the entire wait staff (perhaps because the restaurant was pathetically empty) proceeded to try and serve me every time I emptied my plate of rice. I just don’t get why a place that claims to be so cosmopolitan doesn’t get that ambience is the best thing they can sell, assuming of course, that the food is good. They don’t get that hovering waiters are a pain in the freaking ass, and not the sign of a fanciness in any way. Are the rich people who come to such places so unable to serve themselves that they want such service? Am I in the minority here in finding this level of hovering irritating? Here, perhaps paradoxically, is where the snooty places can take a page out of their less fancy counterparts—leave your guests to enjoy their food alone.

Okay, and here is where it got really irksome. When it came to doing banal things like serving rice, or ladling fish curry into my plate, they are more than capable. But when it comes to telling me that I needed to stir my drink—which was so pretty and admittedly something I should have known to do (although Dale didn’t seem to know either)—they were woefully negligent. I got through more than 2/3rds of my drink before the headwaiter smugly informed me I had not mixed my rum with my drink, and so he brought me an extra glass of the mixings (not free, of course). Seems like a bit of crappy service here: attention is not given where it is needed and omitted where it is needed. Tiger Bay was good for Dale and I at that moment. We had been on an 8 hour long bus ride from Mangalore and desperately in need of some place quiet, non bumpy, clean and nice. Tiger Bay was that. The food was also pretty good, but the service—not much to rave about. So, please to improve service, Tiger Bay. Thanking you.

Subway, Bangalore India

2006-06-07T06:10:00.000-04:00

I promise this will be my last entry on fast food etablissements, either in the homeland, or elsewhere. Subway, in truth, is a place I rarely—if ever—go to in the States. The only times I can remember going there is at Union Station in New Haven. The only other alternative is Dunkin Donuts, and Subway seems a little bit of a healthier option. By far, the nicest Subway experience I had was when in Nashville, TN on the edge of the Vanderbilt campus. I had gone there with friend Yoonmee who wanted a sandwich. While she was in line, the server—who happened to be a Gujju immigrant—started chatting me up, and upon seeing that I wasn’t going to order anything, he insisted that I at least have a drink of my choice, which was on the house. Yoonmee, impressed by this move, rightly read it as a gesture of diasporic solidarity. I tend to doubt this man would have given me a free beverage unless I’d been Indian and that too—someone willing to engage him. It was a moment to mark similarity in ways that are not always cognizant to outsiders and it can only happen because we are both Indian minorities in a place like Tennessee, the large desi population of Vandy, notwithstanding.

What this made me realize is how much a place like Subway in the United States has become associated with Indianness. Indians run many of the Subway franchises. I’m not really sure why, and I’m sure I might find something in the work of my friend and colleague Pawan Dhingra who works on Indian business owners and motelling etc. (Well that is a part of his work I remember, though I’m not giving it to the proper complexity it deserves) to explain why so many Subways franchises are run by people from the homeland. There is certainly a long standing tradition of convenience stores owned by desis (think Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from the Simpsons) but maybe the subway desi franchising is something we all know and recognize but just haven’t gotten around to documenting.

I noticed in Subway in Bangalore that the store was entirely staffed by another minority—the Nepalis in the community. The next day I would find out from filmmaker Ayisha Abraham, that there is a large Nepali refugee population in Bangalore. So is there something to this? —I don’t know. But it certainly seems curious to see overlapping movements in the US and India where different type of minorities find a niche within the rather staid and stale world of fast food franchising. What is more, these establishments (particularly in India) sell Americanness. Indians may like sarnies, but its still not everyday fare. It is still something of an unusual commodity—to eat a footlong sub is just plain excessive. But how easy is it for us to overlook the labor making our food for us? What are the histories that make it necessary, and perhaps even viable, for Gujjus to work in Subway in the US, and Nepalis to work in Subway in India? Moreover, isn’t there a stunning asymmetry between the idea of Subway (or for that matter any fast food establishment) in India selling footlong sarnie as part of an access to America, and then we find that sure, in America, sarnies are a part of Indian immigrant life—but not always in the sense of being consumers, but in terms of serving that food up to others? I’m interested in these links: the ones that seem to speak to a globalized world, yet one that masks the very truths behind who are the laboring forces that bring such goods to your table. At times, I wish I were less shy, and more of an anthropologist: perhaps then, I’d have the chutzpah to do some real research and talk to people, such as the desis in Subway in Nashville and the Nepalis in the Subway on Brigade Road and try to see what these minorities have experienced and what their labored existences have looked like instead of only fixating on how Subway has tweaked Americanness for the Indian palate.

Pizza Hut, Mangalore

2006-06-03T12:32:00.000-04:00

What is it about the idea of being cosmopolitan in India that has meant that everyone thinks that to be cool and hip means that one should necessarily have their eardrums abused with excessively loud music? This was the first thing that came to mind when I entered the brand spanking new Pizza Hut in the new Adlabs Cineplex and Shopping Complex in Mangalore. I know this will surprise no one, but it was stunning to me, how the pizza at PH in Mangalore tasted EXACTLY the same as the PH in the US. I mean, unlike Dominos in India, which is a bajillion times better than the Dominos in the US, the pizza at PH is an exact replica of what one finds in any mall in the US. This must be a sign of globalization etc. The reproduction of sameness across the world. There are a few menu items that taste different: corn, paneer etc., but the dish itself is fundamentally the same. And yet, something tells me that pizza cannot be the same everywhere. I know that one of the hallmarks of global movements of capital etc., has been to reproduce cultural norms etc., and that there are those who will lament the arrival of Pizza Hut as a sign of looming Americanization of the local population in India. But to me, it seems that PH in a place like Mangalore is about something else. It might be about consumers desiring to be a part of something that is seen to be so fundamentally American, but it also seems to me, that they way people eat pizza in India is so fundamentally different than it is in the US. When Dale and I were there, we were among a very small group of young people eating alone. Most others there were families. Families! These places always advertise themselves as family restaurants, but how many families think, ‘hmm…lets go out for a nice meal to Pizza Hut’ in the US? No, such moves are more a part of a Third wordlist ethic, where eating at Pizza Hut is still a treat. Its not everyday food: it never will be.

At the end of the day, I can’t quite figure out what will be the long-term story of places like PH: will they survive? There will always be those lured by the ideas of consuming a little piece of Americana, but will it ever alter the foodways of Indians in ay significant way? Will the arrival of such chains alter the nature of how Indians go out to eat? I tend to doubt it.

Bombay Brasserie vs Mathura, Pune

2006-06-03T12:31:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago (yes, don’t be misled by the dates on these entries—few of them are current at this point), I was in Pune, and had the good fortune to stay with friends who are very committed to good food. My new friend Amit, and my old friend Radhika were incredibly gracious hosts and paid for every single meal I had, so major shout out to them for some good homeland generosity. But onto the topic at hand, I couldn’t really think of ways to construct separate entries for both of these eating adventures, so I decided to combine, and see what I came up with. Bombay Brasserie, or Bombay Brassiere as my friends irreverently referred to it, was—in all honesty—less than enthralling. Lovely décor, but the food pretty much resembled the things one finds in buffets on Devon Street in Chicago, and Jackson Heights, New York. I liked the taste of all things, but it struck me that, what a few years ago, might have positively thrilled my taste buds, now do little for me. I’ve always liked buffets, but I’ve never understood why buffets have to be so derivative and uninteresting. Bombay Brasserie had an excellent opportunity to offer some stunning food, but fell dramatically short. So, moving along. . . .

In strong contrast, however, was Mathura, a relatively obscure restaurant that is not quite a hole-in-the-wall establishment, nor, a fancy ass place. It was something quite in between, but the food was really quite out of this world. I’ve always liked going to places in India that serve regional cuisines without announcing it as their distinctive calling. This place served only Maharastrian cuisine, but did not really announce it to any degree, nor did it downplay its cuisine. It is just very matter of factly Maharashtrian food—no menu. Everyone who eats there tends to be a regular, and you can ask for various standard specialties, or as we opted to, go for the thali. The thali, to me, is a uniquely Indian offering (although I’m sure other cultures have similar versions) that is a godsend to anyone who wants to try new things and is not sure what to order. I know this has often been a problem for me: I want everything, and yet I don’t know what to order. The thali, simply, organizes cuisine into discrete little units that can give one small tastes of a wide range of culinary choices.

Now I should also essplain that Maharashtrian food has always held a particular fascination for me because my father RAVES about it. He is from northern Karnataka, and the cuisine there is very different from the coastal Karnataka food from my mother’s hometown, Mangalore. They are not rice eaters, and tend to prefer bhakri, a type of roti made from corn meal. The food at Mathura was the first real time I got to sample what it is that so moves my dad to wax poetically about the richness of food from his area and to scoff at the coastal cuisine favored by my mother’s relatives cooking. Bhakri, I’ve learned is something that is worth waxing about: it is simple peasant fare, and yet it holds so much taste and flavor that I might be convinced to wax poetically about it. But while such foods are not available diasporically, they have also not made their way onto the plates and kitchens of the urban elite in India: one does not find such simpleton fare as bhakri within restaurants like Bombay Brassiere, misspelling intended, but they are key to the thalis etc., of the smaller places (only in stature) like “Mathura.”

I recently revised the description of this blog, and to that end, I looked up what it means to be a foodie. Definitions abound, but one of the most salient descriptions is that found on urbandictonary.com, and one that I abridged up earlier. It basically states that people who are serious about food, will go to lengths to find really good tasting food. They are people who might not be swayed by pretty décor etc., but are taste hounds, or what Calvin Trillin and others might describe as chowhounds.

Chowhounds.com has not quite made its foray into India, which is perhaps a good thing. I’m not foolhardy enough to think that Mathura is a hidden treasure—after all, they charge Rs 150 for a thali, only marginally less than Samrat in Bombay charges for its Gujju thali. It is less glam, but the food is worth every paise. My sense is that the Pune elite that may go to places like BB are missing out on something real: an effort to reward the tastebuds with amazing food.

What is more, as any good thali, one can eat a lot without feeling like one’s gastrointestinal system is about to overheat and explode. The amount of food served would please Goldilocks: not too much, not too little—it is just right. Thanks, Radhika!

Anyway, so the next time someone who is reading this blog might find themselves in Pune, skip Bombay Brasserie and go a little further afield and check out Mathura, near F.C Road.

My Self Gifting Registry

2006-06-01T10:21:00.000-04:00

So, purely for intellectual and demonstrative purposes, I drew up a list of what I would want in my ideal kitchen, were I to partake in that ritual of registering for a wedding, and asking my friends and family to furnish my kitchen. This is what I would come up with, and as one can plainly see--its no list of cheapie things. And yet, this is completely AVERAGE and perhaps even limited compared to what most people demand as gifts. Granted, I did not request the $6.99 stainless steel can opener, but we know what that means if you buy it--you are too cheap, or too declasse to know that the item is only there for cosmetic purposes, to show how thoughtful the happy couple has been when considering their choice of mandated gifts. All up, my gift list comes to about $907.93. Mind, you I also tried to make my list more interesting, and added two books that I recently learned about by Elizabeth Freeman and Chrys Ingraham. Both of these books consider how weddings are part of what Freeman terms the 'wedding complex' and Ingraham terms the 'wedding industrial complex' (and here I thought I was brilliantly coining a new term--should've known better). But I am excited to know that critical work exists on this phenomenon and I am excited to checkthem out of the library when I return, unless of course, someone gifts them to me before then....

The really significant move, in my opinion, would be to be able to gift the book to couples who are about to be married. I for one know that I would love to receive those books to read, rather than Martha Stewart Weddings before I got married, if such an event materialized..

Total Items: 14

Cuisinart Chef's Classic Stainless 12-Inch Open Skillet with Helper Handle

Cuisinart

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $44.95

6 used & new from $42.99

Cuisinart Chef's Classic Stainless-Steel 16-Inch Rectangular Roaster With Rack

Offered by J&R Music and Computer World

Cuisinart

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Price: $79.99

3 used & new from $79.95

Triple Baguette Pan

Offered by The Baker's Catalogue

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Price: $22.95

1 used & new from $22.95

Henckels Twin Signature 7-Piece Block Set

J.A. Henckels

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $99.95

4 used & new from $99.95

Krups 085 20-Ounce Stainless Steel Frothing Pitcher

Krups

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $9.99

1 used & new from $9.99

Krups 985-42 Il Caffe Duomo Coffee and Espresso Machine, Black

Krups

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $99.99

7 used & new from $92.94

Peugeot Fidji 6-Inch Salt Mill, Black

Peugeot

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $29.99

1 used & new from $29.99

Peugeot Fidji 8-Inch Pepper Mill, Black

Peugeot

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $49.95

3 used & new from $39.90

KitchenAid KSM150PSMC Artisan Series 5-Quart Mixer, Metallic Chrome

Offered by Etronics

KitchenAid

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Price: $244.93

5 used & new from $229.99

Cuisipro Stainless-Steel Measuring Cups and Spoon Set

Cuisipro

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $30.99

3 used & new from $29.86

Le Creuset 2-Quart Round French Oven, Blue

Le Creuset

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $69.99

2 used & new from $69.99

White Weddings

by Chrys Ingraham

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $8.95

56 used & new from $7.39

The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Series Q)

by Elizabeth Freeman

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $15.36

19 used & new from $4.25

Cuisinart DLC-10S Pro Classic 7 Cup Food Processor

Cuisinart

Avg customer review:

Usually ships in 24 hours

Price: $99.95

8 used & new from $113.94

Technically, not a food posting

2006-05-31T23:31:00.000-04:00

Technically, this is not a food posting, but it is something wonderful. My friend, Allan Isaac, recenlty finished his book, American Tropics. Allan is my number one eating friend. He and I would spend hours (literally) eating and talking. So much so, that what I gained intellectually, I could also correlate directly to the weight I put on! But seriously, here is the blurb about Allan's book--available this October from Minnesota Press.

American Tropics

Articulating Filipino America

Allan Punzalan Isaac

How America’s image of the Philippines reflects the U.S. inability to see its own imperialism.

In 1997, when the New York Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing “to be everywhere and nowhere,” Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialism’s invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other “unincorporated” parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies.

Isaac boldly examines the American empire’s images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai‘i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imagination’s role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empire’s enfolded but disavowed borders.

Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americans’ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture.

Allan Punzalan Isaac is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.

256 pages | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | October 2006

Pillsbury in India

2006-05-31T14:07:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how I feel about this. While I know globalization is all about what the new India is about, the entry of Pillsbury into arenas of life that directly and adversely affect the small farmer really bothers me.

This company is now launching a product to directly compete with local farmers etc., by appealing to regionalism. I know this is capitalism---good for the consumer, yadda, yadda, yadda..but still.

A shout out to my mom also, my favorite feminist in training, who said she would never buy Pillsbury Atta because she did not want to support these MNCS in India. Got to love her spirit:)

Pillsbury launches Punjabi atta to take on local players

Purvita Chatterjee

Mumbai , Nov. 30

SEGMENTING the atta market to pit itself against the regional players, General Mills India has launched a new sub-brand under its Pillsbury brand - Punjabi atta.

Having re-launched its flagship atta brand under Pillsbury Chakki Fresh atta' this year, it has now launched a region-specific atta targeting Punjabis living outside their State. Presently, the region-specific Punjabi atta has been launched in the multi-cosmopolitan Mumbai market before being made available on a national level.

Ms Gayatri Yadav, Marketing Manager, General Mills India, told Business Line, ``We are segmenting the atta market and are targeting Punjabis living outside North India. This is a customised and coarser ground atta and has been initially launched in the Mumbai market before being rolled out nationally.''

Carrying the baseline `Sadda Taste, Saadi Roti' (My taste, my roti), Pillsbury Punjabi atta has been designed and customised to suit the Punjabi palate and is being pitted against the regional players such as Roshan da Atta and Shakti Bhog Atta.

Currently, Pillsbury's Punjabi atta is sporting 10 kg packs pegged at Rs 175, which is at a lesser premium than Pillsbury's Chakki Fresh atta (5 kg for Rs 105). Its pricing is also less than that of its competitor brands such as Annapurna (Rs 103 for 5 kg) and Aashirvaad's superior atta with MP Wheat (Rs 105 for 5 kg).

Commenting on the company's strategy to enter the regional atta market, Mr Jagdeep Kapoor, Managing Director, Samsika Marketing Consultants, said, ``The atta market is going the way of the papad market with different tastes appealing to different segments. Pillsbury's initiative to launch North Indian atta is a step in the right direction. It will now compete with regional players such as Roshan Da atta.''

In fact, industry observers feel that with atta moving from a commodity to a brand, sooner or later most of the national atta players have to start looking at the regional brands. As the atta category evolves, it is bound to get more segmented and positioning will not be enough to sustain the brands. In fact, the existing national brands such as Annapurna and Aashirvaad have been focussing more on positioning and value addition than segmenting their offerings for the regional market.

General Mills, with its Pillsbury brand, seems to be the first national branded atta player to have taken the initiative to pit itself against the regional players with its segmentation strategy, beginning with its Punjabi atta.

Pillsbury is today one of the top three branded wheat brands and enjoys a 7.5 per cent value share as per AC Nielsen urban data. According to estimates from the company, the branded atta market stands at about 800,000 tonnes, which comprises about 2 per cent of the total atta market. The branded atta market is growing between 20 and 25 per cent and General Mills claims that its Pillsbury brand has been growing ahead of the market.

The Wedding Industrial Complex, or Why I Want a Kitchen of My Own, Not Acquired Through Wedding Registries

2006-05-31T13:26:00.000-04:00

I was hesitating to even post on this topic because it might seem rather untoward and ungenerous of me, but the fact is, I have been thinking about this so much the last couple weeks that I feel I must say something about this. Even though I am in a relationship and may some day get married, I do not think my opinions will change simply by going from being single to engaged or married. Here in India, it is wedding season, and everyone is abuzz getting clothes made etc. I don’t even know this person, but I was invited to a wedding (I didn’t go). What I noticed on that invite was the line, “gifts in blessings for the couple only.” This is a far cry from the kind of aggressive demanding of gifts I feel has taken over the US via that abomination known as the gift registry. Perhaps I am lucky, or just friends with the right people, but everyone I know who has gotten married has not wanted to use a registry, and thinks people flying in from miles away is gift enough. Within the brahmanical tradition, we go even further, and pay for the travel and out of town guests—guests are like “gods” and so we treat them with reverence and respect. (Some of this should be taken in stride, its not always the case, but the sentiment remains in place.)

What I find egregiously offensive about the gift registry is that people seem to have no qualms about demanding all manner of high-end kitchen appliances: brushed steel Cuisinarts, Peugeot salt and pepper mills, Calphalon cookware, Le Creuset pots—things I can only dream of. Here is where it gets annoying for me: these are things I want in my kitchen. I love to cook, and have been making do with my graduate school days pots and pans. The only times I buy nice things is when they are on sale. I have worked hard to buy my Calphalon bake ware: I have a set of nice stemware from “Pier One” that I bought on sale; I buy one nice thing for myself at “Sur La Table” on occasion and it was with much thought that I bought myself a cheese board and cheese knives from “Williams Sonoma.” I cherish these items because they represent hours of work on my part: they form part of my kitchen, part of my labor, my work. I have gotten these things on my own, and not demanded that someone buy them for me, merely because I’ve entered into an agreement to publicly sanctify my relationship. So why is it, that in an age of globalization, women who are more educated than ever before, that we are reverting to some ritual that makes other people set up your kitchen for you? I’ve heard the argument that it is easier for your guests to know what to buy you. Well, guess what folks? It is even easier for your guests if you ask them not to give you a gift. It is easier for your friends if you ask them to make a donation to a charity in your name.

I’ve also heard the argument that the gifts are an investment: you buy people things, and then get them back when you get married. “That is so heteronormative,” I want to scream. So, the only way to get your gifts back is to get married? Where, within that, is the spirit of “giving”? Shouldn’t presents be about love and thought and not an investment on a future return? IF that is the case, I object to calling these items “gifts”. Gifts are a misnomer—call them futures trading. Because that is what it is: one speculates that because they bought Waterford Crystal Glasses for the happy couple, you will get back something related, and not a can-opener.

Maybe, this is obvious to many, but I am always reminded of that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie loses her Manolo Blahnik shoes because she has to take them off at a baby shower, and so it only adds insult to injury that as a single woman, she is forced into this ritual that is really not going to be able to do anything besides add to her financial woes. Then she is chided for owning $450 shoes. I’m seeing the analogy here insofar as I think it is important to resist this horrendous practice in which heteronormativity collides with a consumerist capitalist ethos to say, “you must help me buy my kitchenware” and help me furnish my house. So seemingly, one wants all the trappings of consumerist America sans the work and labor that goes into getting those items. This is why such kitchen items are so out of my reach. I’ve always wondered who buys all those fancy kitchen gadgetry and heavy bottomed aluminum pans and set of knives: it’s the stuff that wedding registry dreams are made of, and, it is the way for bourgeois society to reproduce its norms and keep people in line.

So what is my answer to this? I’m a committed foodie. I love my food: I love my cookware. I, also, however, am a feminist who values having a kitchen of her own, that is a testament to love and labor. I object to these rituals as sexist practices that seem to suggest that a woman only deserves fancy kitchenry if she enters into a social contract, and so the single woman or the feminist who sees through these rituals is left to hang and dry. But I can’t be a bitch and not participate in these rituals—I am not so independent. So here is what I have decided to do. Every time I get invited to a wedding and people suggest that I buy something on a wedding registry, I will do so. But I will do it differently. I will see what is in my budget and what I think is nice, and then, I will buy it for myself. For the happy couple? I will resist by offering them my own gift: not on the registry, and not something they can return. It will be something they can use and that will be unique—that, my challenge to their assumptions, will be the hidden gift.

And, in the meantime, I’ve decided that even if it doesn’t exactly mesh with my political stance, I am going to set up a ‘wish list’ of kitchen items on amazon.com. I won’t send it to anyone, but if anyone wants to buy me a gift, they can look me up on amazon.com and see what they want to add to my kitchen. . .

p.s. if anyone knows of any articles critiquing the “Wedding Industrial Complex,” please let me know….

The Flags, Pune

2006-05-30T22:20:00.001-04:00

Disclaimer: this post may make me seem like a know-it-all NRI (Non Resident Indian) who scoffs at the culinary procilivities of the homeland desis, but far from that, I am really trying to grapple with what makes culinary taste work here, in ways that seem so illegible to me.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had been having a hard time discerning where the new India had emerged, and more importantly, how it had taken shape. A lot of my questions were answered when I visited Pune: the first place I visited there—eating wise—is an establishment called Flags. And yes, they even had flags of various nations on each table—a veritable culinary United Nations. The food was pretty decent—okay, really quite good. One of the things that this place boasted was the ability to prepare any dish from any part of the world—what I liked about their menu was that it created a sort of international fusion by listing pages and pages of food according to category—appetizer, soup etc., so that one could really think about the type of meal one wanted to create. Ostensibly, one could eat an Italian meal, while others at the table could eat whatever they wanted. This to me seemed like an ideal solution to the eternal problem that plagues me when I want to go out to eat with friends. I don’t have an especially finicky palate, so I’ll eat anything. But I have friends who only want to eat Chinese, or only want to eat American, and I always feel resentful, thinking things like, why I got to eat boring shit just because that’s what YOU always want? Flags, I think comes up with an innovative solution to that problem by really having a serious menu of options. Consider this: I had a lamb tagine, Amit had a ratatouille en crepes and Radhika had some kind of cilantro-encrusted fish. All in all, a fairly diverse range of food items, but ones that we were all able to eat in a nice place, without having to feel like we were at a food court.

This got me thinking about how, or why such a place might thrive in a city like Pune, one that is markedly a part of the new India, interested in all manner of cosmopolitanism, and yet, would probably crash and burn in the US. I just don’t think that in the US people would know what to do with a multi national culinary establishment. It just seems like it would cause much consternation. Part of that has to do with the idea (in the US) that one says I am going to eat, Chinese, Indian—what have you. Food is carefully apportioned according to national categories. Maybe this is too much of a blanket statement, but it seems to be one with a certain general level of applicability. I’m not sure what guides food choices in places like Pune and what motivates taste and restaurant going. In part, it seems to be that a place like Flags represents a type of culinary cosmopolitanism available to a certain class of restaurant goers. This is the more mobile elite, the ones that know what represents good taste etc., and cares about food presentation etc. This is also the class that Saskia Sassen describes in Global Cities: the new young elite of workers that have emerged as large spenders. These are the young people who have large disposable incomes and have the wherewithal, or at least the desire to consume in interesting and novel ways. Flags, after all, has a certain novelty to it: one could eat there for a year and never eat the same thing and still feel that one has not mastered the menu.

Yet, there is also the cynic in me that says that such things are only superficial. The food is amazing, but it seems that Flags is trying a little too hard to be hip and to be relevant in a world that has forgotten regional cuisines etc., and in the process of trying to be cool and international they get things wrong. Here is one example. They mistakenly say that lumpia is Indonesian, when it is Filipino. While this may not seem like a big deal, it seems to me to be the type of stupidity that reveals a lack of real interest in diversity. Surely, if one is taking an international approach to cuisine seriously enough to include “lumpia” rather than “spring rolls” on the menu, one can figure out that the origins are Filipino, not Indonesian. This might be a quibbling point, but it is telling of the ways that the attempts at cosmopolitanism seem superficial. Is it just that Filipinos matter less in India’s version of cosmopolitanism? Would Flags, for instance, mistakenly call quiche a British dish? Does accuracy matter less in third world countries when the cuisines one is including are from third world countries that one views as less significant than our own country? India has its own versions of anti-Asian prejudice, and it wouldn’t seem unlikely that Indians would conflate Indonesians and Filipinos at the same time that Indians balk at being confused with Sri Lankans or Pakistanis.

Don’t get me wrong: the food at Flags was really amazing, but it was the veneer of it that annoyed me to a certain degree. Certainly there is an exclusionary mechanism at places like Flags: they cater to an elite that considers itself culturally elite, yet if someone like me can spot 5 errors in less than 20 minutes, I have to wonder if this is an engaged version of cosmopolitanism, or merely an attempt to superficially render cosmopolitanism for a clientele that so desperately wants to feel it is relevant to a global world.

Airplane food rocks!

2006-05-26T03:49:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in the domestic terminal of the Mumbai airport--I have a connection to Pune at 4 pm,and am treating myself to an hour's worth of internet time-wasting for the princely sum of Rs 60--about US $1.50.

Ostensibly, my blog is about food, and so I'll write about food, but really wwhat I want to do is kvetch about the shitty flight service one gets in the US. Ok, so I had a flight to Mumbai that was just a little over an hour. On NWA, that would constitute no food, and maybe--if you're lucky--a snack of cheetos, trail mix and some other crap for $3. Ok, so on my 1 hr long Jet Airways flight, not only was I upgraded to business class, but I (and even those in Coach, mind you) were served three bottles of water, one bottle of nimbu pani, endless coffee and tea and a chicken kebab, samosa and bonda and a brownie--all on real ceramic ware and with proper flatware--no plastic trash.

Again, I emphasize, this was not special b/c I wasin buisness class: everybody got this. I have to say, this service was all comfortably served within an hour,so why doesn't America take a page out of its third world brethren and improving its F***ing service among its supposably millions of competitive flights? I know the answers, but Im feeling like ranting and this seemed a reason to do so. Now, let's just hope my connection to Pune is on time :)

Martin quoted in Wine Spectator

2006-05-25T11:54:00.000-04:00

Okay, so this article in which my friend Martin Manalansan is quoted, appeared in Wine Spectator back in 2001. But I only just found it, and having my own perverse history with Wine Spectator, I couldn't not post this to mah blog:) The date of the article is August 5, 2001. Also, I attended the conference at NYU that the article addresses, and it was there I met Martin, and became inspired to think about food and culture more seriously, so I have to give props to that conference for inspiring me...

East Is East -- Or Is It?

At a recent gathering of writers and scholars in New York, the food for thought was Southeast Asian

By Laura Stanley

To Americans who eat out regularly (and that means most of us), Southeast Asian food doesn't seem exotic anymore. On the East and West Coasts, and even in the heartland, millions have tasted pad thai, Singapore-style fried noodles, satay and biriyani. When a recipe calls for fish sauce, coconut milk or jasmine rice, most of us know where to get it.

But do we "get it"? Not really, say the anthropologists, historians, food writers and restaurateurs who have devoted their careers to the diverse cuisines of Southeast Asia. At a recent two-day gathering of a rather staggering number of such experts at New York University in Greenwich Village, one speaker after another explored the culinary traditions of Thailand, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines, exposing both their depth and the depth of Americans' ignorance about them.

"I contend that the media's performance is poor indeed, in the extreme," admonished Fred Ferretti, a former New York Times columnist and Pulitzer nominee who is now food and wine editor at TravelClassics.com. "The writing about Asian cooking demonstrates lack of knowledge, lack of research, certainly a lack of respect." He saved his most scathing criticism for "fusion" chefs who borrow from traditions they don't understand, citing dishes like "lamb chops with macadamia nut coconut crust on star anise, Cabernet Sauvignon jus and coconut ginger cream."

Others were more circumspect. Barbara Hansen, who writes about Asian food for the Los Angeles Times, conceded that Southeast Asian food that's been adapted for the American palate isn't always misguided. She commended Crustacean, a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence winner in San Francisco, where the Vietnamese-style fare is more subtle than it is traditional -- in part to make the menu better suited to wine.

"All cuisines are fusion," said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of the NYU Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. There was much discussion of cross-cultural transmission -- of how the Arab world gave noodles to Asia, how Chinese émigrés gave fish sauce to Thailand, how African slaves taught white American colonists how to cultivate and cook rice. (Never mind that Thomas Jefferson is given so much credit, sniffed historian Karen Hess; without Africa, she said, there'd be no Low Country rice cookery.)

"There is no such thing as authentic food," asserted Madhur Jaffrey, who has written many books on Indian cooking for the American market. Potatoes came to India from the Americas less than 200 years ago, she pointed out, "and now there must be 10,000 different potato dishes there. You take an ingredient and make it yours."

Of course, foreign foods are more frequently rejected than they are embraced, often due to xenophobia or even racism. New York restaurateur Amy Besa, who grew up in the Philippines, remembered her dismay when the first review of her pan-Asian restaurant, Cendrillon, appeared in a popular downtown weekly. "The critic said that the avocado ice cream was the stupidest idea he'd ever seen in his life. He said something like, Who ever thought of making a vegetable into an ice cream? Well, in saying that, he just insulted a whole culture, and it was not forgivable. Every Filipino grows up eating avocado ice cream. We love it. And avocado is a fruit."

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called such food matters "partly geopolitical." Certainly that is how Martin F. Manalansan, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sees it. He talked about not flavor, but odor, as a "signal to affiliate and a way to ostracize" -- as a cultural marker, in other words, that brings people together and sets them apart, much as skin color, language and clothing can. "Smells can mark a household as an immigrant one," he pointed out. Fusion cuisine, he claimed, attempts to tame or even eliminate strong, authentic food odors. It's "produced, delivered and eaten up by a public that's trying to overcome and subjugate the smelly, the distasteful, the foreign, the violent, the abnormal or the queer," he said.

This might have been a controversial statement in any other circle, but not among these listeners. Heads nodded passionately in agreement. These were, after all, initiates who adore the powerful pungency of durian -- a spiky, honeydew-sized fruit that's prized by Southeast Asians but detested by most outsiders, to whom it smells of mingled gasoline and rotted fish. One wonders: Are Laotians and Thais equally repelled by the great stinky cheeses of France? Or by avocado in vinaigrette, for that matter? "When I first got here I was so shocked by that," said Besa. "There was no way I would eat it."

I heart truffles

2006-05-25T11:46:00.000-04:00

I'm desperately searching for truffle recipes as I'm off to Pune tomorrow and have promised good friend Radhika that I will teach her how to make truffles. So far the truffles I've made, tend to be dipped in cocoa or ground up nuts--I've not found a way to make that delectable hard chocolate candy covering with the molten truffle interior.

I found a recipe for such trufflage online, so voila. Hope it works!

Chocolate Truffles

This is a basic chocolate truffles recipe. Chocolate truffles should be simple, delicate, and not overrun by other flavorings and the following recipe achieves this balance. If true chocolate essence is what you crave, these chocolate truffles are a sought after treasure. The ganache is dense and coats the palette.

INGREDIENTS :

• 1 1/2 pounds of dark coverture for ganache

• 1 1/2 pounds of dark tempered coverture for dipping

• 1 1/4 cups heavy whipping cream

• 1/4 vanilla bean

• 3 1/2 Tablespoons of unsalted butter (softened & 1/4" cubed)

• 2 1/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder

THE PROCESS :

1)	Chop coverture as fine as possible. The best way to achieve the desired consistency for your chocolate truffles is using a food processor. The finer the better. As it starts to reduce it may start to melt which is ok. Place contents in large bowl.
2)	Drop vanilla bean into cream
3)	Bring cream to a boil. Let bubble and rise. Reduce to medium heat.
4)	Remove vanilla bean, slice down the center and scrape seed contents into the boiled cream. Stir well.
5)	Two tablespoons at a time, mix boiled cream into coverture using all of the cream. Mix until smooth.
6)	Equalize the temperature of the ganache by allowing to set for 20 minutes at room temperature or 10 minutes in a refrigerator.
7)	Add butter to the coverture and mix thoroughly until the mixture is consistent. Do not leave any lumps of butter.
8)	Place back in refrigerator for approximately 20 minutes. This will allow the ganache to stiffen slightly. The consistency you are looking for is that of a spreadable paste. Not to dense and not too runny but somewhere in between. Periodically check for the desired consistency.
9)	Spoon ganache into a pastry bag with a 1/2" round tip. Pipe into balls on parchment or wax paper. This may take a few tries to get it down. Start with light pressure and increase as you lift up. Finish with a light squeeze.
10)	Allow ganache to set for a very minimum of 3 hours or up to 24 hours for best results. This is done to allow for proper crystallization.
11)	After setting period, temper the second 1 1/2 lbs of coverture. Dip centers into tempered coverture with fingers or circular dipping fork. Shake off excess.
12)	Immediately drop into a bowl containing the cocoa powder. Sift cocoa over the truffle but do not touch it until the coverture has had time to harden slightly. Finish by rolling with fingers in cocoa powder.
TIPS:
•	Perfectly Round Chocolate Truffles: Use a melon baller to form ganache instead of the pastry bag in step 9. Bypass step 11 and drop formed ganache into cocoa powder. Coat generously. Shake excess cocoa powder form chocolate truffles.
•	Slightly Sweeter Truffles: Use sweetened cocoa powder

Storage: Shelf life is approximately 2 to 3 weeks when refrigerated. Make absolutely sure the chocolate truffles are thoroughly sealed in some type of airtight container.

Serving: Remove chocolate truffles from refrigerator 2 hours prior to eating. Serve at room temperature.

Coverture - A term you will hear quite a bit in these circles. Simply put, coverture is good quality chocolate that contains at the very minimum 32% cocoa butter.

This allows the coverture to be molded, shaped or formed in an easier manner. Coverture does not contain fats such as palm kernel or coconut fats (oils). The absolute best covertures will contain nothing but the bare essentials, those being: cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla, & Lecithin.

Ganache - This is the soft creamy filling common to most chocolate truffles. The result of mixing boiled cream, butter and coverture. Can range in density from custard like to a hard paste. Should contain a minimum of 10% butter to provide for the correct mouth feel. The higher the cream & butter to coverture ratio, the lighter the ganache. The heart of all chocolate truffles.

Truffle - For clarification, chocolate truffles are the high priestess of all confectionary creations. Its namesake originates from its similarity to the forest floor dweller, the truffle mushroom. In its most original form, chocolate truffles are neither shapely nor a picture of perfection. For what chocolate truffles lack in appearance is well made up for by their delectable, almost addictive allure.

Best Food Blogs?

2006-05-25T09:50:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I really don't read Forbes magazine EVER, but I was looking for good food blogs and found this article online about what makes for a good food blog. According to this criteria, half the bloggering attempts out there suck, and I tend to agree. I think my own desire to write a blog dedicated to, and inspired by food is my attempt to revitalize a genre I know little about. Well, not entirely true, but there is something deeply unfulfilling for me about reading someone salivating about food in ways that revel in consumption without offering anything else. So here's the article.

Best Food Blogs Breckinridge Ely

There are many reasons people write blogs: to vent, to communicate, to meet other people, to stave off boredom, to be anarchic, to cultivate a kind ofcelebrity, but it is obvious that the people who maintain food blogs do so because they love food.

Of course, most people love food. It is one of mankind's greatest pleasures, consolers and unifiers. But the majority of food blogs are often only indirectly concerned with consumption. Rather, most celebrate instead food's preparation, presentation, history, arcana and psycho-economic role in society, uplifting, gratifying and informing not only the blogs' authors but those who read their blogs.

While many of the blogs are amateurish or sometimes not even terribly interesting, for the most part it is hard to fault a person for dedicating so much of their time to so nourishing a passion. The better blogs, on the other hand, like better cooking, appropriately enough, can be served up with piquancy, relish, flavor and a sense of humor.

Depending on why one reads a food blog--for practical advice, communality or something in between?--some blogs will be more appealing than others. It can be frustrating to read about how the author cooked the best clam chowder of their life and then doesn't give a recipe. For the most part, though, after sampling dozens of food blogs, we now offer up the ones that most appealed to our tastes.

These are the Best Food Blogs according to Forbes.com
http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com
http://deusexculina.robsama.com
http://foodgoat.blogspot.com
http://blogs.salon.com/0001399 (Julie/Julia Project)
http://www.lapingourmand.com

Cereus Blooms at Night and Food

2006-05-24T13:22:00.000-04:00

I’m writing this blog entry in the hopes that Ms Gladys might read it and offer some of her brilliantly brill insights. Gladys is one of those people who is just so brilliant and generous—see her blog if you don’t believe me!!!

But to business, I’ve been working on a revision of an article I wrote about three years ago about the novel Reef by Sri Lankan British author, Romesh Gunesekera and Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire. I was trying to make the argument that these works decouple the link between food, sexuality and the home space. Cooking, in so many ways, is a fundamental activity within the household: for domestic management to be smooth and efficient, one implicitly accords a central role to food preparation. Without even realizing it, cooking, I argue, is one of those activities designed to reproduce good heterosexual citizens. I’m not by any means the only person to argue this (think Partha Chatterjee, for one) but if the home is microcosm of the nation, there are similar ways that household economies are rigidly constructed to produce good future citizens of the nation—ones that are almost always heterosexual.

So here’s my argument: what if characters in novels and films use food to challenge this necessary matrix between food and sex? What is food becomes a way to express queer desire within the home? As Gayatri Gopinath has argued, we need to become much more vigilant about thinking about how queer subjects might be born within the home-site, and not to always assume a Western telos of ‘coming out’ and departure. I take Gopinath’s comments very seriously, and so my work is really inspired to try and offer the critique she advocates—and to see how food preparation might serve purposes other than national edification, and the creation of a new generation of straight bodies.

There are several moments in both Reef and Fire that attest to this logic. Think about how in Fire, the two female leads Sita and Radha, mark their growing fondness for each other through a culinary idiom. One says, “my mom always said a woman without a husband is like white rice: bland and appetizing”; the other replies, “I liked white rice.” Then, when they imagine leaving their husbands, and try to imagine how they’ll forge a life together, they jokingly say, “We’ll open a takeaway.” There are just a few moments like this in the film, but enough to buttress an alternative view of food.

Okay, so getting to the point—as I revise my article into a book chapter, I’m thinking about Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night. My thoughts on this will be very a la Eric Auerbach in Mimesis though I do not claim to offer analogously brilliant insights. Our similarity is in form alone: I’m in India without access to my copy of Cereus, so I’m writing this from memory. Mala Ramachandin, the main character is virtually a prisoner in her own home after her mother escapes her abusive husband to be with her white lover, Lavinia. Mala’s sister, Asha, eventually leaves the house too, and Mala is left alone in the house with her abusive father, who through his incestuous practices, treats Mala as both wife and daughter in the worst ways possible.

We know that the hour marking the anniversary of her mother’s departure is traumatic for Mala—and deeply so. What I find fascinating is how Mala manages those moments o grief. She prepares a chili pickle for weeks in advance and at the appointed hour, consumes the bottle so that she is literally burning inside. Her physical pain on most days does not match her emotional pain, but on that date—that traumatic hour—it seems that she needs to take an extra step to negotiate the pain and to feel such an intense level of bodily pain that she literally does not have to think at that appointed hour.

Another example to think about: her father expects her to prepare his meals for him, and on one occasion she misses market day, and does not have chicken curry prepared for him, so she opts to make fish instead. He is so incensed when he returns that he throws the dish on the floor and rapes her. She then is asked to make dinner, and she goes into the garden and finds a dead pigeon and cooks it as though it were chicken. She then serves it to her father, and he seems satisfied. What is so stunning about this move is that the pigeon is dead, rancid, and disease-ridden. He had complained that he would not eat her fish (inedible to his tastes) and yet she brilliantly serves him something that is inedible—literally so—and yet he does not notice.

The kitchen in Cereus is also such a site of violence: some of those most difficult scenes from the novel, as well as some of the most gut-wrenchingly awful scenes of incestuous rape I’ve read take place in the kitchen.

So, what I’m struggling with here, is how to think about the kitchen in this novel that is so queerly constructed? Chandin, Mala’s father, feels ‘betrayed’ by homosexuality—his wife left him for another woman. Mala herself seems queer in some ways. And yet cooking, scattered sporadically through this novel, is not just not a buttress to heterosexuality, but it seems to be a way for Mala to assert some kind of agency. She seems to negotiate her own pain through the way she approaches cooking for Chandin, and this small act, maybe, leads her to find the strength to eventually kill Chandin and escape his abuse. (now I’m really oversimplifying). So does her approach to food allow her to escape the confining roles assigned to her? I’m not sure. I’d like to think so—it’s hard to compare to Reef or Fire. Neither have that level of latent pain, but in Fire, Radha’s sari also catches fire when a pot is knocked off the gas burner.

I think what binds these works is the sense that they are resolutely committed to thinking of food as full of agency and potential: in its most enabling sense, it offers someone like Triton in Reef, the ability to express love and affection through the dishes he lovingly prepares for his boss without having to fear the repercussions of actually articulating those wretched words “I love you.” A little bit of the same happens in Fire. But with Mala, who is denied the ability (by Chandin) to love another, food becomes a way, not to express love, but to say, “I do not love you and I do not want to be a victim left behind and betrayed by those who I once loved.” Food is her way to assert control and perhaps, in the case of Chandin, also a way to say, “Fuck you. I am not your wife, and you can’t abuse me.” I don’t know. I’m also realizing that one of the ways Mala wants to express her love for Ambrose is to cook for him and I can’t for the life of me remember what happens to foil those plans.

Chicken 65?

2006-05-24T12:25:00.000-04:00

Does anyone know what "Chicken 65" is? I ordered some from the Chinese take-out place today and it is amazingly delicious. It's like that type of Chinese-Indian fusion I keep raving about. Really spicy chicken with a gazillion curry leaves. I can't for the life of me figure out what the name means, so if anyone knows, please let me know.

In the meantime, here is a recipe I found online on tarladalal.com for it. I cannot speak for the poor grammar or why the recipe requires two hours. I'm guessing time to marinade and to cook?

Oh, and also, a shout out to my friend and colleague Lynn who just had a birthday today. Happy birthday, Lynn!!!

Chicken 65

Preparation Time : 2 hours
Cooking Time : 30 min
Serves / Makes : 6

Ingredients

Chicken 500 gm
Yogurt 2 table spoons
Chilly powder 2 tsp
Coriander powder 2 tsp
Garam masala 1 tsp
Ginger, Garlic Paste 2 table spoons
Red colour
Salt

Method

- Mix all the above and keep for 2 hours
- Fry adding curry leaves

Premila Lal, Vimla Patil and some recipes

2006-05-23T04:46:00.000-04:00

These are some recipes I typed up from my mom’s cookbooks. They come mainly from two books:
Lal, Premila, Indian Recipes. New Delhi, Rupa, 1974.
Patil, Vimla. The Complete Indian Cookbook: Kashmir to Kanyakumari. New Delhi,
Rupa, 2003.

Interesting factoid about both authors. They are both affiliated with women’s magazines in India. Vimla Patil is the editor of Femina, the women’s mag, and even more interesting is the narrative in Lal’s book. The front matter to the book notes, “Premila Lal, India’s leading cookery writer was born in Tanzania, East Africa. She is now settled in Bombay.” I had no idea about Lal’s diasporic roots. That might make for some interesting food for thought. I’m especially curious to see if the recipes are part of a larger narrative that shows how Indians abroad can make Indian food. I seem to recall a ragged version of these books in my mother’s collection, and this seems like an updated version of that book. Apparently Lal also has connections to Femina and Eve’s Weekly. The first recipe comes from Patil, the rest come from Lal’s book) Enjoy!

Green Tomato Bhaji

¼ kg firm green tomatoes, ½ coconut,¼ kg onions, 2 green chilies, 1 tbsp coconut oil, salt, 5 curry leaves, ¼ tsp mustard seeds, ¼ tsp cumin seeds

Slice tomatoes, onions and chilies.
Grate coconut and mix all ingredients with salt and curry leaves. Add water and cook till tomatoes are done and water evaporates.
Add oil, stir, and season with cumin and mustard seeds.

Chicken Chaat

2 cups cooked diced chicken, 2 large potatoes boiled and diced, 2 large tomatoes, diced, 2 hard boiled eggs, chopped, 2-3 tsp chaat masala, 2 green chilies, finely chopped, 1 tbsp lemon juice, ½ bunch cilantro leaves, salt

Apply salt to all ingredients. Mix well, add chaat masala.
Sprinkle lemon juice over ingredients and garnish with cilantro leaves

Eggplant and Chicken

3 eggplants, peeled and cut lengthwise,2 large onions, sliced,1 large chicken, cut into serving sizes, 1 small green pepper, cut into rings, 4 large tomatoes, peeled and chopped, ½ cup ghee, or oil, ½ tsp saffron, salt and pepper, 1 large lemon, juiced

Sprinkle eggplant slices with salt and leave to a side.
Layer onion, green pepper, chicken and tomatoes in deep pot. Add lemon juice and simmer for 50 –60 minutes. When chicken is done, stir to mix all ingredients.
Fry eggplant slices and arrange over chicken. Simmer for few minutes until liquid dissolves and gravy is think. Sprinkle with saffron and serve.

Bhindi Meat Curry

½ lb okra, 1 lb meat, ½ lb tomatoes, blanched, peeled, mashed., 2 large onions, chopped, 4 cloves garlic, minced, 1 small piece ginger, minced, ¼ tsp turmeric, 3-4 dry red chilies, ½ tsp coriander, ½ tsp black cumin, ½ tsp black pepper, 1 ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp garam masala, cilantro, 3 tbsp ghee

Wash meat and cut into cubes. Keep aside.
Fry onions in ghee until light brown. add ginger garlic juices. Add meat, turmeric, coriander powder, chilies, pepper, cumin and salt. Cook meat and add water if necessary.
Meanwhile, dry okra and fry lightly.
When meat is browned, add okra and tomatoes. Simmer with little water until meat is tender and tomatoes have been absorbed. Garnish with the cilantro leaves and garam masala.

Coorg Pineapple Curry

1 large ripe pineapple, cut into cubes, 1 pint water, 1 tbsp ghee, 1 large onion, ½ tsp mustard seeds, 1 tsp coriander seeds, 8 dry red chilies, 1 egg-sized lump of jaggery, salt to taste

Grind chilies and coriander to paste.
Heat ghee, and fry onions (until slightly brown) with mustard seeds.
Add pineapple cubes and chili-coriander paste. Add jaggery, salt and water to taste. Cook on low heat until gravy thickens. Serve with rice.

Fish Vindaloo

1 large fish, cut into bite-size pieces, 1 ½ lb onions, hopped, 6 dry red chilies, 10-12 cloves garlic, 1 large piece of ginger, ½ tbsp cumin seeds, ½ pint vinegar, 3 tbsp ghee, 1 inch stick cinnamon, salt to taste, 1 oz sugar, 1 tsp garam masala, 6 green chilies

Rub fish in salt. Leave for 10 mins, rinse.
Grind chilies, garlic, onion, ginger and cumin seeds with a little vinegar to make a fine paste. Fry spices in a little ghee for few minutes.
Add the cinnamon and fish. Add salt and fry for 5 mins on high. Lower heat and simmer until almost done.
Add vinegar, sugar, green chilies, garam masala and cook uncovered until sauce thickens. Don’t use water while cooking.

Cauliflower Ghosht Curry

1 lb cauliflower, cut into small florets, 2 lb meat, cut into small pieces, 8 cloves garlic, 1 piece ginger, 2 large onions, finely chopped, 1 ripe tomato, chopped, ½ tsp turmeric, cilantro, 6 dry red chilies*, 6 peppercorns*, 2 tbsp coriander seeds*, 1 inch piece cinnamon*,4 cloves* , 1 tbsp desiccated coconut*

Create paste out of ginger and garlic. Rub onto meat and keep for about 15 mins.
Grind * ingredients into paste. Keep aside.
Fry onions in ghee until light brown. Add ground spices and fry.
Add meat, tomato and cauliflower. Fry 1 min and add turmeric and water for meat to cook. Cover with well-fitting lid and cook until meat is tender. Season with salt. Cook another ten minutes. Garnish with cilantro leaves.

Mango Galore, in Mangalore

2006-05-23T04:12:00.000-04:00

Since coming to Mangalore, I haven’t really been eating a whole lot at restaurants. What I have been enjoying a lot of is fresh organic produce. It is currently mango season here, and oh my god, am I in heaven. In the US, bar the few Mexicano imports, mangoes—in a word—suck. At the risk of reproducing all those things about food porn that I abhor, I have to say, mangoes here are succulent, divine and sublime. I’ve had about 4 varieties of mangoes so far. I don’t remember all the names—langada, thottapuri, badam, neelam, mundappa, alphonso, but the two I like the best are the “neelam,” and of course the “alphonso” mango. Thus far, I’d never tried a real alphonso mango. The only ones I’d had were the cans of mango pulp that go into my famous mango cheesecakes. It was weird tasting the real deal and being able to discern how close they resemble the canned pulp variety—that at least tells me that the canned mango folks maybe onto something, and maybe my mango cheesecake is not some kind of sad derelict version of fake mangoery.

Here, mangoes show up in all kinds of dishes. Two days ago, I was at a 14^th day lunch, which typically takes place on the 13^th day after the death of someone. There was the customary lunch served on banana leaf, and while I was annoyed to have to eat with my right hand (the eternal gripe of the leftie) I remember how amazing and tasty the food was. My favorite was the mango curry, which was made of wild mangoes.

People in the US just don’t get mangoes and how versatile they are. Here, mangoes are mixed with everything. Mango flavored Kellogg’s cornflakes, mango soy milk, mango shrikand, mango candy, mango ice cream, mango juice—there’s no limit to the deliciousness. I’ve taken to eating about 1-2 mangoes a day, as well as pineapple and chikku, watermelon, papaya and sweet limes (almost at the end of the season L ) All in all, good fare.

Before I go, here is my recipe for mango cheesecake. I can’t make it in India, but it satisfies my un-ending taste for mangoes back in da US.

Anita's Mango Cheesecake

1 graham cracker cookie crust

2 packages cream cheese

about ¼ cup sugar

2 eggs

some vanilla

about ½ -3/4 cups mango pulp.

Beat cream cheese until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla. Add mango pulp and sugar to taste. Mango pulp is so naturally sweet, you might not need all of the sugar.
When the mix is to your taste, pour into the cookie crust. Bake for about 1 hr until top rises and is cracked and slightly browned. Oven temp is about 400F.

Cool before refrigerating, and make sure pie is pretty cold before serving.

Coffee Day Cafe, Mangalore, India

2006-05-22T13:08:00.000-04:00

I'm writing my blog from Mangalore, India, where I have been for the past few weeks. I've returned to India after a gap of soemthing like 8 years, during which time, India's economic growth has been dramatic, and palpable. In the weeks before my "return," all I would hear was about how much India had changed. I'm not going to claim to be conversant with the intricacies of life in India, but I had my suspicions that the two places I'd be spending most of my time would not chronicle that much dramatic change. Why? Because, the one is a Bombay, a city that is already so unusual from the rest of Indian cities, that I was not fully sure how globalization would alter an already cosmopolitan and vibrant city. The other city, Mangalore, is one that is perhaps too small, and too unimportant to register massive changes.

I suspect the major changes will be in spaces in between: cities like Pune, which I visit in a few days, as well as Bangalore, a city that I've heard has changed immesurably within the last few years. I'll be visiting Bangalore next week, so we'll see....

Today, I perhaps registered one of the major changes wrought by a changing India. I visited Coffee Day Cafe, a chain coffee store which in most ways feels like a Starbucks, or Cup o' Joe, the local chain I frequent back in Ohio, but the big difference is that its so freaking loud. I still have yet to understand why coolness and hipness in India has to be marked through auditory assault. There are few things about the "West" I like: one of them is a quiet place to read or write within a public space. I've never liked listening to coffee shop music, and the advent of IPod culture has enabled my resistance to it, but much as I liked the coffee and even my fake brownie ( I say fake because it was really chocolate cake masquerading as a brownie: a no-no in my book), I wasn't that thrilled with the music.

I want to find my place in this new India, and I want to find what is changed. Most of the changes I notice are culinary related. This will make me seem so hopelessly retrograde, but the India I remember was an India of Thums Up, Gold Spot, Limca and Mangola. All that has gone and its now Coke and Pepsi. I've seen any number of food products catering to the Indian market: Frito Lays with Masala; Kelloggs Cornflakes with Mango Puree or Bananas; mango-flavored Ice cream at Baskin Robbins; Chicken Big Macs; Tandoori Pizza at Pizza Hut. All these are creations that I like to think of as differant globalization: repetition with a slight difference. Its Indianized Americana.

I'm not against these changes, but these are the main changes I've noticed. That and freaking cellphone everywhere. What I love about India remains there: the fresh food, the bustle and crowds, the in your faceness of life. That all remains the same. The fact that India demands you to engage with your physical surroundings: you use all senses--touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. You can't opt out of life here. That hasn't changed in the least, and I to me. . . .well, that is a good thing.

McDonalds, VT Area, Bombay, India

2006-05-05T02:09:00.002-04:00

I'm not one to usually count trips to fast food establishments as legit entries within my world of food bloggering, but McDonalds in India is such a culturally rich terrain that there is no way I can justify not writing about McD's.

For the past 13 years I've lived in the United States, and one of the things that I was so excited about was the prospect of being able to eat at McDonalds more often. Prior to coming to the US, McD's was totally glam to me, as it is to many kids raised outside the United States. The only McDonalds I'd been to were in Singapore where the restaurants are decidedly (or at least were in the 1980s) more upscale. In the tropics, air conditioning is a must, and a luxury. McDonalds was one of the oldest places to have a/c and so the whole experience was so enthralling for a kid. Burgers, the hallmark of Americana and shakes and fries were all very exotic to me.

When I arrived in the US to go to college at the University of Wisconsin, I noticed McD's was a whole different thing: it was a place that I continued to go to on weekends with my dorm friends, Katherine, Tjin Tjin and Camilla. But they were all, like me, international students, respectively from Singapore, Indonesia and Norway. Over time we came to notice that none of our fellow dorm-mates from the Highlander frequented McD's (or for that matter any of the fast food establishments) and we also noticed that McD's did not have the same polish and verve it had in places abroad.

In the intervening years, I've stopped going to McD's. In fact, I literally cannot eat the food there. Just a few days before leaving the US, Michael and I went to McD's on Morse Road and I felt ill for a whole day after. I also am part of the post Fast Food Nation generation and don't support their business practices, the way they use all kinds of sketchy meats in their products etc. Plus, really, after watching Super Size Me, I can't even stand the idea of eating McDonald's food.

So all this as a prelude to explain why, and how, I ended up putting a visit to McDonalds in India so high on my list of priorities. My reasons can always be justified as 'research' but in the case of McD's it was important for me to see how McDonaldization had taken shape, and root, in India. I am after all, of the diasporic generation that was raised with sporadic trips to India. India, to me had been characterized (as for many) as a space free of multinational capital and where domestic industries were supposed to thrive--all that translated to an absence of the typical markers of US globalization, most notably, no KFC, no Pizza Hut and no McDonalds.

When McDonalds did hit India, it was always going to be a little difference: no beef, after all! Some people I know bitch and moan about how that means Indian McDonalds is bad. Every meat burger has chicken instead of beef. But to me, what this means about globalization aside, this represented a unique way for McDonalds to actually make food that is tasty. After hitting the Prince of Wales Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in the Kala Ghoda area, my mom and I took a taxi and came to the McDonalds near VT (Victoria Terminus). I already knew the menu because I'd shown images of McDonalds around the world to my food and culture class. But I'd never tasted the things. There were things like McAloo Tikki, Chicken Maharaja Mac, McVeggie and only one thing I remember with the word "curry,"--something called a "McCurry Pan."

All in all, the food was not bad. It was Indianness consuming American fare on its terms. No apologies for spiciness, no apologies for wanting vegetarian options. McDonalds in India, as I suspected is more like McD's in Asia, than the US, insofar as it is not an option for everyday eating: its still a bit of a luxury--its a bit expensive especially when placed against the much more reasonably priced fast food options that to me, are the mainstay of Indian food--things like samosas, bhel puri, chaat, iddlies, vadas etc.

NB: As we drove into Mangalore, I saw a Pizza Hut that had just opened. The lettering in Kannada was what caught my attention at first. I have still to go there, but I'm certainly curious about how they've fused Americanness to our palates:)

Now, if McDonalds and Pizza Hut in the US would serve from its Indian menu, perhaps I'd actually go....

Samrat, Churchgate area, Bombay, India

2006-05-05T02:09:00.001-04:00

Finally, I am in India!!! I've not been able to travel out of the US for a number of years owing to a pending green-card application. I got my green card last year, and one of the first things on my agenda, was to plot a visit back to the 'homeland.' Not surprisingly, among the many things on my to-do list involved food. One of the first places I ate at after arriving in Bombay was Samrat, one of my favorite Gujarati restaurants.

One of the things I love about being in India is that I can go out to eat all kinds of regional cuisines. Amid a vastly changing India, it is nice to have some things remain the same. I remember eating at Samrat about 8 yrs ago when last in Bombay and the thing that stunned me then was how much I could eat for Rs 100, a mere 2 USD. Some inflation has set in, and the thali at Samrat is now Rs. 125--3 USD.

The thali is one of those Indian creations that has not translated well in the diaspora: people think it is a way to merely sample a lot of different foods on one plate (hence, thali). It is that, but in India, the thali is also a buffet of sorts. The food is brought to your table and you can eat your fill of whatever, and don't have to get into the buffet line for it. My kinda thing!

It is fascinating to me to think that what I know of Gujarati food is what I've encountered in the 'homeland.' There are several bad jokes about Gujarati food being nothing more than regular Indian food with sugar added, but the cuisine, in truth, is more complex. Its always struck me as interesting that in the US, Gujaratis are a large sector of the Indian American population, but you'd never know it from going to restaurants. Now there are more Udipi style restaurants, but the majority of restaurants still serve the staid Moghlai inspired cuisine. Gujarati cuisine to me, is the ideal vegematarian food. Its so rich (way too much ghee) but its a cuisine that celebrates vegetables and pulses. Not that all regional Indian cuisines don't do that, but the vegematarian influences are so strong in Gujarati culture, that it translates to amazing vegetarian food.

One of the things I love in Gujju food is the khadi and kitchidi. The khadi at Samrat was ok, not great. Nevertheless, I found a good recipe for khadi I want to share. I found it in a cookbook I bought at Crossword near Kemps Corner in Bombay. Khadi is one of those sublime dishes that can be eaten plain or with rice. Its not a 'curry' and its not just yogurt. Its something entirely its own, that could be eaten with rice, but also works really well by itself. Here's the recipe:

Kadhi
1 cup yogurt
1 ½ tbsp gram flour
2 green chilies
1 sprig curry leaves
½ bunch cilantro
¼ tsp coriander powder
½ tsp mustard seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds
oil/ salt

1.Mix yogurt and gram flour. Add 5 cups water, coriander powder, salt, chopped chilies, curry leaves and boil for ½ hour.
2.Season with mustard and cumin seeds. Garnish with chopped cilantro.

Shiv Sagar, Bombay, India

2006-05-05T02:09:00.000-04:00

Since arriving in Bombay, I've not been keeping any kind of reasonable schedule. I get up ridiculously early, and keep not being eligible for the fancier breakfasts that Sea Green Hotel says it can order from Shiv Sagar, a restaurant around the corner. I'm amazed to see how much the street has changed in the twenty years or so I've been coming here. There is now a Baskin Robbins on the corner, some Pizza Place that I will boycott because they had a freaking insulting sign that said "Damn the anti-Dam people" referring to the campaign to stop the creation of the Narmada Dam. I mean, come on, wtf, people? Are we that complacent with life, and so invested in our selfish lives that we don't see why the anti-dam movement is so important? For the first time, I begin to understand the critiques against the complacent apolitical youth that a film like Rang De Basanti makes. But I digress...

One of the new additions to this particular street is Shiv Sagar, which if names mean anything, should be a good South Indian iddli-sambar, masala dosa type establishment. But I get there and see its so much more than that.

In my dissertation, I wrote about how there are all kinds of things that don't count (within the US imagination) as fusion (most notably non white cuisines combining together). In India, at least in my lifetime, Chinese cuisine has become more of a presence, but its often not that imaginative or interesting. Not so in Shiv Sagar. For some reason, I was hankering for a dosa, and not being a conventional sort, I was drawn to the list of non-traditional dosas. The one that drew my attention was the paneer Szechuan dosa: about three types of fusion in one. North Indian, Chinese and South Indian. Let's just say I was not at all disappointed! This dish was amazing, and the kind of thing I imagine when I think fusion.

Ming Tsai, grand master of fusion, says something like good fusion is when a dish is made not just new, but better. Paneer Szechuan dosa made the staid old dosa not only new, but better. And yet, it saddens me to think that such a dish will never make it to the US. Among the US Indophiles, almost all the ones I know denigrate Chinese cuisine in India. Its not as good as Chinese food elsewhere, its not as good as Indian food--what have you.
US Indophiles in particular, seem to be the most resistant to fusion. It is as if they want Indian food and culture to remain unalloyed and pure. But also, I think (and this goes back to my posting on Masala Casa, which is now closed, by the way) they don't get it when non-white can mix with non-white. Its a defensive posture for whiteness: Asianness must mix with whiteness if it is to be legitimized, and admixtures of Asian-Asian are just illegible to them.

I'm fascinated by this, especially because I'm also fascinated by how Indo-Chinese interactions have taken root in such different ways and cultural arenas and no one really talks about the latent Orientalism in some of these cultural forms: think about the song, "Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo" from Howrah Bridge (recently remixed on the Bombay Bronx album as "Mr Chung" by Stevoss Feat. MC Slayter.) and one sees what I'm alluding to. Anyhooz, Paneer Szechuan dosa to me is an enabling fusion in that it doesn't denigrate anything, and it keeps the distinctiveness of flavors while creating something new. I wish there could be things like this in the US, but until folks in the US don't look so askance at brown fusions, that is not going to happen.

Bhojanic, Decatur, Georgia

2006-03-26T21:12:00.000-05:00

One of the worst things about being on vacation is that I tend to eat and eat and eat, so that by the time the last day encroaches, I am literally so full, I can feel the extra ten pounds I have gained. Sadly, what this means for me, is that I inevitably feel the onset of serious guilt pangs and I am unable to really enjoy whatever happens to be the “last meal” in said city. When the last meal also comes on the heels of a dinner the previous night at a Brazilian churascarria, I am doubly in trouble.

Such was my plight, when I landed at Bhojanic. I had told myself I would not go, but my friend Falu, implored upon me to come with her to this fabulous place, and how could I not. The place advertised itself as producing innovative desi fusion, and our (or at least my) new acquaintance, Shyam, also one hella DJ had invited us to come listen to him DJ at this place.

Well, we got to Bhojanic (us being Falu, my former advisor, Sunaina and my friend Cathy—later, we were joined by friend Purvi), and it really is the kind of Indian restaurant I dream of when I think about interesting and innovative fusion. I didn’t really eat very much (that guilt thing) but the place just felt ‘real.’ It was the kind of place that didn’t have to try and be hip to something exciting and new in the world of desi fusion: it just was. The waiters who seemed so thoroughly vacant, were also so easy on the eyes, that it made the whole experience all that more interesting. But back to the food: what made its version of fusion so good, was that it actively aimed to create things that don't just sound good, but that taste good. The one little thing I ate was 'eggplant makki ki roti": ok that makes a lot of sense. Eggplant served with a traditional flatbread made of corn (Hence the makki)--and it was affordable. What I doubly liked about this place, then, was also the way that they really evoked the spirit of fusion, joining things together, while keeping things affordable. Why fusion always got to be so darned expensive? Does joininfg different culinary styles necessarily have to translate to high priced food? And I should add that I am one of the few people I know who will spend a lot of money on food.

Despite being enmired within Asian American Studies, and that too within South Asian Americana, I’ve never felt that comfortable in claiming a part of a South Asian American community. I’ve always felt more comfortable with other Asians, Filipinos, Koreans but South Asians, I have a harder time with: maybe it is because with my alphabet soup identity, I am neither, ABCD, nor FOB, nor NRI, nor RNI (this is my new favorite: Resident Non Indian). Going to Bhojanic was one of the few times I’ve gone out with an almost entirely desi posse, and felt comfortable. Maybe my research on food is what has helped center me when I go to restaurants with desis: I have a proven/ established level of expertise, that I can feel like I belong. Ironically, my research had tended to veer towards an alternative narrative: one that shows how food cannot always cement belonging. So what did it mean that Bhojanic helped make me feel at ease? It clearly wasn’t the food as I hardly had any: I shared my makki ki roti with Sunaina, but thass about it. Maybe it is the fact that I can now talk meaningfully about food, and have a place at the table, because I have tried to find my own way to relate to South Asian identity? That’s a little hokey, I know.

One of the things that was nice about Bhojanic was that they had their own T-shirts that actually were cool. I bought one before the evening was up: my favorite part about it was the back where it includes a message, “Caution: Food Contains Flavor.” Maybe that’s what I liked about Bhojanic: Falu and I both bought t-shirts, and I had something tangible to take with me that was non-caloric. At the end of the day, I know Bhojanic left me wanting to come back for more. Maybe it was as simple as me wanting to eat more of its food, but I think the open-endedness of my feelings about Bhojanic might not be an altogether bad thing, and in the meantime I have a pretty awesome t-shirt to wear!

Boi e Braza, Atlanta

2006-03-26T21:11:00.001-05:00

Up until the last few months, I’d never been to a Brazilian steakhouse, aka churascarria. Oh man, had I been in deprivation or what? This is the type of place that will make me do away in a second with any of my fears about mad cow. While I’m not that foolhardy to risk getting a serious bout of mad cow disease by ingesting some curious offal served up by McD’s, I’ll put some serious blinders on, and convince myself that it is safe to eat gobs of meat when I go to a churascarria. I’d been to one with Allan somewhere in midtown NYC, just before we went to see “The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” on Broadway. This time, I was with 18 Filipinos, a good crew amongst which to indulge in vulgar and vast amounts of meattage.

The thing I liked about the churascarria: two things.

It helped me figure out what all those different cuts of meat are. I’m still no expert, but I can better navigate the difference between sirloin, rump etc.
It’s the closest thing to an Indian thali I’ve come across. Most restaurants in the US I know tend to either be a la carte menus, or buffets. The thali system is a little misunderstood in the US. People tend to think that the definition of ‘thali’ is plate and that is not incorrect, but it is also the case that thali as a culinary practice refers to some kind of intermediate space between a la carte and the buffet. The best way I know to represent a thali is as a buffet that comes to your table. You have to be rather dexterous and nimbly move your hand over plate if you wish to not receive a particular food item or else the server will dunk a portion of whathaveyou onto your plate. The churascarria system strikes me as something similar. Meat is brought to your plates and sliced to your liking onto your plate. It is the lazy meat eater’s version of heaven: a seemingly endless supply of meat finds its way onto your plates so that the only thing that one exercises is one’s restraint and jaw muscles.

But seriously, I don’t know how much the churascarria commodifies Brazilian fare but it is something I’ve only encountered through this type of restaurant.

Boi e Brazza was doubly fun for me, because I got to hang with all my Filipina friends, Martin, Allan, Lucy, Jeff, Gladys, J.B. And I can’t think of a better crew with whom to eat vast amounts of meat, or for that matter, to just enjoy food.

NB: with this entry, I complete my ‘backlog’ of entries, and now I have to think about ways in which I want to rethink my bloggering attempts.

10 Degrees South, Atlanta

2006-03-26T21:11:00.000-05:00

Within a relative short period of time, I have found myself leaving the drudgeries of the Midwest for more interesting culinary spaces: Philly about a week ago, and now, Atlanta. I found out about 10 Degrees South, to date, the only South African restaurant I’ve been to, on opentable.com. I don’t know a whole lot about South African cuisine, apart from the fact that it is a mélange of different styles of cuisine originated from South Africa’s rather colored past--pun intended.

I don’t know what it is about being Indian, but for some reason, I always am pleased to see the ways Indian inspired foods have made their way into the local fare of so many places which are part of the larger Indian diaspora. Even though Indians rarely use the term, “Curry” to describe our foods, it certainly seems to be the case that the diasporic incarnations of our foods seem to frequently use this term. 10 Degrees South as I recall, had some curry dish, most likely with chicken. But despite the ubiquity of ‘curry’ dishes, I somehow always feel that it is a cop out for me to order a ‘curry’ dish, even though in many cases, that is what I most want to eat. I wonder what that sentiment is about? Part of it seems to be a desire to avoid replication and to relish novelty. Much as I abhor the idea that people consume particular cuisines because it represents something new and unusual, I am not exactly someone who can claim to be above such patterns of consumption. I wanted to eat South African food, simply, because I had never had it. It is part of my identity, I realize, to be a culinary slut. I want to try new things, and I don’t like boredom. Repetition bores me, and so maybe that is why I veer—unfairly—away from things like South African curries.

And yet, at the same time that I realize this desire for newness is precisely what keeps places like 10 Degrees South in business, it also troubles me to think that the taste du jour will eventually give way to something else. I don’t have much to base this on, but the vogue of a place like 10 Degrees South, also seems to be related to a resurgence in a fascination with Africa. In the past year and a half, I can name a bunch of films I’ve seen that have to do with Africa: Tsotsi, the Academy Award winning film; Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener. It seems to be chic to think about Africa, but I wonder again, what it means to reduce the essence of an entire nation, or in this case, continent, to something that is a mere passing fancy? This line of thinking on my part is hardly original, but it also seems that in going to places like 10 Degrees South, one can enjoy the current vogue of Africanness and not think much about the actual dishes and cultures and politics behind the concept of South African cuisine.

It is stunning that we can think of South African cuisine as a happy mélange, or fusion of Asian, Indian, Portuguese, Dutch and African styles when I can remember a time not so terribly long ago that these groups hardly existed in peaceful harmony. And despite the lack of media attention on S.A, one can hardly say that ‘all is good’ in S.A. now. Race relations are still kinda messed up in a big way, and it bothers me that restaurants can work with that knowledge we have about different cultures and races, and then produce some kind of happy multicultural cuisine to suggest all is good.

Anyway, just some thoughts, perhaps inspired by my own general discomfort with celebrating fusion as the triumph of multiculturalism over xenophobia.

North Market, Vietnamese Eats

2006-03-16T15:27:00.000-05:00

OK, so why don't I go to North Market more often? Every time I go there, I fall totally in love with the place, and yet, I never go there. North Market was one of the first places I visited after moving to Ohio and it remains one of the most amazing treasures I have found in recent years. Even to a displaced Eastcoaster like mahself, the North Market seems truly sublime.

OK, so you think I exaggerate? Then let me explain what it does and why it is so great. BAsically, it is a foodie's dream. When one is moored in the midwest, one perhaps unfairly, thinks of it as being in solitary confinement, away from the culinary riches and treats available elsewhere. I'm reminded here of something my friend Sejal wrote about the midwest: badly paraphrased, she says something like "I associate the midwest, unfairly I know, with mediocre Indian food." Take the Indian food out of Sejal's statement, and one still finds a sentiment common to many.

North Market feels like that kind of oasis in the midwest, the space that satiates one's desire for more and better food, and most importantly, variety.

One of the many food stalls in North Market is Vietnamese Eats, to date, the only Vietnamese food establishment I've found in central Ohio. While the food was amazing ( i had my favorite sammich, the banh mi), it reinforced what I wrote about in my post about Vietnam Palace: the notion that in non major cities, one cannot find places where one can truly relish an "Asian" meal without having to pay a freaking arm and a leg, or be assaulted by bad smells, bad decor etc.
But, still Vietnamese Eats is a treasure, a true good culinary find, and one I'm not likely to stop visiting any time soon :)