Accidental Blogger

Anna sent me a link to this article in LA Weekly from food critic Jonathan Gold, about what he claims is a rise in regional specialization among the Southern Indian restaurants in Artesia (a suburb of Los Angeles):

Gold, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for criticism, made his mark enthusiastically opting to report on restaurants in ethnically distinct commun ities rather than the latest French Bistro in Beverly  Hills.

During the dinner hour, Tirupathi Bhimas is as jammed as a Cheesecake Factory — it even has those buzzing paging devices that erupt into flashing lights when your table is ready — and you could probably cast a Bhangra video from the ranks of the chic Desi teenagers that seem to throng the place. Dosas come out the size of refracting telescopes. Thick, sweet lassi flows like water. The waiters are more sharply dressed than you.

The idea of an Indian restaurant as club-kid hangout is nothing new, and joints like Tanzore and Tantra certainly play up the sultriness of the Indian kitchen, but what is drawing the crowds at Tirupathi Bhimas is fairly orthodox Andhra Pradesh–style vegetarian cuisine, the heavy Southern Indian stuff, without a Bombay mojito or a chakratini in sight.

Anna was understandably put off, a bit suspicious of the reference to Bhangra videos- The restaurant being reviewed is south Indian, and has no reference to Punjab in northern India, where Bhangra originates. Maybe Gold used that reference as a sort of shorthand into his ‘clued-in’ status to all things Indian- whether it be Bollywood or Bhangra (One does have to resort to silly generalizations of this kind, I suppose, especially to justify the Pulitzer won.)

From the article, I could envision a fairly average South Indian vegetarian restaurant, rather spicier than the average American palate is accustomed to. The description of the dishes reads like stuff culled off the menu, which tend to be tedious exercises in marketing to American clients.

Wanting a more specific set of reviews from the locals of Indian origin, I searched for more links and found these:

More reviews of Tirupathi-Bhimas

Some of them weren’t very happy with the service, though the food is fairly authentic and at normal (which is to say, extremely hot)  Andhra spice levels. It was evidently too hot for at least one reviewer, who is used to the dumbed down spice levels at some Indian eateries.

Another,rather better example of restaurant criticism came from this link (via Amardeep’s blog), though not void of the blanket exoticizing statements that characterizes Indian restaurant reviews

From a corner table of Angon on the Sixth, Mr. Ray scooped up gobs of daal, or lentil stew, with a piece of roti bread and pointed to the slender lamps hanging from the beams of the low ceiling. "These lamps are Ikea," he said between mouthfuls, "but meant to resemble terra cotta horse figurines." In India, he explained, horse sculptures are traditional offerings to the deities.
In Little India, a strip of about a dozen Indian restaurants on East Sixth Street between First and Second Avenues, Angon stands out for its lack of trinkets, flashing lights and live music. The low-key décor is meant to appeal to the non-Indian, somewhat upscale clientele that Begum Mina Azad, the owner and chef, has courted since the restaurant opened in 2004. So are the decorative robes that the waiters wear, traditional garb of Indian’s upper middle class, even though, Mr. Ray pointed out, such robes would be inappropriate for service in India.
When the fried fish and kichuri rice arrived, the plate was adorned with tomato slices. Tomatoes, which wouldn’t be found on a dish served in India, represent another bid for crossover appeal, a concession to Americans’ desire for color and vitamins. "Otherwise, it’s brown, yellow, brown, brown," Mr. Ray said. "Peasant food doesn’t stand up."
If he were to open a restaurant he said, "to upscale it, I would downgrade it — give them the authentic experience true cosmopolitan New Yorkers are ready for: seating on mats, no silverware."

Talking of ‘downgrading to upscale’- that is precisely what a 5-star hotel/restaurant chain in Chennai, India tried to do a few years ago. It resulted in quite a few incongruities:

The greasy, meaty kotthu parathas, banged out on a noisy, sizzling tava make their way towards us, borne aloft by a waiter in a mismatched lungi and loud floral shirt. On the table, a lamp flickers warily, as the hoots and drums of a flamboyant folk dance rent the air. This is an evening of street food served in the most rural of ambiences. Well, except for the perky little brochure on our table, which helpfully suggests a glass of Chardonnay, or perhaps some Moet Chandon, to go with the chilli bajjis.

And that is what happens when a five-star hotel decides to help its linen-and-diamond clad patrons to slum it. (But stylishly, of course.) At the Taj Connemara’s Thattukadai Food Festival, there are baskets piled high with jasmine chains, but they’re handed out by a impeccably clad hostess armed with little clips, so she can show the foreigners just how the `traditional Indian woman’ does her hair. There’s sugarcane juice, and a painstakingly done-up TASMAC wine shop. But, which wine shop owner worth his rum-and-fish would think of combining the juice with a shot of vodka? Or opening a tender coconut and adding vodka, for a deliciously bizarre cocktail. And there are mamis, crouched over pans of noisily frying bajjis — wearing long, hygienic gloves. 

Weird downscale-to-upscale conversions aside, there’s no experience like actually eating at one of the genuine roadside eateries at a fraction of the cost of the bash described above. Despite the lack of hygiene, the food at those stalls can sometimes taste positively ambrosial in comparison with the carefully tailored offerings of a ‘5-star restaurant’.

At least, that’s what I can remember from my cast-iron stomach days, though it could be just nostalgia speaking. I loved the Paani puris from the roadside stalls near Marina Beach, and the fact that I was in a group of 10-15 whooping-it-up college kids definitely helped. One of the most delicious salads that I ever ate was prepared on the fly by a wizened lady in a filthy sari sitting by her basket of still-rimed-with-dirt vegetables on a train to Hyderabad.Or the best ‘naaranga vellam’ or lime juice came fresh squeezed with water from God-knows-where, a dash of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, available for 25 paise per glass ( around 6/10 of a cent at current exchange rates) from the tiny stall opposite my college entrance.

Anna agreed, with her version of mixed memories of roadside eating adventures:

Yes, I love street vendors, roadside stalls, etc., too, even if eating from them requires shutting off some nagging part of my brain. But then, with stalls and stands at which food is prepared, at least we have available in front of us all the information for a reasonable calculation of risk– who knows what really goes on in restaurant kitchens.
My stomach isn’t teflon, and I have had some bad cases of food poisoning that some would call predictable. My sister still shakes her head when recounting her efforts ministering to me, and explaining the mess in our room to hotel staff, after I ate a hand-moulded coconut and milk candy sitting out in the heat at a fly infested market, while on a visit to her when she lived in Mexico.

Though Ruchira did chime in with a cautionary note on ‘dirtier is not always tastier’: 

I agree to an extent. I did have a cast iron stomach (with teflon coating) until quite recently. I could eat pretty much anything without untoward effects that had others groaning in agony.  Some of the things that I ate from the roadside stalls of Delhi had my mother (who was very particular about hygiene) watching me anxiously for the onset of cholera. But those days are gone. During visits to India now I am often taken off guard by occasional nasty surprises – even when I have eaten only in fancy places. Last October my son and I ate some delicious lamb gyro outside NYC’s Union Station from a Lebanese   street vendor. Everything was okay. Not even a suspicious burp!
As for dirt lending taste to cooking, I am sad to say that my local Sugarland Udipi restaurant is becoming increasingly filthy. But the food ain’t improving. 

Speaking of nostalgia, Anna reminisced about her happy encounters with NY neighborhood restaurants, a  microcosm of foodie heaven:

"One aspect of the article that’s interesting to me is that, as an ex-pat New Yorker whose family lives there, I have a particular, 1980s-1990s vintage association with each of those neighborhoods, which to some extent also explains the food:

6th street between 1st/2nd: What used to be a one block stretch of Indian restaurants, catering largely to a young, white population (college students like me and drunken hipsters) all trying to outdo each other in their array of flashing lights, but with totally indistinguishable food. I used to joke that I suspected that there was actually only one kitchen in back of the many storefronts. The neighborhood, like most of Manhattan, is now very upscale. I’m glad that the food has become more varied– no doubt there’s an increasing market for variety, both because of an increase in South Asian immigration, and the changing tastes of non-South Asian Americans. I wonder, though, if it would still be affordable to college students.   

Union Square was gritty when I was a kid, and has been generic upscale/yuppy since the late 1990s, which might help explain who is supposed to eat masala schnitzel.

Lexington  between about 25th and 27th was a stretch of South Asian restaurants where South Asian taxi drivers ate, and also to some extent South Asian and not South Asian personel associated with the nearby NYU Medical Center. Andrew used to live at 27th and Lex; in 1996, the apartment below him was busted for prostitution. It was a gritty neighborhood with a hospital. For that reason, the restaurants there were always both more authentic (or at least, what do I know, more interesting), tastier, and dirtier, than those on 6th street. Some of the restaurants did not have spoons (per Mr. Ray’s comment) back then. The neighborhood has unrecognizably gentrified since that time. Nice to know the restaurants survived– rising rents have driven out many of the neighborhood’s residents.      

Queens and Brooklyn have always been the places to go for variety and dense, ethnic neighborhoods– often of minorities among minorities (e.g. Bukharan Jewish/Kosher)– in the same way that Southeastern suburbs like Norwalk and Artesia are in Los   Angeles. My Uncle Ed would sometimes go on food adventures out the subway lines in Queens, stopping for a different kind of food at each stop (he’s a bit of a gourmand, my uncle). When I worked at the D.A.’s office in New   York, a woman I worked with was a Guyanese Muslim
Indian immigrant, who lived in Jackson Heights, which was, she told me, the only place in the city where one could get good Guyanese Indian Halal cooking. She would bring in her own cooking and menus of places she liked.
Makes me both miss New   York–certainly miss having a working subway
system– and hungry!

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For anyone interested in trying out S.Indian food, here’s a primer for anyone who is new to South Indian cuisine and would like to try the specialties at a local restaurant. Do check out the dosas (very thin crispy crepe made from a mixed rice-and-lentil batter-) usually with a variety of fillings, chutneys and sambar (spicy lentil soup) to dip the pieces in on the side.

Idlis ( steamed rice-lentil cakes) are nice, if properly done, but I usually dislike the restaurant versions here in the US, chiefly because they never have the melt-in-the-mouth quality that I’ve seen even in the lowliest roadside stall in Tamil Nadu. It’s all in the fermenting and the quality of lentils/rice used for the batter, and extremely hard to replicate.( I might succeed in 1 out of 10 tries for the perfect batter at home, and I suspect that extreme hygiene could be to blame. My mother complains that my hands are too cold to mix the batter and it never rises quite as well as opposed to my mother or sister mixing it.)

Vadas are like a fried lentil flour snack, similar in appearance to doughnuts, coming with coconut chutney and sambar on the side- these make a rather heavy appetizer course.

Thalis are full-fledged meal plates and are a good choice for a complete  dinner or lunch in themselves. They usually include a large helping of rice, a small piece of flatbread (like chapattis), assorted vegetable curries ( usually steamed, seasoned with mustard and other spices, sometimes garnished with grated fresh coconut), sambar, extremely spicy pickle and a deep fried paapad. The sambar is typically poured and mixed with the rice and eaten with the curries as in ‘scoop of sambar rice and small helping of curry’.