Offbeat Eats

As I mentioned last fall in my review of Fat Paulie’s, we occasionally have an opportunity to visit our friends Liz and Wes in Saratoga Springs, which in addition to spending time with them and seeing the horses occasionally, also gives us a good opportunity to explore some of the restaurants around Saratoga Springs. In this case, we were unsure of where we wanted to go for dinner, so we ended up basically wandering around downtown until we found a place that interested us. As we wandered on Henry Street east of downtown, we started to pick up some nice aromatic notes, and then saw why: Karavalli Regional Cuisine of India. A quick glance at the menu looked interesting enough that we had to give it a try.

Like most springs, I spent a lot of my weekends volunteering at various FIRST Robotics competitions as a robotics judge, and that usually means I spend a lot of time staying at hotels in various smaller towns and cities around New England, but it also gives me a nice chance to try out a few places on my hit list. In this particular case, heading back home from a weekend in Salem, NH, this gave me a good opportunity to stop off and visit one particular Indian and Nepalese place in Manchester: Kathmandu Spice.

While much of our dining in Portugal focused on Portuguese cuisine, there was one particular ethnic cuisine I was looking to experience, and knew we could find several examples of in Lisbon: Goan Cuisine. Goa, an Indian State in the Konkan region, was Portuguese ruled from 1510 to 1961, and the cuisine of Goa diverged a bit from the surrounding Konkan region over this period, mostly by adapting Portuguese customs (particularly, the use of pork and beef), customs (using vinegar), and ingredients (pineapple, cashews, guavas, tomatoes, and potatoes were all introduced by the Portuguese to Goa). The resulting Goan cuisine remains distinct, and there are quite a few restaurants around Lisbon either labeling themselves Goan, or labeling themselves “Indian” but with heavy Goan influence. One of the better-rated ones, on the edge of the Moorish quarter, is Tentações de Goa (“Temptations of Goa”), and we decided to check them out for our second dinner in Lisbon.

Returning home from the Adirondacks involves more driving time than you think, since most of the drive is meandering along US Route 4 as it passes through eastern New York and Vermont. Interestingly, part of this drive is four-lane divided highway (roughly between Fairhaven, VT and Rutland, VT, a byproduct of one of the original alignments of I-89 that never came to be, and briefly considered in the 1970s as a potential I-92), but mostly the drive bounces from one small town to the next until you get to New Hampshire. Between our Lake George trips and most of our westward voyages to upstate New York, I think I’ve done that drive a good hundred times, and it isn’t all that often that we notice a new place showing up. But as we were driving through Whitehall (one of several claimants to be the Birthplace of the US Navy), we had spied a relatively new Asian restaurant, Whitehall Red Panda, and decided to give it a try.

My visits to Arizona’s Valley of the Sun always involve a combination of trying to find the new and exciting places to dine, while occasionally indulging in an old favorite. In this case, we headed over to Tempe, AZ, where there, in a fairly nondescript strip mall a block east of Rural Road, sits Delhi Palace. Back in my undergraduate and graduate school days, Delhi Palace was the standard gathering place of not only my own friends, but my brother’s as well; a typical Christmas visit to Arizona could see as many as ten people gathering for the lunch buffet. But as folks age, move away, start families, etc, the annual gathering at Delhi Palace started to fade away, with my last visit with friends happening in 2015 (although a few of us migrated to a similar periodic gather at Haji Baba a few blocks away. This trip, however, I decided to call up my old friend Karla (a veteran of many previous Delhi Palace gatherings) and see how our old haunt was doing.

The next stop on our trip to South Africa was a few days spent in Durban to explore the beachfront and explore the area a bit before heading back to Johannesburg. Durban has an interesting history; it’s the third largest city in South Africa, and one of Africa’s largest ports. Now just part of the larger eThekwini municipality, it is a highly ethnically diverse city, with large Zulu, White, and Asian populations, and the metro area hosts one of the largest Indian populations outside of India. From that history, Durban has developed it’s own variety of Indian food, with one particular dish that’s become well-known: Bunny Chow. We first got turned on to bunny chow from UK chef Ottam Yottolenghi, when he did a Guardian article on the dish. It’s one of those unique fusion dishes, with a loaf of bread (usually white sandwich bread, and sold by the fraction of a load, so a “quarter Bunny” is a 1/4 of a standard loaf), hollowed out and filled with a curry of your choice. The local curries tend on the spicy-but-not-overly hot side, and it’s traditional to eat it by tearing off break and sopping up the bits of curry. There are many, many places to get Bunny Chow in the Durban area (heck, it’s pretty popular across South Africa, I saw it several times in Johannesburg, too), but they were concentrated in the suburbs. Downtown, there’s a number of well-known cafes that serve up Bunny Chow, but one of the better-reviewed ones was Billal Cuisine out by the beachfront.

One of the whole reasons I started this blog is that, living in Northern New England, we don’t have a lot of options when it comes to ethnic food. Indeed, for some options like “Vietnamese”, “Indian”, and “Cuban” being the most notable, there can literally be hundreds of miles from one restaurant of that ethnicity to the next. This is particularly the case with Indian food; over the entirety of VT, I can count the entire population of Indian restaurants on one hand (and NH, with twice the population, doesn’t have that many more). So, when I actually hear of an Indian restaurant that I haven’t been to before, it’s notable. In this case, it was about a year ago I first heard of Rickie’s Indian Restaurant in South Barre, so when some recent travels ended up with my passing through Barre around dinner time on a Saturday, it was worth my time to stop by the Citgo station in South Barre on Route 14 to try out their Indian food.

Sometimes I really enjoy when cuisine takes some interesting voyages to get from its origins to its current state. A good example of this is the concept of the Irani Bombay café. The Irani café concept dates back to the 19th century, when a large wave of Zoroastrian immigration into India resulted in a large number of cafés opening that were welcoming to a good cross-section of society; Sikh dining next to a Hindus and Zoroastrians, with an interesting Indo-Iranian cuisine focusing on chai, fragrant Biryanis (a dish that actually traces back to Iran), omelets, curries, and naans. It’s also, unfortunately, a culinary heritage that’s dying out, with fewer than 30 classic Irani cafés still remaining in Mumbai, and similar number in Hyderabad. Into this scene comes another migration, with British restaurateurs Shamil and Kavi Thakrar who decided to bring the concept to London. The result was Dishoom, a small chain of “Bombay-Style Cafes” (although the Thakrar cousins sold the chain in mid-2017).

(Closed) After a fairly pleasant recent trip to Boston, we decided to take some back roads to get over to Route 3 to go home through Nashua, and decided it would be a good opportunity to stop for lunch, taking us right down Main Street in Tewksbury, MA. This isn’t completely terra incognita for me (you can read my review of the rather nice Vic’s Waffle House from a previous trip through), but I’m not all that familiar with the area, and mostly found myself staring at typical “North of Boston” fare: a lot of chain restaurants with the occasional roast beef or seafood place. But not far down the road from Vic’s we saw a promising place: Saffron Indian Grill.

(Closed) Our next evening in London was a bit of an exploration. We started off by heading to Seven Dials for drinks at Detroit. Despite a name that makes most Americans snicker, it’s actually a rather good cocktail bar, and for bonus points, we got to meet up with Richard Barnett, the author of the most excellent Book of Gin. After Detroit, we decided to do dinner in the area. The immediate Soho/Covent Garden area has rather a few decent Indian places (in particular, we’ve previously enjoyed The Punjab, London’s oldest Indian restaurant, which was booked solid this time). We ended up at Mela, an Indian place on Shaftesbury that has a rather good reputation as well.