Why are so many Indian restaurants in the US so pretentious?

 “….he is not a man obsessed with the freshness of quality of his ingredients.  Cooking for him is a craft of spice and oil.  His food burns the tongue, and clogs the arteries. “  The Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s description of a cook in “The Third Born” aptly describes more than 90% of the cooking done at Indian restaurants in the United States.  These are blunt instruments that downsample Indian food into a monochrome of caricatures.  And they do so in restaurants named after the India of the princes and the India of the British, an ambiance desperate for an illusion of what was an illusion to start with.

Evoking grandeur and the exotic is an old formula. Here is the Indian writer R. K. Narayan, describing his experience at an Indian restaurant in the San Francisco of 1956: “Its elaborate and self-consciously planned Indian atmosphere, dim light, long coats, bogus Indian tunes out of gramophones hidden in the arras, more bogus bric-a-brac are deliberate, but I suppose, commercially successful.  Chappati and Indian curry are genuine and are not bogus.  A waitress clad in a sari, an usher in a long coat buttoned to the neck, create an Indian atmosphere, which seems to appeal to San Franciscans as I find all tables booked, and women dressed in caps and gowns, which outdo Fifth Avenue style, sit with an air of facing an impending adventure, while reading the menu card, and utter little cries of ‘delicious, delicious’, when they sample a curry.”

This could be a restaurant in Los Angeles today.  Gentle sitar music, can make it easier to chew on a tough naan.

Credit for this brand image has to be given to the first Indian restaurateur in the US, Prince Ranji Smile, a minor social character in the New York of the early 1900s, and a man of uncertain orgins and tall claims.  Ranji came to New York and spent several years as an Indian chef who held visiting appointments at some of the big restaurants of the day.  While he was never able to fulfil his dream of opening his own restaurant, he, more than any other, brought the message of Indian food as being something exotic, something brushing royalty, that—as he advertised—would make women more beautiful.

To be sure, Indian food is not considered highbrow.  Inglis and Gimlin give an interesting statistic in The Globalization of Food.  In the hierarchy of Zagat 2006 check averages, a measure of the “exclusivity” of the food,  Indian check averages stand at $33.85, below French ($47.81), Japanese (46.72), Italian (42.27), Greek (38.71), and Spanish (37.73).

Starting about 5 years ago, a new theme emerged in Indian restaurants—desi chic, inspired by Bollywood and the folksy color combinations promoted by Indian ad agencies.  The developments were apparent to me in the tale of two restaurants, almost next to one another, in Mt. Kisco, NY.  One of them is A Passage to India, straight out of E. M. Forster, a member of the old colonial genre that—as far as I could see—had been languishing for years.  Then came the impulsive upstart, a colorful chunky little joint called The Little Kebab Place, with remixed disasters of 70s Hindi classics thumping on its speakers, and truck art on its walls--nobody would trace its genes to Rajput royalty.  And this restaurant was packed.  So packed, that its owner bought out the two adjacent stores and expanded out into a couple of other restaurants.  The three places burst at the seams, while the old brand languishes.

There is a lesson to be learnt there.

And then there are the contemporary east-west fusion experiences in upscale Manhattan that will charge you the price of your first born for Indian street food presented as if it were French.  These are the places that get various assorted stars, from assorted city newspapers, from assorted critics who know Indian food like Indians know rock music. 

Indian food has always had to put on an act, the projection of an image that isn’t.  As if the food simply wasn't enough.  And, in many cases, it isn't.  There are exceptions to this hypothesis.  One is Shalimar in San Francisco, a rough-hewn Punjabi-Pakistani place that my friend C thinks could be a transplanted truck stop from India.  Mallu Cafe in Philadelphia, has the kind of unashamed originality that makes you want to throw back your collar and shove a handkerchief in it to soak in the heat. A third is Saravana Bhavan on Mary Road in San Jose, part of a successful international restaurant chain, that has maintained its stainless steel and tubelight like lighting innocence of a dosa place, where no means yes with a headshake.  And finally there is Neerob, in the Bronx, a Bangladeshi place, so original in its speech, being, and sounds that I find myself speaking in the rounded English of the Bengali when I am there, as in “nayeen owan phor” area code.  These are places that give you the ambiance of the original because—as far as I can see—there has been no attempt at gaming this.

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Shalimar on Jones Street in San Francisco

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Off O’Farrell Street, on Jones Street, in a slightly seedy block in San Francisco, there is a cluster of Indian and Pakistani restaurants.  There are shadowy characters that hang around the footpaths there, disheveled in appearance, minding their own business, each preoccupied within his or her own bubble.  Did not look the kind who always obeyed the letter of the law.  There was a conference, and I was walking past with a distinguished colleague and good friend, when a familiar whiff--the kind of whiff you half expect to linger on a San Francisco street where the nation’s mandate on whiffs are not always obeyed.  You smell that? I asked.  My friend, who was going to receive a major award the next day, and had grown up always at the top of his class permeated with nothing but goodness and academic excellence, took a nose to the air and replied, smells like coriander.  And indeed, in addition to this whiff, there was the smell of coriander, for we were walking past Shalimar, a hole in the wall Punjabi restaurant on Jones Street.

Later that night I came down for dinner to Shalimar with my friend K.  Orders are taken from a soggy menu that looks like yesterday’s newsprint.  We ordered haleem, naans, biryani and seekh kebab.  Then we grabbed a couple of diet cokes from the freezer and sat down on rickety chairs at a laminated table.  Paji aap baithiye, hum khana ley ayengey  said the man, so we sat and waited.  Haleem is generally not too common here: chicken that is made into a paste with lentils.  There was brain fry (bheja fry), but good sense prevailed. 

Authenticity is a hefty compliment that one does not wish to give away lightly, and authenticity does not necessarily equate to exceptional quality.  The food at Shalimar is what one would get at an authentic truck stop in India.  The food is hot and virile, made with muscular vigor. Served at the table by a man with a wrist of iron ringed with a stainless kada. A dishabille kitchen that looks as if it grew out of the pit of the earth.  Rough hewn naans flop half hanging from the edge of the plate like a drunkard passed out.   The biryani flung onto your plate with disdain, angry pieces of goat glaring from within the rice.  The brown haleem sits, a viscous medieval mess plotting vengeance on your innards.  The meat is fresh, the spice is in your face, and the seekh kebabs are moist on the inside.  What more can one ask for on this temperate San Francisco evening where one man’s coriander is another man’s something else?   Do not look for contrasting flavors, or pairing of textures, but here, twenty bucks will bring you a satisfying meal for two that a forty dollar meal of Savitri Amma’s Avial and assorted flavors from the “Chutneys and Savories” section at a dainty joint in Westchester will not.

This is the place that will remind you of all the greasy joints that you frequented in college, and paid for with wrinkled single notes that came out from the deep cotton folds of your pant pocket.

Sharpening a kitchen knife with waterstones

Years ago, as a student of metallurgy, I was given this piece of advise by a steel plant manager: “If you can make a good steel, you can make a lot of money”. I never ended up making steel, turning to semiconductors instead, but I remember this message every time I look at kitchen knives.  I have bought several kitchen knives in the past 20 years, but the ones that have been able to stand the test of time have always been the priciest.  True to the plant manager’s advise, in steel you get what you pay for.

If steel kitchen knives are not sharpened properly, they are useless.  There are plenty of gadgets around but I have found none satisfactory.  The method I use was taught to me by a patient Japanese knifemaker on Kappanbashi Street in Tokyo—an entire street dedicated to the sale of kitchenware. It works very well.  Here is what I do.

Get yourself a couple of Japanese waterstones.  One with a grit of about 1000 and another with a rating of about 4000-6000.  There are natural waterstones available but these are expensive and geared towards loaded purists.  I buy artificial waterstones which work well, cost between $40-45, and are available on Amazon or any woodworking store. Soak the waterstones in water for at least a few minutes before you sharpen the knives and then make sure the surface is wet during sharpening.  

Hold the the knife on the 1000 grit waterstone with the front index finger holding it in place in the manner shown in the figure above.  The cutting edge of the blade should be against the waterstone pointing away from you and the blade should subtend an angle equivalent to putting two coins underneath the trailing edge of the knife. I do not actually put coins, but I like to think of this in Gedanken mode and simply eyeball the height. Just try to keep the subtended angle as constant as you can keep—and go by feel.

The waterstone is typically 2 inches wide and so this is the length of blade that it will sharpen at a time.  Divide the knife mentally into 4 or 5 sections of 2 inches-- each section will need to be sharpened separately. Start from the section closest to the base of the knife. Firmly and slowly move forward and backward for about 10 cycles, holding the edge down with the right index finger and steering with the left hand as shown in the figure above. This should take about 10-15 seconds.  The index finger should hold the blade at a steady angle.  Firmness and uniform motion rather than pressure is key.  The sharpening act occurs mostly on the push stroke and after a few strokes a slurry of grit particles will form.  It is this slurry that wears against the blade, sharpening it.

Now flip the knife so that the cutting edge faces you, and this time hold the knife and the angle in place with the thumb (see figure above).  Go back and forth again this time for about 7-8 cycles.  Now the major sharpening action occurs on the pull stroke. 

Repeat this process for each of the 4-5 sections of the blade, working your way from the base of the knife to the tip, till the entire blade has been sharpened.  Then go through this entire process one more time.  It is a lot quicker than it reads.

Try to slice a newspaper edge with the knife.  It ought to slice through cleanly.  If the edge is really sharp, you can also shave the hair off of your arm, but I am not a hirsute person and I don't need this depilation.  The thinking man cuts a newspaper.  It the knife does not cut, it needs some more sharpening, so go over the process again.

After the 1000 grit sharpening, go over the same process using the 4000 grit waterstone to give the edge a mirror finish.  I usually do just one round of 10 forward/8 backward strokes.

This process usually works.  If the knife has severe nicks then the blade needs to be sharpened on a coarser stone.  You could try a 400 grit waterstone or an oilstone.  When you buy the waterstones, it is helpful to by a cheap and coarse oilstone as well. 

Quick trip to Shanghai and Nanjing

If Manhattan wears black and England is grey, then China is red.  Red is the theme coming off the jetway at Beijing airport, an enormous airport with acres of stainless fixtures and designer stores.  Not a brazen hussy red, neither the dark crimson that suggests an obsession with the past, but a sanguine statement of strength and vitality for a nation at full gallop, a Mao Little Red Book Red (banned in the India of the 70s, but we had a copy anyway), not a red splattered with abandon, but one of effective restraint; enough to impart just a dollop of tension, paired at times with a bright deep yellow.  The last time I was this close to China was 1962, when my mother—pregnant with me—fled the border town of Tezpur as the Chinese marched into India. But those times are long gone, and today I witness nothing but unfailing politeness and friendliness.  A lady at the counter asks me where I am originally from. She then smiles and tells me that she finds Indian women very beautiful.  With no other Indians around, I, of balding crown and graying beard, feel compelled to accept some indirect responsibility and find myself thanking her. 

I have some Thai food at Beijing airport.  It tastes as bad as the Thai food in Thornwood, except that this one had expletive inspiring quarter inch slices of chillies (the red kind) that added one more layer of torture to this complex dish.  I decided to stick to Chinese fare while in China. 

I had escaped an impending storm in Westchester that would go on to lay 6 inches of snow where I live, a second storm in a matter of weeks, bringing to mind the Hindi saying, that when the Lord gives, He delivers till it perforates the roof.  A limo ride to Newark with a driver who lectured me on Latin American writers while waving a copy of  Vargas Llosa for President in his hand, was followed by a grueling 14 hour flight to Beijing.  A two hour flight then brought me to Nanjing, followed by an hour long drive through fog infested roads where the driver lost his way multiple times, till—after the third time—he set aside his machismo and pulled out a perfectly working GPS system from a small plastic package.  Peace arrived late at night in the form of a beautiful conference center and resort with a quiet lakeside room and forbidding mountains in the dark beyond. 

The next evening I travelled to Shanghai on the bullet train.  It is one thing to see impressive infrastructure in a small country, but seeing it tackled at the enormity of scale that China presents boggles the mind.  Like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai, Shanghai follows the tradition of the grand Asian super city - mile upon mile of skyscrapers, serpentine flyovers, and enormous buildings that impose their magnificent sense of indestructibility with hunks of steel and glass and with the hubris of a city in its prime; these are beacons of civilization sucking the population out of the rural hinterlands like some giant capillary force driven machine of humanity. Looking out the window from my hotel in Pudong, I see other common elements of a large Asian city: a grandly lit river with barges and cruises, a well-kept promenade and a park along its banks.  I see a Prada at one corner and a Rolex store on another block.  This is cosmopolitan Asia’s one weakness—a fanatical obsession with Western luxury brands among the affluent.  Most likely originating in India’s princely past, this obsession resurfaced in Japan, and today appears to embrace any Asian economic segment as soon as it crosses the threshold of a certain level of economic development. 

In the morning I cross over from one side of the river, Pudong, to the other, an older embankment called the Bund that is lined with stately old buildings in the European style.  How incongruous this Urdu-Persian word sounds today in the midst of the center of commerce in China!  Yet it stands as a reminder of the cosmopolitan nature of old Shanghai.  One of the pleasures of walking around in Shanghai in the Bund and Nanjing Road area is to suddenly come upon entire small blocks full of charming one and two storeyed old buildings and narrow alleyways segregated, intact, from the encroaching construction. These are the remnants of old Shanghai: greying yet dignified counterpoints to the present and the future, scattered exclusions from the near total metamorphosis of this city.  Each building is different, each with its own twist, multicolored clothes hanging on a clothes line, a ramshackle bookstore here, a quaint shop selling tea there, a bit decrepit perhaps but full of soul; places that remind me of the back alleys of Esplanade in Calcutta. The Bund’s soulmate is Calcutta, and decades later when Calcutta will be able to afford to fix up its old buildings and mansions, I would imagine that it will look something like the Bund.   

 I cross back into Pudong and return to my hotel walking along the banks of the Huangpu.  Vendors from the Central Asian regions of China are hawking street food wearing Muslim prayer caps. Their equipment consists of a modified bicycle with a coal grill built into the pillion.  Smoke and the familiar smells of kebabs and naans rise in the air.  I have my camera with me and people on the streets have generally been co-operative.  A quiet. older kebabwalla is selling kebabs and when I ask him about being photographed, he waives me off furiously with rapid shakes of his hand.   He does not want his sense of dignity pimped.

For years, Shanghai was the only city after which a word existed in the English language.  To be Shanghaied meant to be tricked into an undesirable circumstance.  Today there are two more members to this club.  To be Bangalored is to lose one’s job to outsourcing.  And  Californication refers to the spread of California’s (and by extension today, the West’s) mindless urban development style or its sex and violence driven entertainment culture. Today California is getting Bangalored and one might argue that both Shanghai and Bangalore are getting Californicated.  In other words, some might say that the East and the West are mutually Shanghai’ing one another! 

Taj Palace Restaurant, White Plains

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There was a time, several years ago, when the East Post Road area of White Plains had two Indian restaurants within a stone’s throw of each another—the remarkable Dawat, and the not so remarkable “Bengal Tiger” which neither did justice to Bengal, nor to the majesty of this big cat.  Dawat shut down for reasons unknown.  A few years later Bengal tiger burned down, raising the average quality of Westchester Indian food in the process.  Recently, the new Taj Palace Restaurant opened for business in the same vicinity and we tried their lunch buffet today. 

The afternoon lunch buffet is a good time to test the mettle of an Indian restaurant for this is where they can advertise with original creations, or try to pass off a slipshop dish.

The buffet quality was mixed.  The idli and sambar was reasonable, the kebabs stone cold.  There was fluffy rice and soft naans.  The baigan bharta and daal makhni were decent, the bittergourd-potato curry--a first for an Indian restaurant here—was superb and a unique offering on the menu.  The non-veg dishes sounded like a caricature of the stereotypical Indian restaurant menu: Chicken Tikka Masala, Madrasi Lamb, and Tandoori Chicken.  The lamb was tender and had undertones of actual South Indian spices (Madras is in the South).  Take this honesty in nomenclature as good news for not all establishments will do this. The kheer and Gulab Jamun were oversweetened, and will not gain any converts.   I give them points for the bittergourd.  I take away points for what I suspect was the addition of food coloring to the dishes—this is an old practice that has no place today.

The food here was not bad—it was decent.  But I am perplexed by the lack of creativity on a humdrum buffet menu of an Indian restaurant that has opened its doors in 2012.  Certainly, the clientele's demands have a lot to do with what a restaurant puts out.  This buffet will be a litmus test.  If the current menu does well, it will be because Indian restaurant diners in this county refuse to evolve and are comfortable with the tikka masalas of  the past—Indian food will degenerate into what the neighborhood Chinese restaurant has become today.