Bukhara

Bukhara Grill New York Indian Restaurant
bukharany.com

217 E 49th St
New York, NY 10017-1501
(877) 285-4272

Net: Go here for Indian grilled/tandoor food—this is close to what you will get at the best kebab places in India.

A surefire way to get a conversation going, when I meet Indians residing in Manhattan, is to tell them that I have never been happy with the authenticity or quality of Indian food at any restaurant in Manhattan. This is not an entirely true statement. But I leave it out there since it generally draws an animated response, and recommendations to offbeat places. Perhaps the restaurant with Latin fusion food with Indian thematic elements, where everyone is dressed in Manhattan black. Or the establishment that offers handpicked, organic beef cooked “Brahmin style”. Or this real authentic place where you can sit elbow-to-elbow with Bengali taxidrivers. Fads are pursued in Manhattan with the zeal of kindergartners chasing a soccer ball—Indian food is no exception. But there are some really great places to be found, and for that I left it to my close friends A and U, to pick one and then take us out to celebrate a promotionary dinner. This is what led us to Bukhara, on a recent Sunday evening.

The better known Bukhara is in Delhi, at the Maurya Sheraton hotel and is probably India’s best known restaurant for tandoori food. I was there 3 years ago for dinner, and the food was certainly good, my visiting Austrian friend leaning over informing me in the process of engorgement, that he did not care whether he was going to pass out, as he and his food became one.

At Bukhara in New York, the menu comes on varnished slabs of wood. The décor is a touch country woodsy: thick, uneven, heavily polyurethaned slabs of wood form tabletops, little polished wooden slabs cross-cut from logs hang on the walls as decorative motifs, alongside rich Persian carpets.

We had hariyali chicken and crab for appetizers. The chicken, marinated in a spicy green chili based sauce, then grilled, was soft, perhaps slightly softer than I would have preferred. Raan—a North Indian (as well as Afghan) favorite—grilled lamb on the bone was as good as I have had, yet the highpoint were the the grilled lamb chops, with tender meat slightly charred and crisp on the outside. A curry’s beauty lies in the uniqueness of its spicing, and it should be built around a fundamental taste component, a case in point is the Kashmiri Yakhni where the overpowering use of Saunff (cumin) feels right. It is all too often that Indian restaurants pervert their curries into ugly orgies of oil, food coloring and a medley of spices. This was the case for Bukhara, yet this comes as no surprise or offense, after so many years of suffering this abuse. Avoid these run-of-the-mill curries: and go for the grilled and tandoor meat dishes, they are first rate. The chef here know what he (she) is doing with his tandoor, a clay oven with a cylindrical cavity that has evolved over the years in Northern India and Central Asia. The walls of the clay cavity absorb the heat from the hot coals at the pit of this oven and heat food by a combination of conduction and radiation.

Bukhara makes its own Kulfi, traditional Indian ice-cream with pistachio and almonds, denser and harder than western ice-creams. Do not miss this. Stay away from the house wine--I had a glass of Merlot, and while I am far far away from being a wine snob, it would probably have been best to have stuck to beer.

Shiraz

Shiraz Restaurant
81 E Main St
Elmsford, NY 10523
(914) 345-6111

Great lamb shank, spotty service.

Shiraz is the first Persian restaurant that I have seen in Westchester, located at the site of the old “Oki-Doki”, a Korean restaurant that closed down some years back. The first time we went to Shiraz, on a Saturday night with the economy less than healthy, the manager informed us that he had run out of food. Food must be good, we concluded, and made a second attempt a few weeks later. This time I had the gumption to call in for a reservation.

Persian food has strong similarities to North Indian food. There has been much migration into India from Iran over the centuries, indeed the language, Urdu, which means “army” in Persian, arose as a bastard dialect that formed the compromise between the Persian generals and and their Hindi speaking soldiers. And so with the food as well. Meat preparations such as kebabs, rice dishes that go by polow in Persian, pilau in Dari, and pulao in most of India; cucumber-yogurt side dishes, khira raita to the Indian, the more dramatic mast-o-khiar to the Iranian; Zulbiya (Jalebi in India)--a deep fried (in sugar or honey) batter of interpenetrating rings fused together, with caramelized sugar on the outside and partially fermented sugar on the inside, was popularized in India by the Mughal emperor Jehangir in the 17th. century. Persian food makes more extensive use of dried nuts and fruits, such as zereshk or dried barberries. It tends to be less spicier than North Indian food, and I prefer this level of spiciness since it matches closer to levels of home cooked Indian food.

The manager at Shiraz, a pleasant looking sort of chap, looks like he skipped a couple of courses in basic restaurant management courtesy. After taking our name, he pointed out a table with the peremptory wave of an Indian bureaucrat, and promptly forgot about us. After a healthy wait, we flagged a waiter down for menus, some time later we flagged another one down for some water, it was, as if, the establishment ran an a la carte’ service for basic services. Once we ordered, it took a significant amount of time for the food to arrive, though in this case the delay was a welcome one, reflecting the time it took to genuinely prepare a dish from the ground up rather than composite one from pre-prepared items in the bin.

The dish to order at Shiraz is the lamb shank: with tender meat falling off the bone, set in a mild, flavorful souplike gravy that tasted like really good homemade Indian meat curry. This was probably one of the best lamb dishes that I have eaten in Westchester. A second meat dish we ordered, a concoction of pomegranate and beef -- I would avoid in future, the combination falls flat. The rice was good, individual grains evenly cooked, without stickiness, “equal but separate”. We ended the evening with dessert—zulbiyas and Persian ice-cream, the zulbiyas shriveled and stale from that morning or the night before, but the Persian ice-cream, popularized in Iran only after the first World War, with its saffron and rose water infused flavors on that cool, calm Elmsford evening reminding me of Ralli Singh’s Rose Syrup, Rooh Afzah, and times long gone.

Revisit (note added Aug 20, 2011)
A few days back we returned to Shiraz and can attest to the fact that the place has retained the high quality of its dishes.  The lamb shank (they use New Zealand lamb) remains the best that I have had in Westchester.  The gravy, less spiced compared to Indian food, has a deeper, subtler flavor.  The beef kebabs, particularly the ones made from ground meet were superb.  And I cannot shower any more praise for the ice cream--with its saffron and rose flavor, this is one of the finest and most exotic of ice creams that you will have had. 

A brief trip to Seoul

A brief trip to Seoul (April 2009):There is a familiarity in the air common to all Asian cities. Something in the quality of the light, the dilute haze of the atmosphere, the pressing density of population mixing in with gasoline exhausts, that conspire to make your skin and nose feel different. Scientifically, I cannot explain it. Yet this is how I feel as I step into the morning pedestrian traffic in downtown Seoul around the COEX district. There is a slight nip in the foggy air, as in a North Indian city winter, and around me is a swirl of pedestrian traffic and the drumming clip clop of high heels. Handicapped by footwear, but pressed for time, a ritualistic urban tribal dance unfolds. Clutching assorted bags to reel in the center of gravity, tight skirts restricting the stride, narrow contact patch heels striking a rapid staccato: the result is a pleasing liquid collection of individually awkward motions. The COEX area is all metal and glass buildings that form office complexes, stores, and shopping malls. I cross a busy 14 lane road, wide as the Brahmaputra, and it takes me a full 6 minutes. In a city where little English is spoken, most storefronts bear English names, a mix of Anglo-Saxon identifiers and down to earth translations from Korean—Johnson Pork and Stew, Heart Scan and Mind Scan, Hi Call Taxi, Kind Call Taxi, Seven Luck Casino, and right next to it, the imposing “Oakwood Conference Center”.

Multitudes of high rises extend across greater Seoul. From the street level in downtown they soar upwards like some giant exercise in crystal growth. Further out in the suburban areas, they have taken over the hillsides—concrete monstrosities, giant numbers painted on their sides, hued in muddy yellows and grays: each window, balcony and AC vent a replicative unit stitching together an entire floor, each floor duplicating the one below creating a perfect building, each building cloning the next, creating a perfect colony. Devoid of an imperfection or aperiodicity, the mind is drawn to the drabness of their architecture, a sense of desolation, a loss of identity.

The evening before I had flown into Incheon airport on a 14 hour flight. The aircraft drops you into the lap of a hollow silence of muted sounds that is the airport, following the tribe of passengers through a sequence of passageways like a character out of a grainy handheld camera shot movie, escalators, advertisements whisking by, through immigration counters, quarantine checkpoints, pulling out local currency at the ATMs, buying tickets at the bus stand, all of this on autopilot compounded by the daze from the lights and language of a foreign country. The airport itself is on an island and the large, modern highway that leads into the city passes through paddy fields, golf courses, and bleak wetlands where the sea has retreated for now. The traffic is fast on a Sunday. We pass a cemetery on the left carved into a hillside, presided over by a large advertising billboard. Up in the evening sky an aircraft hangs frozen in the air by the vectors of our relative trajectories. The Han river, criss-crossed by a multitude of bridges, cuts through Seoul dividing it into a southern (Gangnam) and a northern part. The city is a mix of rich urban spaces and regional flavors from the earlier Korea. On a previous visit I had gone to the NamDaeMoon Market at 4:30 in the morning. In contrast to the upscale area where I am today, this was a massive wholesale market open all night, where small town retailers drive in from the hinterlands and pick up their selling stock. The place is full of little stores-- open air and covered--selling products for everyday use. Clothes are piled in a heap, fine goods are kept under glass lidded cases, the only difference from a 1970s style establishment is the presence of personal computers. The thinly woven textiles, the plain nylon socks in bundles, and their crinkly plastic wrappings remind me of products I was familiar with in India.

The night that I arrive, I take a long walk through the streets now relatively quiet, where the only places open are the restaurants and small family run convenience stores. I pick up an electrolyte drink at one of these—Polcari Sweat, brilliantly named and branded. If I am sweating in a gym I would like to grab something with the name Sweat, for the vindicative feeling of earning the rights to its consumption. The walk loosens the effects of the flight. I cross an Outback Steak House and come to a small two storey building—Pho Saigon on the ground floor, and-advertized through smoky blue windows and shimmering neon signs—Tokyo Jazz for “music/bar”. Suspecting that the latter is a hostess bar, I settle for Vietnamese noodles and a beer at Pho Saigon. Chinese, Vietnamese, and south-east Asians form the largest immigrant group to Korea, in most cases—and as is often the case worldwide—carrying out menial tasks that Koreans are uninterested in doing. Increased migration to the urban areas have opened up, “international marriages” between South Korean farmers and South East Asian women are expected to generate as many as upto 50% of rural mixed ancestry children by 2020 (http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/04/123_42911.html).

Seoul is not a particularly pretty city. The beauty of the river and the surrounding hills have been long sacrificed to construction. But there is no denying that this is a country that has remarkably transformed itself through technology, from being followers to leaders, starting initially from the steel and shipping industry then moving relentlessly through semiconductors and automobiles. Standing in Seoul, enveloped right inside the guts of this pulsating national engine, you have a deep sense of this vibrancy. Their progress was driven no clearer to me a year and a half ago as I visited the demilitarized zone and looked through binoculars into the distance at the desolate North Korean city of Gashong, a big statue of Kim Jong Il, some farmland, a few apparently empty skyscrapers built to impress viewers like us—shimmering through the telescopic image in the distance. It is the story of two brothers in a hindi movie—one growing up rich and the other in poverty. I wonder if this will meet the happy ending it deserves, or will we continue to see rockets streaking across the skies in this incredible hubris of chest thumping between the haves and the have nots.

A trip to Pittsburgh

I am headed toward downtown Pittsburgh in a cab, getting a crash course on traffic patterns. I learn that it took the cabbie 30 minutes to get to the airport early in the morning. I learn about the roads you ought not to take when rush hour threatens, the number of rides you can expect in a 16 hour day, and received options for three routes to the Convention Center from my hotel. I hear that Pittsburgh holds the second largest St. Patrick Day’s parade in the US (after New York, but “actually a lot better”). And then, in-between this navigational discourse: “you’re here for the American Physical Society Meeting, right? What are you folks anyways—physical therapists? Some of the guys wus wonderin’.” Pittsurgh is not quite in the mid-west but it feels like i. I ease into the familiarity that I had with Minnesota. Large beefy men and women, more American cars on the roads, Steelers and Pirates apparel on the streets. It is early in the morning and the taxi drops me off by the Hilton, a soviet style highrise beautifully located and overlooking the three rivers stadium. I walk through downtown in the early morning rush of office goers. It is a maze of construction, undergoing what is called a “downtown revival”. Not quite completed, it is a mix of toney establishments and down to earth deli joints sharing frontage with rundown buildings. The American Physical Society meeting is being held at the Convention Center and everywhere around me, supplementing the stereotypical urban American headed to work with Starbucks in hand, are gaggles of physicists with convention badges hanging from their necks.

I turn into Sixth Street and then head along Duquesne, hugging the waterfront. The great buildings of the industrial belt jut out from the waterside, the river sides embanked in sections, like so many of the rivers are in the urban areas of India. This was the great steel city—at one time producing almost half of the nation’s steel. Described once as "hell with the lid off" in 1868 (James Parton), Pittsburgh remains near the bottom of the list among cities for atmospheric particulate pollution. Said Anthony Trollope, a 19th-century visitor, "….. I was never more in love with smoke and dirt than when I stood there and watched the darkness of night close in upon the floating soot which hovered over the house tops of the city." Lesser known is Pittsburgh’s contribution to metallurgical science and technology--from the Bessemer process of steelmaking, to the book by Barrett and Massalski that no doubt influenced countless engineers in rolling mills and steel plants from Indonesia to Kazakhstan.

Near my hotel is a spot--the Three Rivers Park-- where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers meet. Surrounded by bridges and enveloped by downtown traffic, it is nevertheless an oasis of tranquility, as though cocooned by the cancellations within the gallery of encircling sounds. Embankments on the water border the park, park benches scatter along the walkway. A couple sits with a book, teenaged skateboarders behind them. Two funiculars move up and down a nearby hillside giving a rhythm to the lapping waters around. Facing the confluence, on the right rises the great Three Rivers Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one side opening up to the rivers. At night I stand and watch this same park from my hotel room window high above, lights turned off, drapes drawn. I view the funiculars still pushing up and down like piston heads, overseeing a festival of criss-crossing automotive lights across the bridges. It is a calm stillnesss, and a magical moment as nighttime Pittsburgh unfolds outside, soon punctuated by the need to prepare for an early flight the next morning.

Kati Roll Company

The Kati Roll Company

99 Macdougal Street
(between Bleecker St. and West 3rd St.)
New York, NY 10012

On one of our rare visits to Greenwich Village , we dropped in for an early dinner at the Kati Roll Company, one of the older roll places in New York City. Kati Rolls started in Kolkata, at a place called Nizam’s on the backstreets of the Esplanade area. Legend has it that a take-out customer in a hurry wanted to grab something quickly: so they made him a Kati Roll--a piece of roti or paratha or rumali roti that is rolled around a median strip of chunks of meat--garnished with onions, vinegar or lemon, spices and other vegetables. The cylindrical, rolled roti is then wrapped with paper that takes on a translucent look once the oil from the food seeps through. One eats holding the roll like an icecream cone, unraveling the greased paper while working downwards.

Kati Roll Company has a catchy name. The walls have large posters of Bollywood blockbusters from the seventies. It is a small place with a couple of tables for seating. We had rolls with chunks of beef, rolls that had minced mutton, and a vegetarian version of a roll with paneer. They were a disappointment, and I only hope that this wasn’t a normal day for the Kati Roll Company. The oily parathas were a fraction of a mm too thick and the rolls were supersized to American proportions. It is time Indian eateries moved away from the paradigm of oily food, it is a clichéd theme that has served its time. Oil can cover your mistakes, it can herald a false richness to food without trying. You can go through oily Indian food without feeling the flirtatious lemony chili tang of finely chopped garnish that Indian food can bring, and which unfortunately most Americans, fed by journeymen cooks who have learnt their trade through osmosis, have never had.

If you do visit the Kati Roll Company, take a few minutes to stroll down Macdougal. A few blocks away is Café Wha—the legendary nightspot that was Jimi Hendrix’ base for a while and where Bob Dylan played, among other famous names. You will notice it by the number of tourists milling around taking photographs. Your trip here will not go totally in vain.