Chutney Masala Bistro

http://www.chutneymasalabistro.com
4 Main Street
Irvington, NY 10533

With a few new restaurants sprouting in and around Westchester the past few years—Chillichicken in Stamford, the reincarnated Westchester Groceries in Thornwood, and now Chutney Masala—a two year old restaurant in Irvington, diners have a wonderful choice of evolving Indian food around the area. We visited Chutney Masala for the first time last night. Finding it was a bit of a struggle--Main St. heads towards the river and ends at the train station. You are then supposed to go around the overpass and head into the parking lot of the train station next to the river, in the middle of which is a brick building,housing Chutney Masala. It is a two storey restaurant that does not feel cramped. The interior walls are exposed brick, hung with black and white reprints of hunting photographs from colonial India, circa I would guess the early 20th. Century. Ask for a table on the second floor. On the winter night that we were there the shutters were drawn, but we are told that in summer the view across the Hudson can be gorgeous.

The menu at Chutney Masala has the usual suspects—chicken tikka masala and its ilk without which I am told, Indian restaurants will not survive given these dishes’ name recognition among American diners. But I would suggest ignoring such dishes, for this restaurant offers a lot more.

Chutney masala is owned by a couple with experience at two of India’s top hotels in New Delhi—The Maurya Sheration and the The Taj Palace, and their food is more novel and interesting, than standard Indian menus. We settled for Amritsari Fish and Bombay chat for appetizers. The fish finger based dish, it was tilapia that night, owes its name to the city of Amritsar, where battered fish is deep fried and sold as street food. The Bombay chat was well done, puffed rice with spices, and variety of additive, similar to the Jhal Muri at Chillichicken in intent. With two meat eating factories in tow--our teenaged sons--we settled for lamb Seekh Kebabs and Hyderabadi Biryani, a Dum dish, with goat meat. This is another “new” for Westchester—5 to 10 years ago, I would not see goat meat on the menu of Indian restaurants here. Dum cooking originates from the Mughal times of the 16th. Century, and involves food cooked with a small amount of water in a clay pot sealed off with a lid by a “gasket” of flour and water. The cooking ambient, an overpressure of steam, leaves the food moist and the meats tender. Our vegetarian friends and dining companions went for, among other things, daal and kurkure bhindi—finely cut, fried, crunchy okra. The daal was as would be made at home, simple and elegant, like a sweet purring engine with no rough edges, that does not need to rev up to make you feel good. Have it with simple white rice and perhaps a mouthful or two of the bhindi.

We sampled a couple of desserts. Gajar ka Halwa a “porridge” of grated carrots, milk, clarified butter, cardamom; and phirni, another “porridge” made with broken rice and milk. Indian desserts, as I have noted before, are an acquired taste, but if you have made this leap, then these desserts were wonderfully built, smooth and not sugary.

Chutney Masala has excelled is because of its restraint. Dishes are not overly spicy, and they are not oily. The menu is varied, there is adequate content for the adventurous, and the food is closer to the quality that you would get at restaurants in the larger Indian cities. Throw in a beautiful ambience, and you have the makings of a winning restaurant.
Additional comments:
A subsequent visit late one night, returning from New Jersey, was not as impressive as the first. An Indian sounding salad looked hastily put together, the biryani was ho-hum. It was late at night and one hopes this was an anomaly, at a time when the kitchen was possibly winding down and the last of the customers were departing. Service remained excellent, and one of the most friendly that I have seen.

Chillichicken

www.chilichickenct.com
19 High ridge road
Stamford, CT 06905
(203) 977-0400

ChilliChicken is a new restaurant that has opened up in Stamford, CT, at the site of the old Tawa restaurant, only a 20 minute drive through the backroads from Chappaqua. Chilli Chicken serves Indo-Chinese food, and as its name implies, originates from the food served in chinese restaurants in India. Set up by waves of Chinese immigrants of Hakka origin who started migrating to Kolkata from Southeastern China as early as the late eighteenth century, the menus in these restaurants were modified by the tastes of Indian customers (and likey British colonial customers before them). Kolkata still has a substantial population of Chinese immigrants, many of whom were persecuted during the Indo-Chinese war of 1962—I am still haunted by the owner of a Chinese restaurant on Central Park Ave in White Plains who upon learning that I was Indian, emotionally confronted me in the early nineties, about why they were thrown out of Kolkata in the early sixties during the India-China war. Visibly successful in the USA, he gave me the look of faraway bitterness as he recalled those days, noting that they had had no reason to move, till the war started.


The leitmotif for the Chinese restaurant in India, is a garnish bowl full of green chilli pieces soaked in vinegar and a little spoon for scooping out the vinegar to add a bit of zing. And if this isn’t enough, then there would be a green, evenly smooth paste called “chilli sauce that was actually made using papaya and pumpkins. These two condiments are de rigueur for a Chinese restaurant in India, and I was reassured to find the chilli-vinegar at our table in Chilli Chicken.



The food at ChilliChicken is more on the “Indo” side of Indo-Chinese, as is typical of this genre in the US. What I found to be its most welcoming, evolutionary aspect, was the absence of oiliness--the bane of the typical Indian restaurant--and the departure from the “no spice unturned”, mode of cooking that many Americans have unfortunately come to expect from Indian food. We stuck to Indo-Chinese classics-- chicken sweet corn soup that was light and airy; sweet and sour chicken—refreshingly easy on the tongue, unlike equivalents that I have eaten in New Jersey that were fit more for a fire-eater’s convention; slightly soggy Hakka chowmein--really an Indo-Chinese concoction that originated from the Hakka origins of South-Eastern Chinese immigrants. Thrown into this mix were appetizers that gave away the Bengali origins of the chef, “Jhal Muri” a spiced up, flirtatious mixture of puffed rice, with the grains of the rice held together with moist sauces and condiments—in your mouth the dry on the inside moist on the outside grains of puffed rice crumble up with the the spices playing a blitzing game with your tastebuds, not too strong, but like little evanescent explosions of a thousand colors. Washed these down with some “Thums Up”, an Indian cola drink that rose to prominence in the late seventies when Coca Cola was banished from India as part of a wave of nationalizing regulations. Rushing in to fill the void, we had new products such as Thums Up and the less successful Campa Cola, belittled in those days as fallbacks that did not come close to Coke, yet serving the nostalgias of the diaspora today, sitting in small Connecticut shopping centers like us.

As I have mentioned earlier in my posts, Indian food has become popular enough that one expects something beyond the usual for increasingly sophisticated foodies. Sometimes these morph into expensive and pretentious combinations of cuisine that can be forced, or they can be the introduction of a time-tested hybrid, cooked sensibly, and for sensible palates (for really hot food, receive the food into the back-side of the mouth and avoid extensive contact with the tip of your tongue where the density of “heat” sensing tastebuds is highest). Along with Westchester Groceries, Chili Chicken is one of those restaurants that are making the Weschester area increasingly cosmopolitan in its Indian food—give it a try and you will not regret it.

A trip to Tokyo in November

There is a cocoon like sense of safety travelling in a large jetliner ten thousands of feet above the earth as the flight path traverses rugged mountains, permanent ice formations and bleak landscapes. Mid-flight, I survey a Siberian landscape, looking for signs of life and motion on a desolate, ice filled expanse of crinkled white merging into the distance, into the glare of the sun. It is a clear day, shards of sunlight filter in through the occasional half exposed windows, the outside temperatures register -50F. Inside, the aircraft exhudes a lived-in feel, seatback bins overstuffed with magazines and empty plastic cups, passengers swathed in red blankets, din of a fussing child reaching through the music on my headphones.

Landing in Japan is evocative of the mood in Lost in Translation, a cliché of a comment, but nonetheless true. There is a stillness inspite of the encircling flurry of activity—as if one is part of a video in mute mode. My feet slide over the grooved escalator floor with a scraping sound, beats from a tabla waft over the loudspeakers near the immigration area. I have done this route often: draw money at the ATM machines that accept foreign cards, pick up a bottle of water from the convenience store at the airport—holding out an open palm filled with Japanese change (from earlier trips) from which the face-mask clad store attendant picks out the amount; take the Narita express downstairs to Tokyo station, grab a cab with a white gloved driver for the last leg of the trip to my hotel, drive past the gnarly trees with windswept shapes on the grounds of the imperial palace, watching the yellow arrow snake through a network of streets on the cabbie’s GPS.

A lasting consequence of the 1964 Olympics has been that the Tokyo metro is sign posted in English. The signposting is pithy, but adequate—a small English word or two inset within the jumble of instructions in Japanese. As I make my way, from the Narita Express platform deep within the bowels of the station to the surface exits, massive crowds of passengers swish by in collective motion, heading out of an arriving train, bifurcating in different directions, then deftly bypassing another school of passengers headed in the opposite direction.

A highlight of my trips to Japan are the noodle shops. Formal Japanese meals in upscale restaurants are—of course-- delicate, elaborate, and exotic. Nowhere else, have I been offered the brilliant variety of meats as I have here: chicken sashimi, raw horse meat, dishes requiring extreme care that only specialized restaurants can provide. These are lengthy, multi-course meals perfect for a long enjoyable evening out with others. But when alone, for a quick cheap meal, there is nothing—anywhere—that beats the taste and camaraderie of eating with other fellow travelers in a hurry as in a noodle shop. As in many other places in Tokyo, noodle shops are cramped spaces with a small kitchen behind a food counter. Outside the store, on the pavement, there are coin slot machines with pictures of noodle dishes available. After accepting payment, the machine dispenses a receipt that you then present to the cook. Standing encircled by large cauldrons of hot steaming water, he conjures up your bowl in a couple of minutes. There is an efficient arrangement of bar like seating, a water dispenser within reach, and a moist cloth to dab one’s hands on. There is little disposable material—no paper napkins, no sauce packets, or straw covers. Most patrons forgo the wooden soup spoons and prefer to sip directly from the bowl instead, in-between mouthfuls of chopstick fed noodles. There is peace and contentment within, and the sounds of deep slurps with-out. This—is moksha—for me. I try to pack in as many noodle shop trips as I can, sometimes heading out at 6:30 am for a noodle breakfast.



Japan is a country with a wonderful sense of engineering, and it reminds me much of Switzerland in the attention to detail, and the “put togetherness” of components. There is an engineering orderliness where not a bolt or tubing is superfluous, readily apparent in a drive through the city, or a rail trip into a train station. It is clear there is a method for everything, an adhered to code for every public placement of an engineering or electrical structure, a dignity and pride in one’s work. For me, this is as much part of the beauty of Japan, a no-nonsense beauty of efficiency, as is Mount Fuji—whose majestic prominence we can see clearly from my hotel in Akasaka on a clear day. There are no cheap looking galvanized metal siding scattered about, utilities and pylons are indexed with numbers, no doubt tracked and kept in perfect working order, stainless steel screws, washers, bolts in a perfect harmony of placement. Yet within this sense of orderliness and pre-determined neatness, are signs of occasional entropy, like the van driver who stood by his van on a busy street on an early morning, relieving himself, as I headed out for a jog; or the trio of homeless men under the bridge in sharp contrast to the suited salarymen on their way to work on an early morning.

Tokyo itself has a magnificence of scale. Enormous buildings line the streets, behemoths seated next to one another like giant football linemen by the sidelines of an unfolding game. The city comforts you with the familiar trappings of modern life, yet keeps you at bay with the unfamiliar and exotic. Blue collar mechanics at a roadside project wear Capri length flared baggy samurai workpants but with western workboots and leather toolbelts hanging from their waist. I recognize all of the power tools in their hands and belts, indeed I may own some of them, but the flared samurai workpants are new to me.

You cannot fully appreciate the beauty of Japan unless you are an engineer at heart. From the exquisite joinery and sparse elegance of Japanese cabinetry, its incredible metallurgical blademaking techniques, the precision and cold stainless heft of its industrial machinery, to the delicate precision with which its food is presented, the entire country unfolds itself as an exercise in efficient, rational design that is at the core of the country’s basic philosophy.

Indian Ocean at the BB King Blues Club

Indian Ocean performance Oct 09 2009
BB King Blues Club
237 W 42nd St
New York, NY 10036-7201
(212) 997-4144


I have always enjoyed the band, Indian Ocean, ever since I picked up one of their CDs in Palika Bazaar in New Delhi, where I had gone to try to find some music by Junoon. So when our close friends A&U told us that Indian Ocean was going to be playing at the BB King Blues Club in Times Square, New York City, we could not resist

BB King Blues club has a cosy stage and a superb acoustic ambience. The place was filling up, mainly with youngish Indian couples in their twenties occupied behind square New York glasses, kisses and cutesy hand waves. The place is dark, womb-like, with two circles of tables beholding a lit stage at center, and an open place for dancing inbetween. I see John Turturro at a table, fiddling with his Blackberry, ostensibly here to enjoy Indian Ocean. I order a beer on tap--it is flat. We order some chicken wings and calamari, they are rubbery and insipid. I call such dishes twice killed chicken—once by the butcher, and once by the cook. We did not come here for the food, and it looked like the establishment wants to keep it that way.

Indian Ocean is a treat to listen to, one of the most original and long lived Indian bands, with a guitarist who punches out an original, mellifluous, spectrum of Indian sounds from his electric guitar. Playing a guitar that has a peripheral frame instead of a solid or hollow body, the sound is almost entirely feedback free (since there is no resonator that can start vibrating sympathetically with the sound system). The band comes on fire with the heart-rending songs of the North-East Indian country-side. They play a beautiful new number, Bondhu, set to music by Indian Ocean and originally sung in the Assamese by the visceral Anusheh from the Bangladeshi band, Bangla. This glissile song undulated as if across a muddy river, reflecting the vivid green countryside around, ebbing and wavering with its musical oars setting it to motion. Deftly working the crowd with asides, the bassist steers the crowd into the Bihari classic Hillela—an ode to the hip swaying beauties of Chapra district, played to devastating effect on the assembled crowd now dancing on the floor. They play their usual classics, Kandisa, Ma Rewa, Bandeh--their most westernized song to date-- substantially re-Easternized in the live version—almost sounding as if the guitarist in the recording were a different person. This is a multi-cultural crowd, through the corner of my eyes I see the East European waitresses ringing up checks on the cash register, jiving to the music their faces nodding in appreciation, lit up by the cold blue light of the LCD screens.

For me, the treat was in learning about the band Bangla, at this show. A few days later I pick up one of their CDs in Jackson Heights and the next day, pop it into the player in my car on a short trip north up the winding Taconic State Parkway in the morning. Fall colors are starting to burst through the hillsides. Anusheh Anadil comes through with her guttural Baul inspired numbers, her voice elevating the music above the occasional self-indulgencies of the guitarist and keyboardist. I compare this with Indian Ocean’s music. Bangla retains its rawness, Indian Ocean has succumbed slightly to the pitfalls of electronics—admirably their guitarist remains distortion-free but the vocals have creeping hints of electronic massage. I am a great fan of Indian Ocean, but perhaps, just perhaps, it is time to repackage these rural classics a bit less. You can marinate it all you want, but do not cook the tuna all the way through.

Kabab King and Alauddin Sweet Meats

Kabab King Diner
7301 37th Rd.
Jackson Heights NY 11372
Phone: 718-457-5857

Alauddin Sweet Meat USA
3714 73rd Street
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
(718) 424-6900

Rajbhog Sweets and Snacks
72-27 37th Avenue Jackson Heights,NY,


I visited Jackson Heights, Queens, after 16 years. And I went back there in a few weeks, and then again in a couple of days. The two blocks around are a little slice of Bengal: the sights, the sounds, the voices, the feel of the place. West Bengal and East Bengal are—like East and West Germany, or North and South Korea—the same people: differing in accents, but shaped by the same literature, music, and food.

Kabab King is at the crossing of 37th. and 73rd, next to a desi movie theater, and it excels at muslim cuisine from the sub-continent. It never closes, it is two storeys high--the lower level with a take-out section where the clientele varies from taxi drivers to visiting suburbanites. Upstairs is the sit-in area and when you walk in there you are greeted by the hustle and bustle of a subcontinental restaurant: the clanging of metal pots and pans, honks and engine noises from the streets, sntaches of Bengali, extended families—mothers, aunts,sisters,uncles, kids sitting at long tables, or two teenaged cousins munching out on a sunny afternoon. The available dishes are different than what you will find at a standard Indian restaurant and you ought to avail yourself of this opportunity. So here goes a meal—distributed across three establishments—all within minutes of each other by foot.

If you are a Bengali like myself, you have parked your car and are strolling down catching bits and pieces of conversation in colloquial Bengali dialects that bring you back to your youth and your visits to the houses of aunts and uncles. Shops selling familiar goods pass by, but the trip from Westchester has ratcheted your appetite and you head straight for Kabab King. If you are not from the sub-continent, you are taken a bit aback, amazed at this little eigenstate of Bengal tucked away a few miles from La Guardia; where your suburban Indian restaurants with names evoking the Raj, Taj and royalty seem worlds away, sanitized mockeries of the real thing.

So start off with the goat biryani at Kabab King, and order along with it some haleem, lamb seekh kebabs, and some goat chops. Go for the stuff that you don’t usually get. Biryanis are ubiquitous, but the one with goat is unusual in a standard Indian restaurant. It is a meat that you ought to try if you haven’t already, it has far less fat than lamb and lacks the slightly odorous aftertaste that lamb can sometimes impart. Haleem I have never seen at the standard suburban or urban Indian eatery—it is a dish popular from Bangladesh to Iran, and is a paste of lentils, minced beef, and wheat cooked for hours. A dish with high protein content, have it with a naan, or mix it in a bit with the biryani. Goat chops are rib chops, cooked with the dark charred meat mixed in with the spices that give it a special bite. What is different about muslim food from the sub-continent is the slightly different tone of the spices (similar to the packaged mixes sold under the “Shaan” brand name at Indian grocery stores), and the singular sense of all encompassing tenderness of the meat that comes from marinating with pulverized papaya. Papaya contains the enzyme papain, that will catalyze reactions which cleave the protein chains in the meat, tenderizing it.

Engorge on the meat at Kabab King, but forgo the dessert menu and instead skip down the stairs and talk a walk down the street to Alauddin Sweets for Bengali dessert. Alauddin Sweets is a Bengali sweet and tea-house. Walk in on an evening and you will find, aside from the take-out customers and sweet-meat purchasers, groups of young men relaxed after a days work, sitting around tables with cups of tea and snacks, engaged in what is called in Bengali—an adda—a “chat session”. Alauddin Sweets offers non-descript samosas—I was not impressed the one time that I ate them, decent Indian roadside stall tea, and an assortment of Indian sweetmeats. The one item—the one that should bring you to this place, are the “kachagollas” made with khejurer gur. Peer into the glass display cases filled with sweets. Look for the one where each sweet is individually wrapped in a tissue paper. This is the kachagolla, called thus since it is soft and malleable. Made using unrefined sugar from the sap of date-palm trees in winter, it is a delicacy in Bengal. Unwrap the tissue paper as if it were a little jewel and behold the light brown soft texture of the confection, imparted by the date palm sugar. Consume a few of these, wash it down with a cup of tea, pack a bunch to go (will keep their texture in the fridge for a few days), and then—if your sweet tooth is not satiated, saunter over to Rajbhog Sweets to sample the king of Indian ice-creams—the kulfi, denser than ice-cream, milk based, with ground nuts and hints of saffron. Rajbhog sweets are among the largest producers of kulfi in the tri-state area and you can find their pre-packaged products across many stores in the city. They have been pre-made in large scale, they are certainly not the best kulfis that I have tasted, but they are pretty good and will do the job.

Once you are done with the food, walk into one of the many DVD/CD stores selling Bengali movies and music. In addition to the large number of Bollywood inspired Bengali emotion flicks, you will find entire collections of the movies of the well known director, Satyajit Ray. Along with these, if you are looking for a great, relatively unknown (to the west) film-maker, you will find DVDs of the angst filled movies of Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most original, stylistic Indian directors of all time. "For him Hollywood may not have existed", commented Ray once, indeed Ghatak was an uncommon film-maker who interest in film lay only in its ability to get him an audience to convey his message. Displaced from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and settling in West Bengal, he never got over the trauma of the partition that accompanied Indian independence, and his films on the racks of a movie store in 21st century America frequented by Bengalis from both Bangladesh and India are a small tribute to this great man.