Devi

www.devinyc.com
8 East 18th Street
New York, NY 10003-1938
(212) 691-1300

Last night our good friends, A & U, took us out to Devi, an ethnically conscious, Manhattan savvy, Indian restaurant near the NYU area of the city. Devi--in most Indian languages--means goddess, and you will invoke her name a few times in course of the evening. The first will be after looking at the prices on the menu. A non-descript entrance leads into an opulent interior in the Rajasthani style. Fantastic colored glass lighting pendants inset with mock semi-precious stones from Faizabad hang from the high ceiling, overseeing earnest faced, uber-palated diners, in a room full of stonework and marble.

There are a few dishes that have made their way into the menus of many Indian restaurants over the past few years, originating from industrial eateries in dense Indian pockets such as Oaktree Lane, mutating onto the menus of fashionable metropolitan ones like Devi, and then tributaring on to the far flung suburbs. Kurkure (crunchy) Bhindi is one of them--finely sliced okra deep fried and garnished with lemon juice, salt, and spices. Manchurian Gobi (cauliflower) is another, fried in a batter with a tomatoey sauce, its roots traceable to Calcutta Chinese food. Bhel Puri is a puffed rice based street food in India that feels strangely impotent in the dimly lit ambience of posh restaurants, neatly presented and cast out of a pyramidal mold, but without the swirl of surrounding entropy that gives it life. Our dinners at Indian restaurants are weighted towards appetizers, an impromptu dim-sum like melee, topped off with a shared entrée. Right off the bat, the food at Devi feels different—better prepared, better ingredients, more thought behind the process. Chicken Kebabs with ground coriander, and an apricot sauce on the side, dissolve in the mouth--you cannot begin to unravel where one flavor ends and another begins, it is as if a continuum has been reconstructed out of the the finely chopped condiments. If there is one unique aspect to this place, it is the background/foreground pairing of tastes.

Devi is the very best Indian restaurant in the tri-state area. This is not the food of a heavy handed pace bowler who will throw you a sizzling bouncer, nor is this your ho-hum suburban medium pacer with his reliable swing balls. The chef, Suvir Saran, is a an elegant bowler with spin and flight, who moves his ball trickily on the textured pitch of Indian food. I have not had lamb kebabs that have been this tender, I have not had jackfruit biryani this refined (I have not had any jackfruit biryani earlier, for that matter—but this is where the background/foreground comes in). Sample the food--this is the next time that you will take the Devi’s name.

The ambiance of Devi has the phoney ethnicity of a hoighty-toighty Indian restaurant, down to the little lamps along each step on the staircase. It is maybe a legacy of India’s colonial hangover, that an intercourse with the west always needs to be with one’s ethnic foot set plumb forward; or maybe just a proven ploy to attract customers. Whatever be the case, if you can afford this on your wallet, by all means go for it, for this will be the benchmark against which all Indian food here ought to be measured.

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.