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.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
trip to India and Bangladesh July 2009
It is late in the night, Mumbai is emerging from a flooding storm, and I am on the road to Pune, 130 kms away. I have just landed from a flight from New York and it has been tiring. After
an hour, we have cleared the clutter of Mumbai and climbed onto the Mumbai-Pune expressway—six fast lanes that thread through the western ghats in a combination of well banked roads and cavernous tunnels. The roads are full of trucks at this late hour. There was a time when trucks, or “lorries”, were puny compared to their behemoth western counterparts. Brightly painted signs over their bodywork reading “OK Tata”, “Honk Please”, “Use Dipper at Night” made up for in spunk what they lacked in size. Alongsid
e these vehicles lurching under their tarpaulin covered cargo , I see newer, torquier trucks, huge side view mirrors hanging from one piece brushed aluminum drops, large flatbeds with names like Maersk on plain grey siding in the staid, efficient style of the pragmatic west. Cars on Indian roads underwent their transformation several years ago and the old Hindustan Ambassador is rarely seen on highways, replaced by sleeker, safer cars better equipped to handle the . This transitional moment appears imminent for trucks today—little things like rear brake lights, almost absent in the trucks we trailed on a trip to Agra in 2005, are today omnipresent.
Lonavala passes by, I see the ubiquitous McDonalds arch by a rest stop. In the distance, the land and hillsides are dotted with the yellow glow of sodium vapor lamps scattered through a dusty haze, giving the Indian scenery its characteristic nighttime tint—these lamps largely absent in the west in such extensive proportion—neither a cold blue, not the warmth of the red, but an obfuscating peela color smearing the dimensionality of the space between the road and the hillsides. We arrive in Pune in the early hours of the morning to empty streets, limping street dogs slinking out of the shadows like liquid droplets, by rumble jumble construction and then onwards to the government guesthouse I was staying in. I try to wake the night clerk, prostrate across the counter—he shrugs, makes a half hearted attempt at rising, loses his resolve, turns around and goes back to sleep. It takes me ten minutes to be able to sign out the keys to my room.
I am here to present an invited talk at the 60th. Jubilee celibrations of the National Chemical Labs, an ironical event for someone who nearly failed his chemistry exams before leaving the country 24 years ago. Inbetween meeting sessions, I take a walk down Pashan Road to the school where I spent my elementary and middle scho
ol years, down whizzing tr
affic and chrysanthemums and gulmohars, with the bittersweet memory of a place you realize was your own at one time, where you can see flat topped hills whose rocks you climbed beyond the unrecognizable road; where you are turned back by the guard at your own school as an unknown, yet you recognize the light beige uniforms of the children with the embroidered emblem that hasn’t changed in 35 years. In the evening I take a car to visit my old neighborhood. The gates to the compound are, surprisingly, the same ones I swung on thirty five years ago. I go by our old flat and I speak to the gentleman who lives there. The metal railings, the houses and the verandahs remain—perhaps slightly rundown, but there is a sense of reinforcing permanence—these are the easels of life upon which so many sketches have been drawn: a set of people who briefly converged onto this campus before dispersing again, only to be replaced by the next cast of characters. I take my leave from the old campus and head on to meet an old friend and her family. We talk, we drink, we go for dinner, and they drop me off late at night by the guest house, on a sweet smelling Indian summer night, a bit tipsy as I walked under the neon lights in a light breeze with the gulmohar trees around me.
The drive back to Mumbai early in the morning allows me to take in the landscape of the ghats. There is a drizzling rain, the cloud and fog has not lifted over the hills and mostly what I see is verdant landscape and wet, shiny igneous rocks. Vehicles remain lanebound, there are no two wheelers or pedestrians and the journey proceeds without the characteristic drama of Indian streets. I fall into a conversation
with the driver. He makes two trips a day, every day: Pune-Mumbai-Pune. Polite, quiet, and helpful these guys are giving in a way that they don’t have to be. This is something that I have repeatedly experienced in Indian trips, where service personnel will go out of their way to help you. On the flight into Mumbai I had long conversation with the Air India flight purser—a lifelong Mumbaiker with the light eyes of a Maharashtrian. He was doing the job, he said, for six years and had joined out of a desire to see the world. After getting married recently, travel made things tough on the family side. He did a flight, followed by a break of 4 days. At the same time, the flying habituated him—the rest period left him itching for the next flight out. I asked him about jetlag. After so many years, he said, it was not a problem any more—the body went to sleep on demand.
Mobile phone costs—at about a rupee a minute-- are around the lowest in the world, triggering a mass adaptation. Almost everyone I meet has a cellphone. Important looking people have two cell phones. Cellphones are always handled with an air of casualness. They ring with custom soundbites--the busy man will glance at it, and just as you thought he was going to let it ring, he would bring it to his ears in a slow, arc, lower his voice to a “hello”. Others will throw their heads back and allow themselves a slighter wider, "haelo". Professional conversations are rarely elaborate, if it is a driver the next sentence will usually be something like “Ha Bandra mein”: that would be the end of the conversation.
From Mumbai I head to Dhaka and overnight at Kolkata. I have dinner at the hotel bar, and over a pint of Kingfisher get talking with the bartender. He is well spoken, educated at a hotel management institute, and ambitious. Jobs in the service sector have multiplied. In 1980 there was one hotel management institute in Kolkata, today there are many. I ask him about the drinking preferences of patrons. About 60% prefer hard liquor, 30% will have beer, and 10% are wine drinkers. Among hard liquors, whiskey is the most popular and among whiskies, Black Label sells the most. Single malts are available though not as popular, not due to a lack of buying power, but rather awareness. I ask him about the big names of my time—Peter Scot, Diplomat—Indian whiskies from the 80s. Not at his bar, he says. What about rums and the legendary Old Monk, the Indian army rum? Losing ground to Bacardi. Among beers, bottled products are more popular than draught, and Kingfisher is by far the most popular. Draught beers are unpasteurized, therefore need careful handling and have limited shelf life—as a result of this, their availability and popularity has been limited. Wine drinkers are a small number, though there is a concerted effort at raising wine awareness through tasting sessions and classes. Here you see the machinations of corporate in influencing acquired tastes. Get these guys to start becoming snobbish about wine correlate it to culture, and there is a whole new business opportunity. Gone are the days of Golconda Red and Golconda White—vinegary tonics of the past, labeled as wines in a fit of optimism. Indian wines, such as Sula are much better, though uneven in quality. My bartender wishes to start his own restaurant some day and for this he is now gaining experience. He hopes to travel abroad for a few years, make some money, then return to open his business. He is curious about my life and how I ended up abroad after growing up in Kolkata. In me, he sees an outward bound trajectory that he would like to emulate, in him I see a countenance mixed with youth and the characterizing sense of self confidence vested into his generation. In the years past, these same young men would be unemployed, or underemployed sitting around at street corners, drinking tea, eyeing women, social misfits waiting in line for the few jobs that came through.
The next day I am in Dhaka, Bangladesh. An excruciatingly slow immigration line. “Computer slow hoiya gesey aazkey” (computers have slowed down today), says an official, in a passive acceptance of . I miss my first meeting due to delays--Dhaka today is like the Kolkata of 15 years ago. Random traffic patterns, immobilizing traffic jams, worn vehicles whose bodies bear the mark of a thousand body shop assaults, Dhaka serves for me as a reference marker for highlighting Kolkata’s progress. There are the little things indicative of India’s progressive prosperity. Government immigration forms, handed out on the aircraft before landing, are no longer on cut rate, blotty paper, No longer do I see decrepit public transport buses with passengers hanging out of the doorways. Commercial vehicles that are more than 15 years old will soon be banned from the streets. Traffic patterns are routed with a system of one-way traffic rules and lights. Slowly, but surely, this unruly mob of motorists have begun to stay within their lanes. I am struck by the warmth of the people in Dhaka. Food is an obsession, fish is their passion—and among the fish the Hilsa rules supreme. Somewhat similar to shad, hilsa leads the bulk of its life in the ocean, then migrating upstream the river from the delta to spawn—as far as a thousand kilometers. The fat content defines the taste, fish that have migrated further upstream have a higher fat content and highly sought, particularly the ones caught on the Padma river. I have fish like there was no tomorrow in Dhaka. Grilled, curried, fish head mixed in with lentils, fish balls, small fried anchovy like fish, fried steaks of hilsa.
After a whirlwind 8 days, I am back in New York. A leafy, sunny morning at the Pleasantville farmers market, it is a world apart, as Audis and Volvos drive up into the parking lot to shop with farmers driving down early in the morning from the agricultural hinterlands of New York City. As the metropolises in the developing world shift to the conveniences of mass manufactured broiler chickens and vegetables ready to throw into the refrigerator, there is a quiet movement, albeit expensive at this point, in the country that started this all, to reverse this trend.
an hour, we have cleared the clutter of Mumbai and climbed onto the Mumbai-Pune expressway—six fast lanes that thread through the western ghats in a combination of well banked roads and cavernous tunnels. The roads are full of trucks at this late hour. There was a time when trucks, or “lorries”, were puny compared to their behemoth western counterparts. Brightly painted signs over their bodywork reading “OK Tata”, “Honk Please”, “Use Dipper at Night” made up for in spunk what they lacked in size. Alongsid
e these vehicles lurching under their tarpaulin covered cargo , I see newer, torquier trucks, huge side view mirrors hanging from one piece brushed aluminum drops, large flatbeds with names like Maersk on plain grey siding in the staid, efficient style of the pragmatic west. Cars on Indian roads underwent their transformation several years ago and the old Hindustan Ambassador is rarely seen on highways, replaced by sleeker, safer cars better equipped to handle the . This transitional moment appears imminent for trucks today—little things like rear brake lights, almost absent in the trucks we trailed on a trip to Agra in 2005, are today omnipresent.
Lonavala passes by, I see the ubiquitous McDonalds arch by a rest stop. In the distance, the land and hillsides are dotted with the yellow glow of sodium vapor lamps scattered through a dusty haze, giving the Indian scenery its characteristic nighttime tint—these lamps largely absent in the west in such extensive proportion—neither a cold blue, not the warmth of the red, but an obfuscating peela color smearing the dimensionality of the space between the road and the hillsides. We arrive in Pune in the early hours of the morning to empty streets, limping street dogs slinking out of the shadows like liquid droplets, by rumble jumble construction and then onwards to the government guesthouse I was staying in. I try to wake the night clerk, prostrate across the counter—he shrugs, makes a half hearted attempt at rising, loses his resolve, turns around and goes back to sleep. It takes me ten minutes to be able to sign out the keys to my room.
I am here to present an invited talk at the 60th. Jubilee celibrations of the National Chemical Labs, an ironical event for someone who nearly failed his chemistry exams before leaving the country 24 years ago. Inbetween meeting sessions, I take a walk down Pashan Road to the school where I spent my elementary and middle scho
ol years, down whizzing tr
affic and chrysanthemums and gulmohars, with the bittersweet memory of a place you realize was your own at one time, where you can see flat topped hills whose rocks you climbed beyond the unrecognizable road; where you are turned back by the guard at your own school as an unknown, yet you recognize the light beige uniforms of the children with the embroidered emblem that hasn’t changed in 35 years. In the evening I take a car to visit my old neighborhood. The gates to the compound are, surprisingly, the same ones I swung on thirty five years ago. I go by our old flat and I speak to the gentleman who lives there. The metal railings, the houses and the verandahs remain—perhaps slightly rundown, but there is a sense of reinforcing permanence—these are the easels of life upon which so many sketches have been drawn: a set of people who briefly converged onto this campus before dispersing again, only to be replaced by the next cast of characters. I take my leave from the old campus and head on to meet an old friend and her family. We talk, we drink, we go for dinner, and they drop me off late at night by the guest house, on a sweet smelling Indian summer night, a bit tipsy as I walked under the neon lights in a light breeze with the gulmohar trees around me.
The drive back to Mumbai early in the morning allows me to take in the landscape of the ghats. There is a drizzling rain, the cloud and fog has not lifted over the hills and mostly what I see is verdant landscape and wet, shiny igneous rocks. Vehicles remain lanebound, there are no two wheelers or pedestrians and the journey proceeds without the characteristic drama of Indian streets. I fall into a conversation
with the driver. He makes two trips a day, every day: Pune-Mumbai-Pune. Polite, quiet, and helpful these guys are giving in a way that they don’t have to be. This is something that I have repeatedly experienced in Indian trips, where service personnel will go out of their way to help you. On the flight into Mumbai I had long conversation with the Air India flight purser—a lifelong Mumbaiker with the light eyes of a Maharashtrian. He was doing the job, he said, for six years and had joined out of a desire to see the world. After getting married recently, travel made things tough on the family side. He did a flight, followed by a break of 4 days. At the same time, the flying habituated him—the rest period left him itching for the next flight out. I asked him about jetlag. After so many years, he said, it was not a problem any more—the body went to sleep on demand.Mobile phone costs—at about a rupee a minute-- are around the lowest in the world, triggering a mass adaptation. Almost everyone I meet has a cellphone. Important looking people have two cell phones. Cellphones are always handled with an air of casualness. They ring with custom soundbites--the busy man will glance at it, and just as you thought he was going to let it ring, he would bring it to his ears in a slow, arc, lower his voice to a “hello”. Others will throw their heads back and allow themselves a slighter wider, "haelo". Professional conversations are rarely elaborate, if it is a driver the next sentence will usually be something like “Ha Bandra mein”: that would be the end of the conversation.
From Mumbai I head to Dhaka and overnight at Kolkata. I have dinner at the hotel bar, and over a pint of Kingfisher get talking with the bartender. He is well spoken, educated at a hotel management institute, and ambitious. Jobs in the service sector have multiplied. In 1980 there was one hotel management institute in Kolkata, today there are many. I ask him about the drinking preferences of patrons. About 60% prefer hard liquor, 30% will have beer, and 10% are wine drinkers. Among hard liquors, whiskey is the most popular and among whiskies, Black Label sells the most. Single malts are available though not as popular, not due to a lack of buying power, but rather awareness. I ask him about the big names of my time—Peter Scot, Diplomat—Indian whiskies from the 80s. Not at his bar, he says. What about rums and the legendary Old Monk, the Indian army rum? Losing ground to Bacardi. Among beers, bottled products are more popular than draught, and Kingfisher is by far the most popular. Draught beers are unpasteurized, therefore need careful handling and have limited shelf life—as a result of this, their availability and popularity has been limited. Wine drinkers are a small number, though there is a concerted effort at raising wine awareness through tasting sessions and classes. Here you see the machinations of corporate in influencing acquired tastes. Get these guys to start becoming snobbish about wine correlate it to culture, and there is a whole new business opportunity. Gone are the days of Golconda Red and Golconda White—vinegary tonics of the past, labeled as wines in a fit of optimism. Indian wines, such as Sula are much better, though uneven in quality. My bartender wishes to start his own restaurant some day and for this he is now gaining experience. He hopes to travel abroad for a few years, make some money, then return to open his business. He is curious about my life and how I ended up abroad after growing up in Kolkata. In me, he sees an outward bound trajectory that he would like to emulate, in him I see a countenance mixed with youth and the characterizing sense of self confidence vested into his generation. In the years past, these same young men would be unemployed, or underemployed sitting around at street corners, drinking tea, eyeing women, social misfits waiting in line for the few jobs that came through.
The next day I am in Dhaka, Bangladesh. An excruciatingly slow immigration line. “Computer slow hoiya gesey aazkey” (computers have slowed down today), says an official, in a passive acceptance of . I miss my first meeting due to delays--Dhaka today is like the Kolkata of 15 years ago. Random traffic patterns, immobilizing traffic jams, worn vehicles whose bodies bear the mark of a thousand body shop assaults, Dhaka serves for me as a reference marker for highlighting Kolkata’s progress. There are the little things indicative of India’s progressive prosperity. Government immigration forms, handed out on the aircraft before landing, are no longer on cut rate, blotty paper, No longer do I see decrepit public transport buses with passengers hanging out of the doorways. Commercial vehicles that are more than 15 years old will soon be banned from the streets. Traffic patterns are routed with a system of one-way traffic rules and lights. Slowly, but surely, this unruly mob of motorists have begun to stay within their lanes. I am struck by the warmth of the people in Dhaka. Food is an obsession, fish is their passion—and among the fish the Hilsa rules supreme. Somewhat similar to shad, hilsa leads the bulk of its life in the ocean, then migrating upstream the river from the delta to spawn—as far as a thousand kilometers. The fat content defines the taste, fish that have migrated further upstream have a higher fat content and highly sought, particularly the ones caught on the Padma river. I have fish like there was no tomorrow in Dhaka. Grilled, curried, fish head mixed in with lentils, fish balls, small fried anchovy like fish, fried steaks of hilsa.
After a whirlwind 8 days, I am back in New York. A leafy, sunny morning at the Pleasantville farmers market, it is a world apart, as Audis and Volvos drive up into the parking lot to shop with farmers driving down early in the morning from the agricultural hinterlands of New York City. As the metropolises in the developing world shift to the conveniences of mass manufactured broiler chickens and vegetables ready to throw into the refrigerator, there is a quiet movement, albeit expensive at this point, in the country that started this all, to reverse this trend.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
A brief trip to Seoul
A brief trip to
Multitudes of high rises extend across greater
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
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).
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