After boffo numbers to close 2024 and open 2025, both page views and unique visitor counts were down in April. This is a normal pattern. I don’t claim to understand why but traffic is always lower than normal in April and November in most years. I also didn’t post as much as I was planning to in April. Not only did I not complete all my food reports from my trip to Delhi in March, I did not have a Twin Cities restaurant report last week. This is because, as I said yesterday, I have been extremely busy, not just with the regular school term but with early preparation for the second run of my Bombay-Seoul off-campus program, which will visit both cities next year. Anyway, May should be a little less frenzied on all fronts. You can expect the usual booze reviews on Mondays—in May these will all be whisky reviews—and food reports on Wednesdays (for the Twin Cities) and the weekends (for my remaining Delhi reports). As for cooking and recipes, you’ll have to continue looking to my Instagram account. Continue reading
Author Archives: My Annoying Opinions
Dim Sum at Jade Dynasty (Minneapolis)
I’d promised a review of another lunch at Grand Szechuan for last week but never got around to posting it. I’ve been terribly busy at work with early preparations for the second run of my Bombay-Seoul off-campus program and just did not have the time to resize all the pictures (this is also why I did not post any more reports from Delhi in March last week). And when it came time to post this week’s Twin Cities restaurant report, I decided to hold off a second Grand Szechuan report in less than a month—I’ll combine that report with that of our next visit (which will doubtless be before the summer). Here instead is my first-ever report on a new’ish Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis: Jade Dynasty. Specifically, it is a report on their dim sum offerings. Long-time readers know—and some take really personally—that I am not very high on dim sum in the Twin Cities. Did Jade Dynasty change my mind? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Rancho Vale Madre Añejo: Straight and Mixed
This month’s booze reviews kicked off with a rum: the Amrut Two Indies. Though this was not planned, it ended up becoming a non-whisky month, with two reviews of French brandies following: an Armagnac from Cardinat and a Calvados from Toutain. To close out the month, I have a mezcal. This represents novelty for me in two ways: this is a mezcal from a producer I have not previously encountered, and it is an añejo, having been matured in oak casks for at least a year. The producer is Rancho Vale Madre in Oaxaca. My friend Ben visited the distillery in February and very kindly brought me back this bottle. Unlike mezcals released in the US, this is a fairly bare bones label: there’s no detail of any kind on the production method or the variety of agave used; indeed, not even the abv/strength is noted (though I am pretty sure it’s around 40%). I was very curious to try it as the word on the American mezcal enthusiast street is not very positive on oak cask-aged mezcals in general. The thinking is that the quintessential qualities of mezcal are best expressed in joven/blanco spirit that has been “aged” only in glass. I’ve no idea what the status of añejo and reposado mezcals in Mexico more broadly or Oaxaca in particular is. Nor do I know very much about Rancho Vale Madre beyond the fact that they seem to a popular stop on mezcal tours in Oaxaca; the estimable Mezcal Reviews site does not list any of their releases. Anyway, as you’ll see below, while I enjoyed this añejo fine on its own, I think I will probably finish most of the bottle via cocktails. Continue reading
Toutain Hors d’Age
This month’s booze reviews have included a rum (this Amrut) and an armagnac (this Cardinat). Might as well make it a full month of non-whisky reviews. Here now is another brandy, albeit a Calvados. I’ve not reviewed a Calvados in a while—the last one was this 15 yo from Domaine Montreuil, which I reviewed in October 2023. Today’s review is also of a 15 yo, though the age is not mentioned on the label of this release from Toutain. The label only says “Hors d’Age” but it seems pretty common knowledge that the brandy inside is a minimum15 years old—that’s what pretty much everyone who sells it notes. Toutain sits on the border of the Pays d’Auge production region of Calvados and the question of which region their Calvados is actually from is a little complicated. I purchased this bottle—along with another of their releases—in Europe some years ago. At the time their releases were not sold in the US. Now, however, they are; indeed, their Hors d’Age is available if you look around online—though at a price that is quite a bit higher than I paid for it. At any rate, this means that my review will not be as useless as usual for my predominantly US-based readers. Let’s get to it. Continue reading
6 Ballygunge Place (Delhi, March 2025)
About two and a half decades ago a wave of high’ish end traditional Bengali restaurants opened in Calcutta/Kolkata. This was a significant development for a number of reasons. For one thing it was a marker of how regional Indian food was beginning to be marketed to wealthy Indians as they looked for more ways to spend the greater disposable income they had in the era of the liberalization of the economy. Rather than foreign or Mughlai or Chinese food, it was now regional food that began to become a viable market proposition. For another, it was also a sign of transformations in the domestic sphere for Bengalis in the middle class and above: more and more younger women were in the workplace, the grip of the joint family was loosening. Among the effects were breaks in the transmission of traditional cooking and recipes in the patriarchal household. The new restaurants increasingly became the places where the Bengali leisure class went to eat dishes that a generation prior would have been made at home, either on special occasions or more regularly. Continue reading
Restaurant Alma XV, Spring 2025 (Minneapolis)
In my post, The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation, which ranked restaurants by how many times in a year we’re likely to eat there, Alma was the only restaurant I had in the “Several Times a Year” tier. And so it should be no surprise that with less than four months gone in the year, I am posting my second report on a meal eaten there in 2025. The first was of an excellent dinner in January. That meal featured a change in how Alma’s presentation of both pricing and the menu structure. Last year a meal cost $95/head with an obligatory 21% hospitality charge added to the bill. Now a meal costs $115/head but this is an all-inclusive price with no further expectation (or ask) of tipping. And while you’re still paying for a set number of courses, the opening course of “snacks for the table” and the closing dessert courses are now the only ones in which no choices are made by diners. The three larger intervening savoury courses feature a choice of two dishes. This is a distinction without a difference for the missus and I when dining there as we share everything anyway. Which means we ate the entire menu on this occasion as well and so I can tell you from direct experience that the current early spring menu—which we were told will continue for another 2-3 weeks—was excellent as well. Continue reading
Cardinat 13, 2009 (for Serious Brandy)
I haven’t reviewed a brandy in a while. The last was a very old armagnac from Pellehaut that was one of two bottled for the Serious Brandy group on Facebook back in 2023. Here now is a review of the other. This, a Cardinat, is much younger than that Pellehaut. It was distilled in 2009 before being bottled in 2023 at the age of 13. I believe the cask was split with K&L (the California mini-liquor chain). These days I have almost nothing to do anymore with the whisky or spirits world, and no longer read any spirits-related news or websites or blogs—with the exception of my friend Michael’s notes over on Diving for Pearls. And so it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when I actually spent time and energy arguing with K&L employees online. I wonder what became of David Driscoll—last I heard, he was planning to cure cancer or something. I guess I would have heard if he’d succeeded. Anyway, I don’t know why I went on this K&L tangent. Let’s instead get to my notes on this brandy. Continue reading
Krungthep Thai V (St. Paul, MN)
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities. Let’s get back into the swing of things with the restaurant that I once called the best Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities: Krungthep Thai. I wouldn’t give it that rank now but that’s not because our lunch there this past weekend was sub-par; it’s only because our hearts and tongues have since been won over by Hot Grainz. Indeed, our lunch on Saturday was as good as the best of our previous meals at Krungthep Thai—which is to say it was very good indeed. We were there with friends we’ve eaten there with before and we ordered a number of old favourites. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Amrut Two Indies (Rum)
Here is an Amrut to start the month. It’s not a whisky though but a rum. Though Amrut is most famous now for its single malt whisky, they’ve actually been making rum for much longer. This, however, is not one of their old-school rums but a blend of their own rum with several Caribbean rums—from Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana: hence Two Indies. I’m not sure when it was first released but I first encountered it last December when I was visiting a friend in Coonoor in South India. She had a bottle that had come her way from Karnataka, the state in which Amrut is located. I tasted it then and really liked it. I didn’t look for it on my return to Delhi on that trip but when I was there again last month I made it a point to seek it out. Sure enough, it was easily available in liquor stores in Gurgaon (where my parents live); and since Gurgaon is located in Haryana and Haryana has some of the lowest prices for alcohol in all of India, I got this bottle for a very reasonable price: Rs. 1500 or $17.50. I opened it a few days after getting back to Minnesota and am very pleased to say that I like it as much now as I had in December. Here now are my notes. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VIII (Delhi, March 2025)
In December I broke my streak of eating at Cafe Lota on every trip to Delhi in the last decade or so. I didn’t have so much time on that brief visit, which included a sojourn to Coonoor for a few days, to eat at all my favourite restaurants; and since we’d eaten at Cafe Lota as a family last March, I gave it a miss. But when I returned this March for two weeks I made it a priority to get back there. I met a friend for lunch there who I/we usually meet for lunch there. As it was just the two of us, we couldn’t do a whole lot of damage. But that’s not to say that we did not have much to eat. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Grand Szechuan, March 2025 (Bloomington, MN)
What better way to mark your return to Minnesota than with a meal at Grand Szechuan? You’re right: there is none. I got back from Delhi on Friday evening, and at noon on Saturday we descended on Grand Szechuan for lunch. It had somehow been three months since our last meal there (this Christmas blowout). We made up at least partially for lost time with another large meal. We were a group of 10 regulars—the four of us plus a few friends we eat there with often. The only surprising thing about the meal was that we did not order the Triple Flavour Squid/Spicy Squid Roll. We did get some other dishes we order often but supplemented them with others we hadn’t had in a while. The absence of squiddy goodness notwithstanding, it was another excellent meal at our family’s favourite restaurant in Minnesota. Continue reading
March/April 2025
Well, it’s been a hectic few weeks. My last term of teaching ended on March 12 and I left for the airport an hour after my last class, headed to Delhi. I returned to Minnesota at the end of last week and have been in a fog of jet lag ever since. I’d barely adjusted to the time shift in Delhi before it was time to come back and now my body’s wires are well and truly crossed. Helpfully, my new term of teaching began yesterday. Thankfully, I’m wide awake during the day and so only slightly more addled than usual during class time. In Delhi I ate out about as much as I usually do when there on my own. Some of those meal reports have already showed up on the blog in March (Matamaal, Ping’s Bia Hoi, Shilloi, Fort City). The rest will be posted over the next few weekends. My goal is to have them all done before the end of April. Twin Cities metro restaurant reports will go up alongside these reports in April on Wednesdays as normal. And I’ll have the usual weekly booze reviews on Mondays as well. Alright, let’s see what March’s traffic patterns looked like. Continue reading
Fort City (Delhi, March 2025)
Here’s something a little different from my normal Delhi reports. Last week I met up with some old high school friends and they suggested a brewpub in South Delhi to hang out at. To be specific, Fort City Brewing, which is located in the Hauz Khas market. Now, I don’t generally drink a lot of beer or hang out in brewpubs back in the US, but I do have an anthropological interest in these developments in Delhi, and so I agreed readily to the location. Named for the large number of medieval forts that iconically dot the landscape of Delhi, Fort City is apparently the only pub/bar in Delhi that brews their own beer. I believe they opened for business in 2023. In less than two years they’ve acquired a strong reputation and a faithful local following. They were named the best microbrewery in India for 2024 by some publication or the other, and have picked up a number of other plaudits as well. They serve a range of their own beers and a range of food besides. What did I make of it? Read on. Continue reading
Shilloi (Delhi, March 2025)
In my most recent report on meals at Matamaal—the Kashmiri restaurant in Gurgaon—I noted that eating there has become a ritual on my/our recent trips to Delhi. So too has eating in Humayunpur Market, one of the major centers of North East Indian life in Delhi, especially of North Indian cuisine. The market is dotted with restaurants, small and large, that serve the cuisines of most of the states east of Bangladesh (I’ve not yet come across any references to restaurants serving the food of Tripura), along with Tibetan, Nepali, Korean and various East Asian cuisines. On my visit to Delhi in December I ate a Nepali lunch at Bhansaghar and an Arunachali lunch at Arunachali Sajolang. Both were excellent. Away from Humayunpur, I also ate an excellent Naga lunch at Dzükou in Vasant Kunj. I was hellbent on eating Naga food again on this trip and this time I fulfilled that desire in Humayunpur, at a small restaurant named Shilloi. Continue reading
Bowmore Tempest, Batch 2
Today is the 12th anniversary of the blog. My first-ever booze review—posted on March 24, 2013—was of the Bowmore Legend. I’ve since marked every anniversary of the blog with a review of a Bowmore. Accordingly, here is a review of a Bowmore. This is in keeping as well with this month’s “young whisky” theme, being 10 years old. The secondary theme of the month’s reviews has turned out to be “throwback whisky”, as they’ve also all been reviews of whiskies released in or before 2013 (the year the blog launched—I note this in case you are even worse than me at arithmetic). Already reviewed this month: a 2013 release of the Ardbeg 10; the first release of the Kilkerran Work in Progress; and the Springbank 11, 1997, Madeira Cask. Here now is a review of the second release of the Bowmore Tempest (see here for my review of the first release). It was bottled in 2010 and, like the first batch, comprised whisky matured in first-fill bourbon casks. I can’t remember now how many batches followed this one but I do recall that the second batch was the last one to bear the name “Tempest” in the US. This on account of some brand infringement issue with an American wine. Subsequent batches were put out in the US under the name “Dorus Mor”. Anyway, I quite liked the first batch and am glad to finally be tasting this one. Continue reading
Ping’s Bia Hoi (Gurgaon, March 2025)
When I am in India, the only food I’m really very interested in eating is Indian food—including Indian Chinese. The primary reason for this is obvious: Indian food in India is far, far superior to that available anywhere in the US, with many regional cuisines and categories not even available there at all. The secondary reason is that, contrariwise, far superior versions of most non-Indian cuisines available in India exist in the US. And so I don’t really see much point in wasting my eating out slots on short trips home on Italian or (non-Indian) Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese or Korean or Mexican food etc. etc. in India. This doesn’t always mesh well, however, with the preferences of my friends and family here. While they do go out to eat at Indian restaurants as well, they’re often more excited to visit non-Indian restaurants. This is how we ended up at Gung in January 2023, for example. And this is also how I ended up on this trip at Ping’s Bia Hoi, a nominally Vietnamese but really pan-Asian restaurant at the swanky One Horizon Center in Gurgaon. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Matamaal III & IV (Gurgaon, Dec ’24/Mar ’25)
Eating at Matamaal has become a ritual on my/our trips to Delhi. We first ate there (twice) in January 2023 and then in March 2024. When I was in Delhi by myself in December, I dutifully went and ate there again by myself. And now that I’m in Delhi again by myself, it’s no surprise that I was back there again. That was yesterday. Here is a combined report on that lunch and my meal there in December (which I’d forgotten to previously report on).
By the way, as I’ve noted before, I use the name “Delhi” in my restaurant reports to refer more broadly to the National Capital Region, which includes the contiguous cities of Gurgaon (in the state of Haryana) and Noida (in the state of Uttar Pradesh). Matamaal is located in Gurgaon in the City Court mall. Or rather, that’s where the flagship location that we visit is located. At some point in the period since our first visit they’ve opened locations in Greater Kailash I in Delhi, in Noida, and even one in Pune. As to whether these locations are branches or franchise operations, I’m not sure. My reports shouldn’t be seen as indicative of the quality of the food anywhere other than at the flagship location. At that location I’m yet to have a bad meal, as my recent lunches in the last three months demonstrate. Continue reading