I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid and teenager in India (1970s and 1980s) south Indian food—outside of south India—really meant the idli-dosa-vada complex. Served in small towns all over north India in restaurants with names like Madras Cafe or Kerala Cafe (just as almost every Chinese restaurant was named either Nanking, Golden Dragon or Kowloon) this subset of south Indian cuisines was one of the three national cuisines of India—Mughlai and Chinese being the others. It wasn’t until much later that I became aware that there was a lot more to south Indian food beyond the vegetarian cliches and that in fact south India is more non-vegetarian than vegetarian. For many of us in Delhi in the early 1990s a restaurant in Hauz Khas named Malabar was our introduction to much of this food—it specialized in the food of Kerala and the southwestern coast. Later, restaurants like Coconut Grove and Swagath expanded Delhi’ites horizons further. Continue reading
Tag Archives: South Indian
Quilon (London)
My American friends are sick and tired of hearing me moan about the state of Indian food in the US. Thankfully, there’s far less cause for moaning on this score in London. On my visit last summer I ate at a few of London’s better reviewed Indian/South Asian restaurants and liked them all a lot: from the Michelin starred Trishna to the ever-popular Dishoom to the far more informal Hoppers. It is our plan during our current, much longer stay in London to explore the Indian/South Asian food scene far more thoroughly across different parts of the price spectrum. I know from past experience that even curry houses in London are a world apart from most of their counterparts in the US. Our first outing, however, was not to a curry house but to Quilon, the posh restaurant at the Taj hotel on Buckingham Gate in Westminster. Continue reading
Dakshin (Delhi, January 2016)
Once upon a time in Delhi, restaurants at five star hotels were pretty much the only option if you wanted to go out for a fancy meal. The pre-eminent restaurants in the category were the Maurya Sheraton’s Bukhara and Dum Pukht, and through the late 1980s and 1990s they set the tone for similar restaurants at the other five stars: meat-centric North Indian food with either a Northwest frontier or nawabi focus. The hotels usually also all had Indian Chinese restaurants (each of which pretended to be “authentic” Chinese) and 24-hour coffee shops, and some had one outlier restaurant: the Meridien had a French restaurant, for example, (Pierre, I think its name was—for all I know, it still exists.) and the Oberoi had an excellent Thai restaurant for a while: Baan Thai. Continue reading
Meen Mapas (Kerala-style Fish Curry)
Malayali food is one of my very favourite cuisines and is one of the things I miss most about living in India. I don’t mean to suggest that I grew up eating Malayali food (Kerala is the state, the people, culture and food are Malayali; the language is Malayalam). Indeed, given how intensely regional Indian cultural identity is, and also how relatively recently it is that restaurants specializing in something other than the local cuisine, “Mughlai” cuisine and Indian-Chinese cuisine have begun to pop up in the major Indian metros, I didn’t really have too much of an opportunity to eat it. In fact, it wasn’t until my early twenties that I was really introduced to Malayali food. This happened at Malabar, a restaurant in Hauz Khas in Delhi that I would eat at often with friends from work. I left for the US shortly thereafter and on visits home seeking out Malayali food was a major highlight (though then it was to the Coconut Grove in the Ashok Yatri Niwas hotel that we’d go—see here for a brief account of a scandalous crime that resulted in the shutting down of the Ashok Yatri Niwas). These days there are lots of places to eat Malayali and other non-idli-dosa-sambhar South Indian foods in Delhi, but in the early ’90s there really weren’t and so there’s doubtless some element of exoticism in my attachment to Malayali food.
Malabari Kitchen (Minneapolis)
After a hiatus of a few weeks my slow-motion survey of South Asian restaurants in the Twin Cities metro area starts back up again with this review of a recent dinner at Malabari Kitchen in Minneapolis, which specializes in food from the southern Indian state of Kerala. I am pleased to report that this meal was much better than the previous and did not jeopardize the future of the series. (See here for my review of a lunch at Bawarchi, and here for my review of the Dosa King meal that almost brought this series to an end.) While not everything about the meal and experience was good it’s still a place I would recommend to people interested in exploring Indian food. Continue reading
Dosa King (Spring Lake Park, Minnesota)
More like Dosa Pretender. This was not a good meal and has put my proposed slow-motion survey of Indian food in the Twin Cities metro area in some jeopardy as it has led my wife to beg off attending any more of these meals—she thought our meal at Bawarchi was fine but nothing worth driving two hours for; but this she thought barely approached acceptability; and I’m not sure if the friend who accompanied us is enthused at the prospect of a possible repeat of this experience.
Caveats: We ate lunch on a Saturday and it was the predictable buffet. It is entirely possible that they do better at dinner (though reports I’ve since received suggest that that may not be very much better). Also, it’s only one meal; maybe we caught them on a bad morning. Who knows? I’m certainly not going back again to investigate.
What we ate—please click on an image below, if you dare, to launch a larger slideshow with detailed captions Continue reading
Bawarchi (Plymouth, Minnesota)
As mentioned a few days ago, I am starting a slow-motion survey of some of the luminaries of the Indian restaurant scene in the greater Twin Cities metro area. Why? Read on. (Or if you want to just skip to the review of Bawarchi scroll down a fair bit.)
I’ve lived in the US for 21 years now and learned from experience long ago to avoid most Indian restaurants, regardless of location. Short version of the reason: almost all of them run the gamut from mediocre to very bad. And somehow, most American foodies don’t get this even if in the last 10-15 years their awareness of and ability to make meaningful distinctions with various other Asian cuisines has expanded dramatically. The most obvious and striking parallel is with China, another large country with a dizzying variety of regions and cuisines. While the dominant mode of Chinese food in the US is still the Panda Express model, the major metros have a fair bit of granularity, with Sichuan usually leading the way. Certainly, the knowledge base of the average American food writer and foodie is much higher re various Chinese cuisines than it used to be in 1993 (I take this arbitrary date as a reference point as that’s when I arrived in the US). The same, alas, is not true of Indian food—leave alone the average foodie I can’t think of a single well-known American food writer who can be trusted on Indian food. Continue reading
Carnatic Cafe (Delhi, January 2014)
I apologize for not having a whisky review on International Whisky Day, which marks the birthday of the late, great whisky writer, Michael Jackson. I do have news that will delight the majority of my whisky-focused readership: this is the last of my food reports from our Delhi trip earlier this year. (You could, of course, skip this and instead read the Aberlour A’Bunadh vertical I published last year on this day, when my blog was still very new.)
Anyway: this is a report on a very nice and very casual meal at Carnatic Cafe, a small restaurant in the Friends Colony shopping center in South Delhi that serves what has been for many decades now one of the most popular cuisines in India, and the only one that could rival the reach and popularity of Mughlai and Indian Chinese food. I refer, of course, to familiar South Indian vegetarian food: idlis, dosas, vadas and so forth. I apologize for being so geographically inexact–I am just trying to give a sense of the view from the not very culturally sensitive North. It is only relatively recently and still not particularly pervasively that this food has been identified in North India with more specific South Indian locations, and most specifically with the name “Udupi”. In my youth all of South India was contained in the descriptor “Madrasi” and this food generally had that or some other recognizable signifier of South Indianness slapped onto it. Continue reading
Swagath (Delhi, January 2014)
I mentioned Swagath briefly in the intro to my review of Kerala Express. It opened in Defence Colony about ten years ago and was a sensation with its southwestern/coastal menu, with an emphasis on Konkani food. This kind of thing is all over Bombay, of course, and is far superior there but it was, by and large, new to Delhi. I can’t remember when Dakshin at the Sheraton opened but that was, of course, both far more expensive and also served a broader South Indian menu than Swagath did/does.
This is not to say that Swagath’s menu only or predominantly features food from the Konkan coast and environs. As is often the case in Delhi, it has been a “multicuisine” restaurant from the start, and you’ve always had to leaf past the Mughlai and Chinese sections of the menu to get to the interesting stuff. And that, in short, is a good illustration of what I said a while ago about the state of regional dining options in Delhi (and elsewhere): once they did not exist; now they do but the gods of butter chicken and chicken chowmein must still be appeased. Continue reading
Golconda Bowl Express (Noida, January 2014)
In my review of Oh Calcutta last week I noted that when I lived in Delhi in the late 1980s and early 1990s there weren’t any Bengali restaurants around. Well, there was no Hyderabadi or Andhra food to be had either—not outside of the canteen (or cafetaria for you Amreekans) of the Andhra Bhavan (the Andhra Pradesh state government’s center of operations in Delhi). The Andhra Bhavan canteen is still in operation and still very popular–I ate there on my last trip to Delhi (and it’s still very cheap and good). But now there are plenty of other options. Of these on my last trip I also ate at a place named Poppadum (in the Ambawatta complex in Mehrauli) with comical service but pretty good food. But Mehrauli is a long way from my parents’ place in Noida, and in any case I remember Poppadum being all but impossible to find (in fact, it may no longer be in business—perhaps because no one could find it). And so when an old, close friend of mine drove over to pick us up for lunch we decided to stay local and head to the Noida outpost of Golconda Bowl (the main one is in the nightmare that is Hauz Khas village—more on this nightmare in a later post). Continue reading