Here is my second restaurant report from my short trip to New Jersey/New York in mid-May. I ate four meals out with friends. Three of these were at Indian restaurants. I’ve already written up dinner at Bombay Bistro in the West Village. That was an old-school North Indian curry house meal. My two other Indian restaurant meals were eaten in New Jersey. Neither were North Indian and both were quite a bit cheaper than the Bombay Bistro dinner. The first of these was lunch at Pakvaan Desi Spice, a Gujarati restaurant in a strip mall in Edison. I met another old friend for lunch there. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Thali
The Weekday Lunch Thali at Godavari (Eden Prairie, MN)
On the weekend I posted the second of two reports of the lunch thali meals I ate in New Jersey towards the end of April. The first of these was at Kathiyawadi Kitchen and was really excellent. The second was at Samudhra, and while I didn’t like it nearly as much as I had Kathiyawadi Kitchen’s thali, resizing the photographs from that meal earlier last week put me in the mood for another thali lunch. My hands-down favourite thali in the Twin Cities metro—and indeed my pick for best lunch deal in the area—used to be the weekday thali at Kabob’s Indian Grill in Bloomington. Alas, as has been reported in the comments here on multiple occasions, Kabob’s no longer offers that thali. Nor, for that matter, does Kumar’s in Apple Valley still offer their weekday lunch thali—it’s been replaced by a buffet. Thankfully, Godavari in Eden Prairie—the restaurant that has topped all editions of my Twin Cities South Asian restaurant rankings—now offers a lunch thali. And so it was to Eden Prairie I went for lunch on the day after the last day of my term. Here is what I found. Continue reading
Samudhra (Franklin Park, New Jersey)
The first, second, third and fifty-fifth thing you need to know about Samudhra, an Indian restaurant in Franklin Park, New Jersey, is that they have a very strict dress code. This may well be the only thing you need to know about them; it is almost certainly the only thing you will remember about them. It’ll pop up as the first thing you see when you go to their website. You’ll be told about it when you call to make a reservation. When you arrive, you’ll see it posted prominently on the window of their foyer. When you go in, you’ll see it posted inside the foyer as well. And just in case you haven’t gotten the message, you’ll see it again before you’re walked to your table. “A lot of people have tried to come and eat here in pajamas and chappals or what?”, I asked the host; he smiled embarrassedly and then launched into a saga of how they’ve had to call the police on inappropriately dressed people. My friend and I looked dubiously at him and he petered off. Thankfully, there are no further reminders inside the restaurant. Continue reading
Kathiyawadi Kitchen (Sayreville, New Jersey)
I was recently in New York and New Jersey for a few days. I was there primarily for a few academic events connected to South Asian cinema, but also took the opportunity to meet up with some old friends. As half my commitments were in the New Brunswick area, I stayed in a hotel across the street from Newark Penn Station. I took the New Jersey transit train down to New Brunswick on both days in the mornings and then took it back up to New York Penn in the early evenings for my events/meetings there. My lunches therefore were in the vicinity of New Brunswick, and my dinners were in Manhattan. Now, of course, I was looking forward to eating a couple of good meals in New York, but, truth be told, I was more excited about the lunches in New Jersey. This because the friends I was eating with had picked out Indian restaurants for us to go eat thalis in. Here’s an account of that first meal, at Kathiyawadi Kitchen in Sayreville. Spoiler alert: It was rather excellent! And I say this as a confirmed carnivore even though it’s a vegetarian restaurant. Continue reading