I can’t begin a food post without sharing an experience from a few nights ago. A group of us had dinner at Indus Valley, a reasonably well-regarded desi restaurant at 100th and Broadway in New York. At some point the composer Philip Glass walked in, and one of our group, a big fan, went into a state of beatific darshan that threatened to destabilize our meal. It got worse when Glass and his companion sat at the table next to ours. My fellow diner was finally able to compose himself, give Glass props, and return to getting our eat on.
Suddenly another of my companions let out a piercing yell and pushed back from the table with great speed. Yes, there was a big old cockroach crawling up the tablecloth — not the short dark ones you often see in NYC kitchens, but a tropical-quality beast, two or three inches long (though not the flying kind). A minor tamasha ensued, during which Philip Glass turned to me and said, with an air of wisdom, “Don’t worry, they have very small appetites.”
Cockroaches happen; celebrity sightings happen too. But what was truly shocking was that the macacas brothers running the restaurant did not comp us even a round of drinks or dessert, let alone a meal, in recognition of the disgusting insect experience. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised us, seeing that they were already trying to seat a couple at a nearby two-top while the cockroach hunt was still on, but come on, what the hell kind of restaurant management is that? So, folks, if you go to Indus Valley at 100th and Broadway, watch out for big-ass cockroaches and don’t expect a discount.
Which brings me to the subject at hand. Perhaps in response to a desi dining landscape that, except in a few fortunate neighborhoods and towns, consists of the same old slop doled out from the same buffets, plus a few “nice” places that look fancy but aren’t necessarily up to snuff in the hygiene department, the idea of desi fast food — cheap, standardized and franchised — becomes a more and more compelling alternative.
We’ve mentioned this before, with reference to the Hot Breads bakery chain, but now here is another entrepreneur heading this way, this time from an unlikely starting point in New England:
Yogi Sood sits in front of his restaurant in the food court at the Burlington Mall talking strategy with his son. The conversation is not about recipes or vendors or price points. Their recipes already are great, their vendors steady, their prices fair.
Rather, this debate is about the speed at which they should conquer the world. Yogi, a 57-year-old retired engineer and the founder of Gourmet India, wants to do it quickly. Now. Yesterday.
“Fifty franchises in five years,” he says.
Vishnal Sood, 24, raises an eyebrow. He is deferential to his father but the eyebrow is ominous.
Yogi interprets: “My son thinks I’m a bit ambitious,” he says. Then he laughs.
The Soods’ company, Gourmet India, has franchises in well-selected, semi-upscale or well-trafficked malls in the Boston area. The idea is to make desi food ubiquitous in mall food courts. I would imagine there are other regional chains starting up in different parts of the country on exactly the same premise.
Still, a national chain? “It’s a big leap,” says Harry Balzer, an expert in the eating habits of Americans. “People’s taste changes very slowly.”
Sood is nonplussed. Indian food will be to the ethnic food market what Chinese food became 20 years ago, he says. He looks around the mall’s food court. Some of the heavy hitters of the franchise restaurant business are his neighbors: Pizzeria Regina, Johnny Rockets, Quiznos. “We’re already among the most popular here,” he says.
The article treads the usual ground (with a punning title too lame to repeat here): how the US market for desi food is different from the UK, etc. Still, the question is there and it’s surely worth a lot of money: what are the chances, and what would it take, to make desi food a ubiquitous option in the malls, airports and train stations of America, like pizza and Chinese?
Pau vada – genocided into Gujurati ‘hamburgers’ by the rotund Mr. Patel, are served with alacrity at the diminutive Patel Snacks – all yours for a dollar each at India Square, Ill town JC, a quick walk from the Journal Square Path stop. We haven’t touched on sweets. Again, I contend that for fresh delectables, Canada is best. Guru Nanak brand (imported from Canada?) ras malai is the best available here.
Heh Heh Heh
Another Guju vegetarian place is Dimple, located on a nondescript side street in the 30s. Yes, you get pao bhajis there as well, and dosas. Its run by an enigmatic Gujurati couple who adorn the (rather stark) environment with Swaminaryan posters.
Dimple! Dimple! Dimple! I love Dimple. Giant plates of chat, very sweet proprietors, lots of extra lanka — perhaps dinner should be there only.
I’ve always said that I’m actually, deep inside, a Southie. Despite macher jhol and raisins in everything, everywhere and all times, my tastes are not those generally Bong. Give me rava anything, avial, curd rice and lots of curry patha and hing and sprinkle the latter on a grilled cheese, please, as it’s toasting.
Please tell me where to find avial in NYC
just to bring the point back home . i think the soods (bless their passion) should think more bricks and mortar than chutney and tadka. consider the macdonald’s franchise. ray kroc was a soda fountain salesman and macdonalds owned a successful restaurant. kroc’s contribution was to make shrewd real estate acquisitions, combine it with slick marketing and create a scalable business process model. there are other industries out there who seem to be in one business, but in truth are all dabbling in real estate.
if i were sood, i would hire a chief exec officer (hand up in the air) to take them national. it isnt a dream – but they should think beyond food to have a successful food business.
mcdonald’s … mcdonald’s… sorry i’m very sloppy sometimes..
Pied Piper, Esq:
My 12 year old self really wanted to sue. My dad told me to stop being so American. 😉
Siddhartha:
These really are my favorite kind of people. 😉 Honestly.
Nina P:
I don’t know whether this or Sepia Destiny is a better idea. There is not even room in the “awesome things” drawer of my brain for both.
There will NEVER be a food tab. Never! Sepia Destiny though…the monkeys in our SM skunkworks division, well you never know what they are up to.
You are evil, you big meanie! (Runs off the playground crying)
Ha ha ha.
Wuss.
Never heard of kati roll in my whole life until I started reading SM. For that matter, my first encounter with Frankie (something that became popular only after I left for the US) was just a year ago.
Don’t ya hate when someone brings their arguments about a unrelated topic to a innocous(sp) topic like food especially when said person complains about meta-criticism, and especially when no one finds it humorous (sp).
Anyway, I can’t eat indian food that my massi don’t cook..and Manju’s Harlem comments is so funny and true. Shells in Harlem top a million these days.
Well, if you’re referring to me I regret my little sidetrack on slurs. Got a virus at the moment and in addition to more typos than usual it’s also making me a little woozy headed. I’m easily prone to distraction. Thank god for SM.
Both Dosa Hut and Saravanaas have it, and probably others on those blocks (Lexington between 26th and 28th).
(back to crying)
The SF Bay area has a desi Chipotle-ish chain: Chaat Cafe
The chaat is passable compared to the best of the Bay but the wraps are awesome.
SF/Bay Area: Viks Chaat House Atlanta: Chat Patti LA/Artesia: Bombay Chaat House
not understanding how vatan (somewhere i’ve frequented a few times while in nyc)had a kheema samosa.. are you sure?
Totally 100% positive. It’s because they were the little tiny samosas – similar to the frozen ones my mom gets from Patel’s in Jackson Heights. I suspect they were not making them in house. Keep in mind this was more than a decade ago, if I’m not mistaken.
ugh. now my stomach is doing backflips… sigh. no more patronage of vatan from me.
bring on mahmouns and kati roll at 4am instead 🙂
Oh come on. I went there with vegan friends recently, and the staff were so considerate, brought out an entire no-milk no-yoghurt no-ghee menu. It was impressive. And the rest of us had the definitely-kheema-free regular menu, as we have the previous half-dozen times.
Not that I haven’t had one or two thousand kheema samosas in my time. But elsewhere, not at Vatan.
I’m sorry, but Kabab King beats all for non-veg food
I actually like Dimples, but I’m not a fan of Baluchis – the mini franchise thing turns me off. As for Indo-Chinese, I’ve only been to Chinese Mirch so far, and it was pretty good. As for South Indian, Chennai Garden is pretty good too (then again as a Pakistani, what do I know), though I’ll never forgive them for bringing my bhel puri after the main course. Bukhara is on my to-do list.
Any additional recommendations?
Cafe Spice, Union Square, New York – Indian bistro, but done o so right
this tangra masala place in queens has been intriguing me too; and as one with roots in the city where the original tangra neighborhood is to be found, i would love to gather a posse and check it out. i can’t do it either of the next two weekends but how about saturday the 16th? reply here and if we get critical mass i’ll turn it into an official SM meet-up.
peace
South Indian, vegetarian, some vegan, Madras Cafe, St. Mark’s, NYC
South Indian, vegetarian, wtf vegan?, best idi aapam ever, shack-on-the-way-to Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, India
how about saturday the 16th?
if lunch, I’m down.
Desitude: Yeah dude. There’s one Hakka Chinese place run by an Indian-Chinese guy from Kolkata who can speak Bengali and Hindi. There’s lots of Sri Lankan Tamil non-vegetarian places that serve exquiste Chettinad food. I even went to an Indo-Kenyan place run by guys who immigrated from Kenya.
Oh, come on! How can you post stuff like this without giving any more info? Don’t be a tease, desitude!
And anyway, I’m sure everyone’s sick of talking about New York by now…right?
for saturday brunch – utsav is great. on 47th b/w 6th and 7th. apparently shah rukh likes this place when he in nyc too.
i think kati roll should branch out into every major city. let’s see that kati roll…
Siddhartha:
Tangra Masala is VERY crowded (all desis), especially on weekends. I doubt they take reservations either (not 100% sure), so a meet-up there might not work. Maybe if you get enough confirmed people ahead of time and let them know they can work something out for you. And yeah, the food is GOOD.
Never!
There are some food items which I have an easier time finding in New York than in South India; the best kathi rolls I’ve had in the south were in this fast-food kathi roll joint in Bangalore just off Brigade Rd., but they didn’t really match the quality of the stuff you can get at the place on McDougal off W. 3rd in NYC. Various newish cafes and restaurants offer kathi rolls on their menus throughout Tamil Nadu, but in my experience these are all crap.
I have a hard time finding chaat at all (let alone good chaat) outside of a couple of places in Chennai, which are OK but no great shakes. Granted, chaat isn’t all that easy to come by in the States, but from what I hear the quality there is better than what one finds in South India. If I’m wrong about this, please tell me, because I’d love nothing more than to sink my teeth into some quality dahi papdi in Tamil Nadu.
amitabh (#185)
thanks for the caution. let’s see what interest materializes. i can also do it on a weekday if a “task force,” as nina p. would say, wants to convene.
peace
I could do weekday since I’m a slacker I mean Independent Professional.
“No, Sir, when a man is tired of New York, he is tired of life; for there is in New York all that life can afford,” to quote the words the great Samuel Johnson had on the tip of his tongue before that tart London distracted him with her cheap wares.
If my comment just gets me Johnson paraphrases and not Toronto resto-recommendations, I’m going to have to refute some people thusly.
Kick your stone elsewhere, Sir. Tis late, and the sensible half of the world is already asleep.
oh, come now. is jealously now considered a “sickness”?
Nina —
awesome. and, er, keep me posted. “independent (and quasi-independent) professionals of the world, unite!!” and where’s pooja? she’s both independent and professional, and she knows her cuisine. i hear she bakes a mean cake.
sepia destiny, indeed.
Siddhartha, try Ayurveda cafe on amsterdam betwen 94 and 95. It’s got a set menu – veggie – for $13. It’s awesome.
Desi Deli (quasi Punjabi dhaba), 49th & 10th — came in handy when i lived in midtown as they’re open 24/7/365. mostly taxiwallahs, and late-night stragglers ending their bar crawls with a plate of palek paneer / non-veg and naan. mountain-sized servings for about 5 bones.
now you guys made me hungry! I am going to Chennai and New Delhi in a couple of wks. Any recommendations?
AlMfD,
Thank you my friend, it’s good to hear a little sanity. As Razib mentioned earlier, it’s terrible that lack of common sense and objectivity in some quarters result in caveats even being necessary, and it’s even worse when the caveats do not register in the mind of the intended audience regardless of how many times they are reiterated.
Razib,
I knew it was a joke too — it sure made me laugh 🙂 My own subsequent post was intended in a similarly satirical vein.
Desitude,
(Apologies for the significant delay in replying to your questions — transatlantic time difference etc)
No.
Some of the more inclusive local white population have recently been making efforts to define British-born (South) Asians as “English” too. However, generally the word refers only to English people in the traditional sense of the term.
The term in current usage is “British Asian”, whether one is within the UK or travelling overseas. In the case of the latter, it does depend on the context; where ethnicity is not relevant, people are just going to say they are British or “from Britain”, although this response will be more common amongst the British-born 2nd-Gen majority rather than the older generation. (Most desis in Britain were born here, since the bulk of the older generation migrated here during the late 60s and early 70s).
There have, however, been some very recent discussions in some political and media circles about the possible necessity of evolving from such hyphenated identities and just making everyone’s primary categorisation and self-identification to be “British”, due to the jihadi/extremist problems we are currently experiencing in the UK and the proposed need for greater inclusivity and unity. In many circles, multiculturalism has been perceived to have gone too far, and there is a requirement for greater integration around “core” British/Western values rather than “parallel societies” and excessive “moral relativity”.
As far as I am concerned, my ethnicity is Indian (or “Asian”, depending on your preference), my nationality is British. But bear in mind that the latter means something quite different in 2006 than what it meant during colonial times; the UK is a very different country indeed now, both socially and culturally, and the United States also has a huge impact on the country in cultural terms.
There are, however, still obviously some differences between the UK and the US as a whole, and between Indians/South Asians here and in America; my frequent conversations on various threads on SM (especially with Amitabh) should hopefully have shed some light on the latter.
There are, however, still obviously some differences between the UK and the US as a whole, and between Indians/South Asians here and in America; my frequent conversations on various threads on SM (especially with Amitabh) should hopefully have shed some light on the latter.
Some other observations: One thing really weird about UK as compared to the US is that if you see a desi under the age of 40, he is very likely to have been born and raised in Britian. The young desi FOB population outside college towns is very very small compared to the US. You will never hear an Indian accent from a desi who is under the age of 40. The desis is UK mostly Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi and Kashmiri. The US desi population is way more diverse. Muslims also constitute a higher percentage of the desi population in UK than here in the US. I did not meet a single Urdu speaking (Muhajir) Pakistani outside my family and the Pakistani population was extremely conservative and traditional.
Al Mujahid:
You’re absolutely right, many times when I was in the UK, I would be surprised by either an elderly Sikh (or even more surprising, an elderly Gujarati lady, dressed in sari no less) who would speak perfect English in an English accent! Indicating they’d been in the UK since they were young. Whereas people fitting that description in the US are likely to not speak English at all; many probably came within the past two decades or less. It’s really a much more established community out there.
An SM meetup Sep 16 or so?!
Happiness 🙂
Esp. since it looks like i might actually be in town for this one…
[readying task force gear]
I’m here, I’m here. Tangra Masala sounds yum and a weekday may work for me too. Keep us posted.
Reiteration itself may adversely affect registration.
To paraphrase Polonius.
okay, here’s the deal for the NYC posse. (hedz representing other cities, you can skip this… unless you’re planning a visit here in the next few months, in which case you might be interested. either way, much respect.)
the potential NYC crew is quite large, and between sheer numbers and the way folks get scheduled in this town, it’s hard to coordinate. THEREFORE: i’d like to pick up on Nina’s Task Force idea:
Announcing The Sepia Mutiny Dining Task Force, New York Chapter
Our Domain: The Five Boroughs + New Jersey Outposts
Our Motto: “Get Your Eat On!”
Sign up for the Task Force by sending me an email. I’ll put an email list together and convene the first event(s). Operations will range from small-group, short-notice missions to full-blown, scheduled affairs. Any Task Force member can initiate an event at his/her whim. Events that look like attracting critical mass will be morphed into SM Meet-Ups and announced on the site so that lurkers and out-of-towners can join.
Essactly. What we need is a light, leaner fighting force.
This taskforce will revolutionize the way we mutiny. Precision raids are the future.
Sign me up!
AlMfD & Amitabh,
I would hazard a guess that this may be one reason for the apparent cultural differences (in some aspects) between the UK & US desi populations. You can see flashes of this occasionally here on SM. Of course, this shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that UK desis are carbon-copies of their “co-regionists” back in the subcontinent (at least w.r.t the 2nd-Generation); a somewhat hybridised American-British-Punjabi-Generic UK Desi culture has developed here over the past 30 years, as I’ve mentioned a few times previously. I think that some people on SM sometimes misinterpret statements by British commenters (or American desis like Amitabh who’ve regularly visited the UK) due to lack of direct experience of the latter, regarding either British desi culture in general or, as indicated by the fireworks over the past few days, descriptions of the physical appearance of many South Asians over here. It probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone unless they’ve had direct first-hand experience of the community and its people themselves.
That’s possibly another reason for the occasional friction and incomprehension that sometimes arises on SM. Since your community there is much more dominated by FOBs (apologies to any readers who may find that term offensive), I was considering that this may be a much stronger influence on the cultural norms & attitudes amongst the US desi population as a whole and here on SM too. I’m not saying this in a nasty way — and am certainly not pointing the finger at either of you or, indeed, the people on SM I’m on very good terms with — but some of the behaviour and viewpoints exhibited by many commenters on SM is much more like attitudes prevalent amongst the South Asian older generation here in the UK, not the 2nd-Gen crowd (apart from the “armchair jihadis” or the more conservative desi Muslims here).
From the younger Brit desi view some of these mindsets are quite archaic, including the ongoing grudge against “the British” re: colonialism, the antagonism towards the idea of South Asian guys dating/marrying white women (or even just finding them attractive), some clear & deeply-embedded racism towards white people in general (even though the people concerned may try to rationalise it w.r.t “oppression” etc) and even the massive hypersensitivity in some quarters to any actual-or-perceived positive comments about our more gauri desi sisters. The last point in particular is really weird; in my experience, such a virulently negative (and, in my view, disproportionate) reaction is practically unheard of amongst 2nd-Gen desis in the UK. I don’t know if this is an accurate reflection of American desi society or just something specific to SM, but it seems that in some quarters over there, “f**k” is not the only 4-letter-word beginning with “F”. We really don’t have this over here — not on that level — and such violent reactions are usually attributed to jealousy at least and bitterness-driven neurosis at the worst.
Correct. I guess you guys are still trying to find your feet in North America in some ways, hence all the debates & soul-searching {dare I say “existential angst” ? 🙂 } about “identity issues”, the whole thing about being “brown” (something else we in the UK took a different route about, as mentioned previously), and so on. It stands to reason that the more loosely-knit American desi community, the smaller numbers percentage-wise, the obviously different phenotypes of large numbers of US desis compared to their counterparts on this side of the Atlantic, the lack of a really assertive and “mainstream” desi voice and culture (so far), and the perceived ignorance of and antagonism towards South Asians on the part of the white/non-desi media and populace also all play a part in the difference of opinions sometimes encountered with myself and the somewhat antagonistic stance apparently taken by some SM commenters towards the white population over there. The fact that race & ethnicity appears to still be a much more loaded issue in America than the United Kingdom may be a factor as well.
We went through the same evolutionary process in Britain too; matters have changed as we’ve “gone mainstream” and have generally experienced much greater integration and mutual understanding with the majority population. The fact that we’re all older than we used to be is probably a reason too, of course 😉
excellent! let the force begin tasking.
For how many years does a FOB remain “Fresh” ? 🙂