Blind Date - Himalayan Food, Darjeeling, Cheese Curry is Awesome, Really

Blind Date Restaurant
Fancy Market (Top floor - watch for the sign from the street.)
12, NB Singh Road
+91 35 4225 5404
Darjeeling, India


Blind Date is a small, somewhat creatively decorated restaurant in Darjeeling that specializes in Himalayan food - the common cuisine ground in between Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan. The constants? Momos (dumplings), Thukpa (noodle soup), fried bread and fried rice, and more dairy products then are usually encountered in East Asian influenced cuisines. Most importantly: Blind Date is both dirt cheap and delicious. For your buck, it's just about the best eating experience in Darjeeling. Don't miss it.

Just be sure to use the bathroom first, since, like every restaurant in Darjeeling (just about) there's nowhere to go in the restaurant. Not a problem for men, who may exert the Indian males God-given right to piss on anything wherever he pleases at any time, but ladies may want to hold back on the beer. Watch this space for an upcoming screed about Darjeeling's discriminatory bathroom facilities, but, writing about food right now.



I believe this was Chhurpi, the Himalayas' somewhat weird but delicious variant on the West's hallowed cheese soup. (The fact I am unsure irritates me - I lost my notes somewhere, and Google is proving unhelpful). We ordered it with pork, which was the way to go. Although it's made with Himalaya-style fermented cheese - pretty much cottage cheese with a weird name, don't need to delve into it further, do we? - the taste is somewhat equivalent to cheddar. However this stuff is made, it's ideal for a foggy day at high altitude.



Ting-mo, or Tibetan bread rolls, are often served steamed (like the Chinese do) and are a rather inoffensive and basic carbohydrate. Good at high altitude to keep you hiking but not something I'd pick out of a police lineup for supper. Thankfully, deep frying turns the stuff into golden-crispy Grade-A deliciousness. Get two orders.

I don't have a picture of Blind Date's variant on the theme, but momos are just what people in the Himalayas - and at various restaurants in India - call God's Chosen Food, the dumpling. The main way you can tell them apart from East Asian variants on the classic is the shape - momos tend to be rounder. Other then that, they're filled with various kinds of things and served in a dizzying number of ways. I happen to like the variety that are pan-fried and served with a thick chili sauce the best, but I'll eat and adore pretty much anything pan fried and served in a thick chili sauce. You can never go wrong with momos in this part of the world, and thankfully, you'll never be forced to live without em'.



I should add that Blind Date has some of the best chili chicken on the subcontinent. Chili chicken is a much beloved Chindian dish (You know, the bastard love child of Chinese and Indian food) and is sort of like a spicier, harsher, variant on General Tso's chicken. This being India, the chicken is usually served bone-in and stir-fried with a not-fucking-around chili sauce, some whole chilis, and some vegetables. My friend Kiran and I are nuts for it, and this was great.



Fried rice is what Asia runs on. The world will probably run on fried rice in a hundred years. I'm cool with this. Blind Date, true to form, has excellent fried rice. They keep it in the pan long enough to get a little nutty crisp on it, which is essential, and there's plenty of stuff in it, which is also essential.



Gobi Manchurian, another beloved deep-fried and spicy Chindian dish. It's deep-fried cauliflower in a sweet and spicy sauce. Just about ubiquitous and pretty good if you, like most people, prefer your vegetable products crispy and delicious.



I've got a thing for fried greens, which most people think is kind of weird. Whatever. These were really good, and a nice mix of various local-greens varieties - not over or undercooked, nice and fresh, a simple and slightly spicy Chinese-style sauce with some vinegar.

Walking to Landour

We decided to spend the day going up. Upwards to Landour, at least. That's the only real way to get there. Thankfully, Mussorie isn't exactly a big place, and there's just enough sign-posts to keep you on the right track. And what a lovely, atmospheric walk. Sure, it's steep, but there's plenty to see. Small shops selling ornate wooden canes, vegetable sellers, men urging pissed-off donkeys up hills, wave after wave of private school brats in identical uniforms. The mist rolling down the mountain, walking through little pockets of cloud. The wildflowers here look like a kid's drawing: a single hill putting up flowers in red and orange and pink and purple, all the colors you'd want, right below yet another stand of tall and lovely pines. You can stop for chai whenever you get tired. We were talking to each other, too, and things went even faster.



Laura, Eric, and I dawdled for a while at this lovely overlook, down into the valley and Mussorie town proper. Some small girls from the area were hanging out in the shelter with us. Eric's a photographer, and he has an absolutely brilliant method of getting to know people abroad.

He's got a donkey hand puppet. Turns out a donkey hand puppet is a fantastic ice breaker, even with adults. He can even crack a smile from endlessly jaded teenagers, which is no mean feat. And kids, needless to say, find the donkey puppet absolutely hilarious. "I had a white seal puppet for a while, in Africa," Eric told me. "But the African kids were scared of it, they had no idea what a seal was. I figured I'd get a donkey. It's a little more...universal."



A rain storm suddenly burst - not a surprise in the midst of the Weirdest Monsoon Ever - and we dashed to the covered entry-way to one of the hillside homes. A man with an umbrella and head phones took refuge with it. "It's strange weather, isn't it?" he said, and we began conversing. The Eternal Icebreaker, the crappiness of the monsoon.

Leon had moved to Landour with his missionary parents in the 1940's, taking up residence in the Peace Cottage, a gentle stroll from where Sheila and Baldev have their own spread. He attended the Woodstock School in the 40's and 50's, working on a video project. He was trying to map all of Landour's trails, on video, document the area where he spent his childhood and formative years. A video record of his memories. He liked to talk, and if you were williing to let him monologue some, you'd be happy you listened.

"What was life in Landour like, back in the 40s?" I asked. This would have been Sheila's Landour too, after all, her origin point and Leon's alike.

"I spoke Hindustani, for one thing. It's a mix of Hindi and Urdu - this was before partition. I'm having to relearn all my words. But there's one word I still remember. "Scorpion". We had a lot of them in these days, up here. Still do. I found one the other day, and I got my groundskeeper to take care of it. The Hindu word for scorpion - I hadn't said it in years and years - well, it just came out. When you need it. "

"But we had a lot more of them back in the 40's and 50's, a lot more. Less development. Less people. We collected 6 lakh scorpions at our house one year. We'd dump them all in a tin-can. One day, a friend came to see my mother, and she walked into the kitchen. She saw the cup and asked, "What is THAT?"

My mother replied pleasantly, "Oh, that? It's our scorpion cup."

We put the legs of our beds in water, to stop the scorpions from crawling up them at night. It didn't always work. I remember being six years old or so, lying in bed. I wake up and I see a scorpion on the wall, a few feet from my face. I start screaming, "MMOOOOMMMM!"

My father took the scorpion away.


I think they call that right there Ambience.

People who have lived through Partition almost always seem willing to talk about it - the Indian urge to purge, to talk it out, to get it out there. To argue. Living through Partition was terrible but more terrible still would be not-talking about, is what's implied, and By God you're going to listen. And I asked him, "What was the Partition like?"

"Well, we moved here in 1947, when i was six years old. My parents were missionaries. This was back before Landour was a quiet, gentle place - this was during partition. The Muslims and the Hindus were fighting in the streets, and I remember seeing dead bodies on the ground."

It was hard to fathom: this gentle hill station being subject to the same time as savage violence as the rest of India. But history and climate do not produce exceptionalism: people are cruel and easily excitable anywhere.



"You'd hear stories. Conversations overheard. Two Muslims walking down the street somewhere near here. One says to the other, walking by a home: "There's a lot of Hindus hiding in this house. Should we kill them?"

His friend shrugs his shoulders. "Ah, naah. Let's go to the next one." As casual as that.

When we first got here, we didn't leave the house of three months. But I remember - one day, my dad coms to me and he asks, "Well, want to see the fighting?" Of course I did. I came with him to the town. There's nothing more bloodthirsty then an eight year old. Nothing in the world."


This makes it look much more creepy and horrifying-alien-movie like then it actually is up there. I assure you that there are no fog monsters waiting to slurp up your eyeballs out there, or if they are, they are very good at hiding.

The rain was beginning to die down a little, and a couple of locals tentatively restarted their walk up the impossibly steep hill, throwing their backs into it. "I suppose we should be going," Laura said. "We should catch up with our friends for lunch, up at the four shops."

"There's that new restaurant up there. The Roorkee Manor. There's this incredibly wealthy guy, from Woodstock. He made a fortune in iT, and he came back up here. He's a decent guy, but he's kind of misguided. He tried to buy the Four Shops, and he said, "I'll take them off your hands. I'll give you any amount of rupees you want. All but one of the owners refused to sell, of course. He was so pissed off he decided to buy that place up the hill, the Manor, and run them out of business. Everyone says the food is really good, but a lot of us are boycotting. You can't mess with the Four Shop

I made a mental note to avoid the Roorkee. Who doesn't love striking a blow in the face of big-time billionaires with ego problems? And we bid Leon farewell.

We walked up to the Four Shops, or the Char Dukaan. Char Dukaan being, shockingly enough, the Hindi for "four shops." And that's really all it is. All it has been. I've seen photos from the 60's and 70's that show the shops looking approximately the same. They have added an internet cafe with a very wonky internet connection. Other then that? You sit down, order tea and cheese toast or pancakes, and you watch the world go by. I'm a Tip Top Tea Shop partisan myself. One: I like to reward adorable alliterations whenever possible. Two: they have fantastic food and the owner likes to come out and chat with me about minutiae. You can't tell the difference between the tea and the coffee, but that's pretty much the deal in India.

We thought we were going to eat there, but, no. A language school student sitting in the cafe flagged us down. "Hey, you're with that group from Delhi, right?"

Yes, we were. "They're up the hill at the Roorkee," he said. "They told us to wait for you."

"How'd you know it was us?" Laura asked.

"They mentioned boots. Red cowboy boots." What I was wearing, of course. I guess they're a trademark.

Laura, Eric, and I shot each other somewhat embarrassed looks - The Corporate Maw! But we had to meet them anyway.

I was irritated to find that the Roorkee was absolutely lovely. The owner has taken an old Raj-era mansion and transformed it into a smart yet homy little hotel, with lots of wood and exposed stone accents. It wouldn't look entirely out of place in Aspen. The prices, needless to say, aren't in the "budget" range. 100 bucks a night for a hotel room is probably not going to get the Language School crew (except for the professionals) in the door.

The restaurant, as we discovered, was entirely reasonably priced. I was further irritated when the food turned out to be good. Flipping the bird to the specter of capitalism and big-bidnes was proving harder then I'd thought. The menu is a combination of Indian standards and Western food. A good call in this startlingly diverse little hill station. That's thanks to the internationally famous language school, of course.



I had an epiphany in Australia. Not a major one. I just found that I liked mashed potatoes again. Hadn't eaten them in four years, but all of a sudden, manna of the gods. Anyhow, the Roorkee had a pretty good creamy lamb stew with mash. Very mild and very English in execution. Sometimes, what you want on a cold day. The height of Mussorie and the cool temperatures make the human organism interested in eating things like mash and tea and cheese toast, I suppose. Warms the soul. Though nothing warms you up quite like really good chai.




Those are some mighty fine looking lamb chops. Considering the amount of lamb Indians consume, it's surprising how hard it is to find a decent frenched chop in these parts. Not a problem at the Roorkee. I came back to have these chops the next day and was very sad when they were out. They should have gone out and whacked a lamb just for me. Honestly.



They have a bakery on site here. The profusion of breads that comes out when you order soup is truly memorable. And they do western style desserts. A god-send for those with a sweet tooth and an inability to enjoy traditional Indian sweets. Having no interest in most desserts, I didn't partake, but apparently this cheesecake was very serviceable.

Caught in the rain again. And getting darker, too. Four or five of us stood under an awing with some computer delivery boys, who had come all the way from Delhi. Nothing better to do. We talked. And I had a question, since I had everyone cornered and all. "When do you feel you've really lived somewhere? How long does it take?"

"I used to live in Africa," Lauren said, "and I was teaching school there. Every day, these little kids who lived next door would have dinner with me, whether I liked it or not. I just got used to it. And one day, I had dinner, and I'm sitting with my food, and I realize: the kids aren't there. And I kind of miss them! That's when I knew I'd adapted."

Or maybe it's the shipment, she said. Getting that shipment from overseas - your entire life in some boxes - and thinking (as many of the travel inclined do), "How the hell did I get all this stuff? And why do I have it?" And having no answer, but continuing to cart around puffy jackets and take-out menus because they were in the box and you can't bring yourself to throw them away, you might need them sometime. The rain died down some and we walked to the Four Shops to get a taxi - easier then you'd think out here. I sat under the awning and watched the rain go down and the sun go down with it, and wondered how and when I'd define Living There in Phnom Penh. Impossible to say.

Mumbai: Gujarati Thali Again and the Sad Story of the Asiatic Society

Another rainy day in Mumbai. I'd stopped being so disappointed - it's foolish to be disappointed by rain in Mumbai - but I was by this point growinfg bored, cooped up in a moldy hotel room with only a terrifyingly huge snail to keep me company. There just wasn't a hell of a lot to do in Colaba when it rained like this. I could sit in Barista and drink surprisingly all right cappucino, and regard knowingly the boy with a copy of Nabakov and a wispy beard one seat over. I could while away a few hours in an internet cafe that smelt of pee, catching up with my friends to the sound of the Muslim owner's Arabic pop-music, piped in the background. I could leap through puddles and slosh through buckets of mud to the local gas station to purchase a Diet Coke, listening in while a Mumbai Society Lady upbraided the properitor on his disappointing biscuit selection. These were the entertainments provided to me. At least I had some books.

I tried to visit the Asiatic Society Library. The Asiatic Society certainly had a good pedigree: founded in 1804 by Scottish judge and professional dilettante Sir James Mackintosh, the society intended to gather "useful knowledge, particularly such as is now immediately connected with India". An Asiatic Society in London followed, and the current building was finished around 1830. It currently functions as a library, with over 100,000 books in the collection, andover 15,00 books classified as rare (including one of the two extant copies of the Divine Comedy).

I was hoping for a colonial and welcoming library like the one I'd found in downtown Bangalore - a calm oasis of learning full of amiable egg-heads who might be willling to talk to me. I might even be able to find a book or two on Hampi, the ancient Vijayangar empire, a personal obsession of mine. It sounded promising.


Abroad is always under construction.

. I dutifully tramped over to Kala Ghoda, slightly soaking myself. The Asiatic Society sits in the middle of a large and impressive looking ring-road, or at least it might have been when new, back when it occasionally saw something approximating maintenance. Now it's old and the buildings ae stained with grime and moss, but they retain a certain grandoise, out of place appeal - there are not very many people here, for Mumbai, and the little park in its center is a nice enough place to while away the day. (I had found myseld trapped in this part of town two years ago, in the hottest part of the day, and had stumbled slightly dazed into this park - it was so crowded with people with the same idea as my own that we all jockeyed madly for butt-space, there was nowhere to retreat. I ended up sitting half on an ant pile next to a girl studying French: I had a nap anyway).

I am sad to report that the Asiatic Society was a vast disappointment. They were theoretically renovating it - there was scaffolding up around the outside - but the interior was dusty and dirty, and the books were all locked away. (I find locked away books in a library vasly offensive - surely thre are security reasons for such, but the browsing element of a library is destroyed, the sense of discovery mooted). There was no attendant to ask to unlock the books, and it was nearly impossible to see through the faded glass, anyhow. The rain kicked up ferociously as soon as I got inside, and I sulkily retreated to the "Ladies Study Area" to look at a book on South Indian History I had in my backpack. Cooing from the ceiling: a pigeon family had taken up residence inside the library's main room.



I had lunch at the Copper Chimney, in Kala Ghoda. It's one of those upscale North Indian/tandoori places favored by power-lunchers and Punjabi families dressed up for a weekend outing. Curiously enough, it's downstairs from a trendy buffet/gelato/Wesern restaurant, and is decorated in a very contempo fashion. I went for my usual picks - tandoori chicken, tandoori gobi.


Could someone familar with Mumbai and/or able to read Hindi tell me who this man is and why he has a statue?

It always amuses me that many Westerners don't know how tandoori chicken gets that red. It's food coloring. They don't use it here, usually a sign of a higher quality establishment. This was excellent. Lots of yogurt coating left on their.

Saleem and I had been hoping to meet up again, but I recieved a call from him around 8:00 PM, after he got off work. "It's raining so hard they've stopped running the trains from Bandra," he said.

"Jesus," I said. "That's not normal is it?"

"Oh, no." he said. "Not normal." Mumbai after all is sub-aquatic city, a city mostly accustomed to being buffeted with rain. Well, within reason - there were the floods back in 2007. This monsoon wasn't flooding, not exactly, but it was persistent, it wouldn't quit, it just kept on thumping away.

The Monsoon, the goddamend monsoon. I was fairly insulated from it in Bangalore - a town with remarkably pleasant weather - but this years monsoon has been the worst in 20 years, a remarkably persistent SOB. Well, according to this article, not the worst by a long shot. (Actually, rather dry on average) Simply one of the most maddeningly erratic. Back in the day, you knew when the monsoon would start and when it would end. Now? All bets are off.

It was pissing down rain, as it had been for the past four days, and I was the only person in Golden Star Thali, situated near the Opera House, opposite Carni Road railway station. The host was small and thin and had an extremely grand manner to him: he ushered me to my seat in a fairly theatrical fashion. "It's all you can eat, madame," he informed me, as the metal thali plate was set before me.

Christ, did he ever mean it.



This montrosity is Golden Star's 300 rupee thali. Not exactly a major investment for a comically large amount of food. It's less refined then Samrat's thali, but it's a little tastier - got more "soul" as we'd say in my native tounge. Loved the stir-fried cabbage and the variant on aloo gobi. It's not as sweet as Samrat's either. (No, I didn't ask for the ketchup. Came with). The Gujarati dahi? Fantastic. I'm very keen on all Indian dahi/curd products and this did not disappoint. You cannot stop them from pouring ghee all over the plate so don't even try. They also bring you masala chaas, a yogurt drink with turmeric and ginger. Incredibly refreshing and a fantastic way to restore electrolytes in Mumbai's climate.



This is, I believe, Gujarati Dal Bati. Basically, it's dal with bits of wheat dough - these seem to be Gujarati "crackers" or biscuit bhakris. Golden Star is very fond of running specials on every day of the week, be they unlimited Bengali sweets, unlimited desserts of another sort, or other items of their choosing. See what's on when you visit. They give you a card which, if stamped ten times, scores you a free thali. I love these guys.

Trishna Restaurant: Yes, it's more chili crab!

Trishna is one of those city classics, a Mumbai seafood restaurant that has been adored and heavily patronized for over 20 years. It's Mumbai style seafood, on the high end, and the kitchen prepares your chosen sea-creature in a variety of ways - Indian, Chinese, European, whatever. The place is so popular that they've managed to open an outpost in London, and it's a must-do on the foodie beat in Mumbai. Me? I like their chili crab. I really, really like their chili crab.

Trishna is located in Kala Ghoda, a nice stroll from Colaba. If it isn't raining. Hint: it is probably going to be raining.



Plenty of tourists come here so it has been Ruined. Judging by the incidence of Indian business groups and blue-haired and terrifying old ladies tearing apart fish and lobsters, though - there may be life in the old dog yet. They're remodeling one of the rooms, so this go-round, I was ushered into a room I didn't actually recognize. There were mostly tourists in there. I'm not in the camp that immediately dismisses a restaurant that has other tourists in it. Sometimes, if not always, tourists are actually right about where one might find a good meal. And think about it: Trishna is a high end place. Your average Mumbaiker might eat there occasionally, but they're not going to splash out on a biweekly basis. A vacationer or sight-seeer though - the logic tends much more towards the "Why the hell not?" Which is why I was there, anyhow.

It always feels a bit awkward to me, to dine alone in Nice restaurants. I'm 22 and I look a lot younger - people guess 15 or 16 a lot - and I always suspect the waiters are wondering what in God's name is going on, if I'm actually capable of paying, if I'm going to inquire in a chirpy voice about the availability of chicken fingers. I ignore their looks of apprehension and order up. Chili crab and bhindi masala. This is all I want to have at Trishna.



Me and chili crab have a sort of, well, perverse relationship. Everyone has a certain food product that they find so godamned delicious as to veer into the "mild, slightly uncomfortable erotica" category, and chili crab is mine. Trishna does a hell of a job with theirs - in my opinion, superior to the way it's done in the Homeland of Singapore. The sauce is a little bit chunky with plenty of ginger and garlic. The balance of sweet and spicy is on point, and there's a bunch of sliced and in-your-face red chilis tossed in there so you don't forget the "chili" aspect of the dish. Finally, Trishna manages to source some excellent crabs. I know how to make this dish, and it's not too hard, but it's a blessing to find one done so well in a restaurant, and especially in India. Oh, the bhindi masala is pretty damn good too.

I went twice in five days. I thought I was exhibiting a lot of self control, all things considered.

Andhra Food: A Spicy Bone of Contention

Andhra food is a matter of pride. Every Hyderbadi I know defends the food of his or her native land with zealous and slightly insane pride. It is deadly to mention that you have partaken of biryani in a Hyderabadi's presence. "What kind of biryani?" they will ask as they move in closer to you, a look of growing insanity in their eye.

"A biryani biryani, with meat in it," may seem to be the correct answer. But of course, it is not.

You must reply "Hyderabadi biryani," and furthermore, the biryani must have hailed from a reputed restaurant or source of such. (They may be found overseas, but they are rare).

If the biryani is not Hyderabadi, or not vetted - well, so much for you. "How can you eat hat crap?" your Andhra friend will say. "We have got the best biryani, the best food in India, the world, and you subject yourself to that swill? What kind of a fool are you anyway?" After the verbal abuse, the Hyderbadi will inevitably whip out a pen and paper and write down the names of at least four or five places in which one can find real Hyderabadi biryani, and will cluck a few times in sorrow and horror. And then they will send you on your way.

And the people of Andhra Pradesh really do earn their bragging rights. There is the vaunted biryani, of course, but there is more to Andhra food then that. The cuisine is extremely sophisticated, has a long history, and involves a profusion of excellent local ingredients, including fresh dairy, fresh seafood and vegetables, and tons of blow-your-face-off hot green chilies. Andhra food today is a synthesis of local food - not dissimilar to that of the rest of South India - and the Mughlai food brought by the old time rulers of still predominantly Muslim Hyderabad. Rice and lentils are the main carbohydrates on offer, although papad (lentil crackers) are also popular. In Telgana, Western Andhra Pradesh, people even eat uppudi hindi or broken rice, a dish more commonly associated with Indochina. Pickles and chutneys come in a bazillion different forms and are considered entirely integral to a good Andhra style meal. The people of Andhra's coast lines prefer coconut and sesame oils to ghee and palm oils - it's a flavor that's pretty easy to detect in many of the region's speciality foods.

My favorite expression of the region's culinary genius comes in the form of Andhra "carrier meals."

A carrier meal is exactly what it sounds like. You are given a banana leaf, and a bunch of little thali dishes, composed of some form of vegetable and dahi and ghee and sambar. Then, a man comes around carrying a few metal pots, in which are contained the day's dishes. These are usually some form of rather bitter daal, a stir-fried vegetable, and something involving potato. Another man comes by to provide you with papad (lentil crackers), roti, and rice, with a dollop of liquid ghee to top it off. To supplement the meal, most non-vegetarians order some spicy (and bright red) fish fry, or perhaps a fish curry, or maybe even some of Andra's beloved fried chicken. The food keeps on coming until you tell it to stop or keel over, whichever comes first. Andra restaurants are usually busy and social establishments, with a mix of businessmen and women, families, and random hangers on (like myself), all eating ferociously with their right hands and shouting happily at each other over matters of great import. The carrier meals at lunch are usually scandalously cheap. 200 rupees is pushing it.


Bheema's
Asha Building,
Ground Floor,
31, Church Street,
Bangalore - 560 001



Bheemas is located on Church Street, and is a favorite haunt of Bangalore's umpteen downtown IT Professionals (whatever that means). Like everywhere else in India, it is a deserted ghost town until about 1:00 sharp, wherin it almost instantly fills up with the famished and highly paid. Like all Andhra style food, Bheema's serves up its veg carrier meals on a banana leaf - and eating with your hands is pretty much mandatory.

I ordered the carrier meal. Everyone orders the carrier meal. It's 225 rupees for a constantly-replinished spread of Andhra dishes, and it's even (theoretically) somewhat healthy. The stir-fried vegetables are tasty. The daal was a bit bitter for me - I like Nagarjuna's version better.



Buttermilk and curd served with a little bit of chili, salt, and onion. It's amazing how refreshing buttermilk can be in hot weather. There's also a sweet dessert of vermicelli with milk and lots of sugar. Papad and rice are mandatory. You can get some liquid ghee drizzled on the rice or not, your choice.



Apparently this is not sambar but is in fact charu, which is...pretty much the same thing. Don't ask me.



I also ordered aloo gobi, which turned out to be both excellent and not needed considering the amount of food already on offer. Still, a lovely representative of a dry dish that is often man-handled.



Nagarjuna Residency



Nagarjuna is an institution in Bangalore. The firm runs at least four or five other restaurants and a hotel besides, and it's attractively outfitted dining rooms turn into total nut houses around lunchtime. The guys carrying the carrier-meals look harried, but the food is totally worth it, featuring spices ground fresh daily and obviously intensely fresh dairy, vegetable, and fish products. This is definitely Andhra food at its best, and you're missing out on an essential Bangalore culinary experience if you don't make it over here. I love the tomato-sesame oil prepared chutney that's served with the veg and the daal here a lot . It's probably awful for you. Whatever.



I wanted the roast fish but they didn't comprehend this madness and brought me fried fish instead. Which was excellent, so much the better. No bones here, just tasty and perfectly cooked meat in a spicy and crispy filling. Excellent.



If you ever wondered where they get the banana leaves, the bug fuck insaneBangalore central market may provide an answer. They're purchased in bulk from various leaf sellers, who probably keep up banana leaf plantations somewhere or another in the tropical countryside. I like to think they are scrupulously washed prior to use. It's nicer that way.

A Brief Ode to South Indian Food, Annapoorani

Southern Indian food is one of the primary delights of time spent in Karnataka. It's completely unlike the heavy, oil rich, and meaty food we commonly associate with USA and English Indian restaurants. That's the food of the Punjab, that's the food of the Mughals - the sort of stuff that originated in Northern India and was disseminated the world over by opportunistic immigrants. But Southern Indian food has stuck closer to home, and has therefore been largely overlooked by many residents of the West. Shame, shame. What's better then a masala dosa (a savory rice and lentil crepe filled with spiced potatoes) with coconut chutney for breakfast? How can you go on living sans sambar (broth with tamarind and daal), avial (vegetables cooked with coconut), Avalakki bath (flattened rice prepared with coconut and curry leaf), and fish moli (fish cooked in coconut milk? Sucks to be you if you haven't had this stuff. Even better? The coffee in Southern India is actually drinkable.

Thankfully, Bangalore has plenty of excellent Southern Indian restaurants. B'lore is a city that runs on dosas, vadais (savory doughnuts) and idlis (rice cakes), and almost every restaurant serves up some variation on the theme. Most of the working-dude class restaurants don't even have seats. Everyone stands up and goes at lunch or supper or snack-time with their fingers. You never see women in these places, of course. Impolite.

My guesthouse was located on Cambridge Road, a remarkably convenient location from a little eatery called Annapoorani.

Annapoorani is one of the finer Southern Indian restaurants in the city, and does a cracking catering business as well, via Moulis Catering. It's a simple joint, but it features a surprisingly extensive selection of speciality food items, and the dining area is spotlessly clean. Further, it's dirt cheap, the coffee is good, and they'll keep on replenishing your sambar and chutneys until you explode. I ended up eating there quite often.

The menu has a variety of tiffins - dosas, vadais, and the like - but I always ended up ordering the set meals. Here's a brief and not particularly well-informed introduction to South Indian cuisine.


This is a mini masala dosa, served with various accompaniments. The dosa was thicker then the norm and had a very flavorful filling - spot on. I liked the green chutney on the side. Tasted like a coconut chutney infused with more cilantro and more interesting spices. Below it, there's a spicy dip, which tasted almost exactly like the famous Turkish harissa.There's the usual delicious tomato chutney in the far right corner. The rice looking stuff is lemon rice, which is a remarkably refreshing and comforting combination of rice, milk, and some very subtle spices, cooked for a bit -this would be great for soothing a pissed off stomach. The red soup beside it is the aforementioned sambar, a lovely combination of slow-cooked vegetables, chili, dal, and tamarind. It's extremely tangy, and the standard accompaniment to a good dosa. The light brown stuff beside it is a sort of sweet, cinammon flavored soup. The white cakes are "gunpowder" idlis, a kind of fermented rice cake. I find their flavor to be remarkably innocuous, but again, they come in handy during episodes of sever stomach upset.



Sometimes, you just gotta eat chapatis. They are, simply enough, an unleaved flatbread exceedingly similar to tortillas, and are usually made of wheat, often referred to as atta. They're extremely good for you. This was served with the usual tomato chutney, which is made with tomato, green chilis, mustard seeds, methi seeds, a smidgen of dal, sugar, and a couple other things. There's also the usual sambar and a dry vegetable preparation. Dry vegetable or subzi preparations are roughly as numerous as stars in the sky in India. Almost all are good. South Indians are paticularly partial to food prepared with drumstick, a kind of vegetable pod with a superficial resemblance to okra. Personally, I find the stuff stringy and hard to digest, but it is theoretically quite good for you. Huh.


This is an adai, or a lentil crepe prepared with masala spices, onions, and some other tasty stuff. There's pachadi (vegetables cooked with coconut) second from the top left. The round thing is a sweet ball with nuts inside of it. Moving clockwise, there's curd rice - a very subtle flavor indeed. The yellow rice is Avalakki Bath, which is beaten rice cooked with a variety of spices. The red stuff was some kind of heavily tamarind inflected veg dish - I believe it had drumstick. Gotta have drumstick.



The centerpiece of this meal is appam, a fermented rice pancake. On the left, there's a sweet short-bread type foodstuff up top. Below that is coconut milk. Apparently, you're supposed to put the vegetable curry at far right on the appam and dip it in the coconut milk for maximal deliciousness. I was happy to find that this was indeed the truth. The beigish looking stuff is pachadi, a slow cooked vegetable stew made with yogurt. The yellow stuff is vermicelli upma, small rice noodles cooked with plenty of turmeric, spices, and nuts - it's slightly sweet.

All these meals come with Indian style filter coffee. It's good, strong coffee, albeit served with enough sugar and milk to give a horse cardiac arrest. A happy horse. I love the stuff. Black coffee drinkers may need to learn a little Kannada or Telugu to get by around these parts.

Conclusion? South Indian food is delicious. Seek it out wherever you are. I found a spectacular South Indian restaurant in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, so I know it's at least possible.....

The Passion of the Shells, Back to Perth

We woke up to a lovely day. This is always a bit unpleasant after you have driven miles and miles to a nature spot to be rained upon. Nevertheless, we soldiered on.

And now, some art appreciation, as brought to you by the wife and decorator of our cozy little weekend cottage. Ahem.



The mirror reflects our appearance, but the sea-shells reflect our origins. Here, Mindy has attempted to convey the incredible stretch of evolutionary time. Gastropod shells confront homo sapiens here; this is what we have come from, and this is where we are going.



Yellow is a color not commonly associated with the sea, but it is associated with the rise - and set - of the sun. Has Mindy's arrangement of shells here an expression of her own trepidation about the aging process? Does she seek solace in the eternal, physically perfect shape of the nautilus at the center, as a poignant reminder of what she has lost, and what she must face in the near future?



Here Mindy expresses her opinion on the essential emptiness of life, the vast void that is the Indian ocean - a stretch of sea, leading to nowhere in particular. Kalbarri leans out to the wind, and so does Mindy's soul - she wishes to explore, to step across the oceans into the mysterious and perfumed lands of Asia, Indonesia (beyond the churning waters) , but yet her responsibility and her culture holds her back. The sea grasses wave at her, as if they are saying goodbye to someone who has no intention of actually going. Will she plunge into the sea, someday? Is that what this masterwork is attempting to convey?



Oysters are closeted, closed-up creatures, and this floral-style arrangement produced from their shells is a profound expression of the ennui and sexual dissatisfaction of the Australian married woman. They are clamped up and dry, now, but once were moist and....oh god i can't go on make it stop make it stop oh god oh god

We stopped to chat with our proprietor in the driveway as we packed our stuff up. He was attempting to control his son's recalcitrant and violently adorable Lhaso Apso puppy, with little to no success. "So what does your son do?" I asked. He had mentioned the other day that his son was, rather ambigously, in the "outback." Whatever that meant.

"Oh, he works in the mines, way up north, for Rio Tinto. He's a chemical engineer. Pulling down plenty of money. My other son does that too. Five weeks on, make a pretty penny and store er' up, head on back. I did that too when I was starting out."

I had envisioned Working in the Mines as something involving hard hats and impoverished West Virginians with missing teeth, so this was a bit of a surprise to me. "Good lord, maybe I should work in a mine," I said.

Lyn chimed in to mention that even clerical workers In the Mines make somewhat ungodly amounts of money. Apparently there is a vast Australian mining secret that has been hitherto unrevealed to my American brethern.

"They've got five mines just about to open up near here, along the coast," he added. "Geraldton and Kalbarri are just going to explode, you'll see about that. Smart young people should go on up to the mines for three years or so, save er' all up, and buy real estate. I bought this spread for 200,000 and now I can turn it over for 500,000 - yes, real estate's the way to go in WA, one hundred percent. Won't ever go down, but up, and up, and up. The kids these days just want to buy a fancy car and a fancy house, but they should just invest, invest in real estate.."

I internally boggled, as I seemed to recall everyone in the state of California making the exact same claim about two years and then regretting it about as much as anyone has regretted anything. I asked Lyn about it in the car, as we headed to the sea cliffs, and she filled me in. "Western Austalians all seem to believe real estate is incapable of going down."

"Do they ever watch the news? Did they somehow manage to overlook that whole real estate bubble kerfuffle?" I said, all agog. (Great word).


The ocean goes on a bit out here.

Then I remembered: they're Australian. They don't have to pay a lick of attention to our USA affairs if they don't particularly care to do so. Just like us, Aussies take extreme pride in their self reliance, independence, and personal ability to make a dollar or two, particularly in the form of turning over houses.



We turned off to the sea cliffs, which were behaving wonderfully in the absence of driving rain and wind. The cliffs are indeed astoundingly beautiful, and I've never been to a place where one experienced such a visceral sense of being at the literal edge of the earth, the place where land stops and segues (for a terribly long distance) into sea. The sea far below had turned glass clear again, and little brown Australian kestrels wheeled below the outlook. There were no whales. The lighting was fantastic: the sight of the cliffs in the morning made all the rain and ennui of the day before entirely worth it.



"I'm going to invest in real estate," I told Lyn, pointing to the top of the natural bridge. "Going to open a Hungry Jack's and a drive-in motel right there. Make a bazillion dollars and die inordinately happy."



"Yeah, you do that," she said.

Here, have some informative signs. Don't say I never did nothing for you.







We made a last-ditch attempt to catch the pelican feeding that supposedly occurs every morning at exactly 8:45 on Kalbarri beach. There was an older man, doubtless a member of the Old Bastards club, holding a bucket of herring. There were lots of families standing around the Pelican Feeding Official Viewing Ground, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the 5 foot tall winged beasties.


You think you're so great, seagull. I bet you do.

Except the pelicans didn't show, the jerks. You'd think free fish would be enough to do it. As it was, we spent about five minutes dejectedly watching silver gulls squabble over fish, straining our eyes for the sight of a big white pelican soaring over the horizon. Nada mas.

"Back to Perth, then?" Lyn said.

"Seems that way," I said. We headed out of town.

I drove for a short while, which was all right actually, mainly because there was no one on the road who I could demonstrate my tenous grasp on left-right dynamics to. I kept on turning on the windshield wiper instead of the blinker. Stupid down under. The ride back to Geraldton was fairly benign: we passed by the Pink Lake again, which had not declined in pinkness one iota, and the trees were still bent over, and the green pleasantness of spring was still in the air. I went in to buy a Diet Coke at the Northampton roadhouse and was flirted with somewhat pathetically by the counter boy.

"Are you from around here?" he said, hopefully. Perhaps he was imagining a romantic date at the Fish BBQ, or something.

"No, no, I'm afraid not," I replied. No one is, you poor, dear sod, I thought, as I walked out the door.



We stopped at the Dome in Geraldton for lunch, in lieu of paying an inordinate amount of money for nouveau lunch Cuisine.

Dome really deserves its own paragraph, as it is Australia's exact equivalant to Starbucks. For the zoology types, Dome has successfully filled Starbucks ecological niche - Starbucks was unable to make it in Australia, despite the company's doubtless dogged attempts to put down roots in Oz. And Dome is indeed nice. The shops are attractively designed, with a lot of wood and a distinctly Gallic gilded interior. The coffee is good and plentiful, once you figure out how to negotiate Australia's bizarrely obtuse method of ordering. Insofar as I could ever work out, a Flat White is coffee with some milk in it. Don't ask me how this differs from a latte.

The food is all right, cooked to order, and will do in a pinch, which is more then one can say about anything edible Starbucks dishes out. Finally, Dome's parent company possesses the inordinate wealth required to plonk down shop's in exceptionally primo real estate. Geraldton's branch was situated right on the beach, where we could watch the breakers thump in benath a sparkling blue sky.



I had a perfectly serviceable Greek salad....



And Lyn had some microwave-quality cannelloni. Well, you're always in dangerous territory with cannelloni, says I. They're not to be trusted, as Italian foodstuffs go.



We drove on to a nice little beach outside town, con lighthouse. It is the only steel British made lighthouse of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Thought you might care to know. The sigh on the beach warned of rip tides, man eating sharks, deadly jellyfish, and sea snakes, in case you might consider taking a little dip. Oh, Australia.


Geraldton has some big ass cargo ships comin' through. The guidebook said this is in fact one of the primary attractions for locals on weekends. Everybody turn out to see the big ass boat come in! Bring the little nippers! Well, okay, then.

The ride from then on back was through fairly featureless outback, punctuated by the occasional kangaroo corpse and unspeakably terrifying Road Train. Road trains, if you don't know, are pretty much exactly what they sound like. As we got within spitting distance of Perth, in the Swan River Valley, we discovered that it had got quite cold in our absence. It's always a bit of a cognitive dissonance thing when you're indisputably in Australia, yet still freezing your butt off. We entered the bizarrely American style suburbs, and were pretty much home free.



LOOK A WHALESHARK IN SUNGLASSES OH THE HILARITY

Another moment of cognitive dissonance for American tourists here. Australians, especially in WA, love freeways, suburbs, and big box megastores just as much as we do, and construct them in pretty much the same way and in the same locations. This leads you to moments of dozing off in the car or whatever, looking out the window and thinking, "Oh, San Jose! There's the Ikea!" then being confronted by a dead kangaroo or a roundabout or someone in an unspeakable school uniform to jar you back to your senses. It's weird, is what I'm saying.



For dinner, Mike had thoughtfully picked up some uber-delicious Aussie lamb chops. He served this with an equally delicious mustard-shallot-honey sauce, which I need to have the recipe for post haste. I hope you're reading this, Mike.



And we had some asparagus wrapped in CUSTOM MADE bacon. Yum.