Taken in December of 2013 in Kuala Lumpur
I took this on Jalan Alor, Kuala Lumpur’s famous food street. It was early, well before dark when the street gets thronged with hungry travelers. The fruit stands were just getting erected and the frog porridge was simmering.
Taken November 2013 at Queen’s Restaurant in Bangalore
I took this in a dimly lit Bangalore restaurant with a cellphone. Needless to say, it did not turn out well, but it’s something different for a Sunday. My chicken tikka came with a cool tomato lantern. It looks like something that fell out of Iron Man’s chest in this photo, but was a pleasant piece of ambiance in person.
Queen’s is a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Church St. I’ve found the food to be consistently good, though the decor might keep the faint-of-heart out.
Jeyuk-Chulpan with assorted sides.
I’ve been eating a lot at restaurants since we moved to Bangalore, both because it’s (usually) cheap and for the experience of it. I’ve eaten at enough places to have developed some favorites, but I try to keep broadening my experience by eating at as many new places as I can.
Today, I had a lunch experience that was new on two fronts. For one thing, it was a restaurant that’s new to me, but–for another–it was my first experience with Korean food as prepared in India. I’ve eaten at several Chinese restaurants in India, and, while the places I’ve tried were all pretty good, they were all distinctively Indo-Chinese. In other words, the dishes didn’t taste like they did in other places at which I’ve had Chinese food, e.g. China. On the other hand, the Bangalorean Thai restaurant, Lan Thai, seems pretty authentic to me, except perhaps the diminished use of fish sauce (which is incredibly popular in Thailand and almost non-existent in India.) I was, therefore, uncertain what to expect from Hae Kum Gang–other than that it had a pretty high rating on Zomato and so it likely had decent food.
I can’t say what Korean food tastes like in Korea, as I’ve not yet gotten outside of Inchon airport, but Atlanta had a pretty huge Koreatown and I ate at a variety of Korean restaurants there. (A Korean man once told me that Korean food in Korea tasted very different because of the taste of the vegetables–given the spice palette of Korean food, I wasn’t sure whether to dismiss this as nostalgia–e.g. tasting the difference between American cabbage and Korean cabbage through the kim chi chili seasoning and fermentation seems a bit of a challenge.)
At any rate, what I found at Hae Kum Gang was on par with what I’ve had in Duluth, Georgia. This was a pleasant surprise because their menu states Korean, Chinese, and Japanese cuisine. While these cuisines have some overlap–particularly with Korea in the middle–they are each distinct. My concern was based on bad experience with “multi-cuisine” restaurants in India that try to do everything and end up doing everything in a mediocre fashion. (Hampi was loaded with such places.) What I ordered was pretty typically Korean, I imagine if you had a Chinese or Japanese dish off the menu you might not find it authentic, but rather like a Korean interpretation of the dish. (Although, Duluth has some fine sushi places with Japanese names and advertising themselves as Japanese food, but clearly owned, run, and staffed by Koreans.)
I ordered the Jeyuk-Chulpan, which was described as: “Stir-fried pork with vegetables, served in spicy chili sauce on a sizzler plate.” The description was spot on. The platter sizzled for about 15 minutes after it got to the table. The dish had a pleasant level of heat (spice) and was tasty. This isn’t a dish for those watching their cholesterol. The pork was quite fatty, which, of course, made it sumptuous and delicious but higher in fat content than many might desire. For lunch it suited me. It’s not something that I would eat for dinner, both because I don’t sleep well if I have red meat immediately before bedtime and because one needs some active time to burn off some of those calories before going to bed.
I was told a bowl of steamed rice came with this dish, but was pleasantly surprised to find seven other sides were brought out as well. Getting a load of side dishes along with your main is not uncommon with Korean food and I’ve had similar experiences elsewhere. The first small plate to arrive was Yukhoe,–a spicy Korean answer to steak tartare. I was a little reluctant about eating a raw beef dish in India, but I forged ahead and found it delectable. It was spicy, and warmed through–though not enough to cook the meat. While it was tasty and I’m none the worse for wear, I don’t know if I’d recommend you partake of this dish unless you know your constitution to be caste-iron and you like to live a little on the wild side. In the US, where there are all sorts of regulations and health inspections in restaurants, there is still invariably a warning to consume at your own risk. The same could be said of Japan, where 4 people died (35 hospitalized) in 2011 from eating a batch of the Japanese version of this dish that was tainted with E. Coli. The standard for raw beef dishes is less than a day between slaughter and freezing and less than a day between thawing and use. I can’t say what this restaurant’s practice is. It tasted clean and fresh, but exercise care.
There was also a soup and a salad. The soup actually tasted more like something I’ve had on occasion in India than anything I’ve had in a Korean restaurant, except the vegetables were typically Korean. I believe the salad was a seaweed. There was also braised tofu, boiled baby potatoes in a teriyaki-esque sauce, and the Korean mainstay kim chi. If you eat the Yukhoe, I’d recommend you eat your kim chi. Kim chi isn’t a personal favorite of mine, but its fermentation may offer you some assistance in digestion.
I’d recommend Hae Kum Gang. My food was 480 Rs. (plus tax, tip, and a mineral water), which is pricey by Indian standards–but, as I always say, sushi and brain surgery are two things you don’t want a great deal on.
No, I don’t know if the name is supposed to register as “Hey, Come Gang!”
Those who’ve read my posts, or who know me, probably know me to be areligious, which–contrary to popular belief–isn’t necessarily the same as being atheist. Personally, and on the whole, I’ve never found enough virtue in religion to outweigh what I believe to be its vices. That being said, I do find behaviors to applaud among the faithful.
First and foremost among these commendable activities is the practice of saying grace before each meal. Of course, what appeals to me isn’t the notion of saying, “Hey, God, you are really groovy for laying this food upon my plate, and it’s my most heartfelt wish that you’ll keep up the good work. Thank you ever-so-much, and YEEAAAH, God!” [Though if a less borderline-sacrilegious version of this kind of grace is your bag, more power to you.]
What I commend is the taking of a moment to be still and introspective before eating, of taking time to recognize the importance of our food. Of course, one can do this same sort of thing without invoking a God or gods–and some people do so.
One can take a moment to remind oneself to be mindful of how one eats, to not eat too quickly, and to recognize when one is full. (Bodily full not mentally satiated, the two are often not the same and the former will usually arrive first.)
One can take a moment to remember a time in one’s life when one was hungry or thirsty and concerned about whether one would have enough calories or safe drinking water to get through. In our modern age, I suspect many have never been in a situation to experience such a thought, and are the poorer for it.
One can recollect the image of some hungry soul, scraping to gather enough food to survive.
One may simply say, hara hachi bu, as Okinawan people do to remind themselves to eat only until they are 80% full.
Whatever you think or say, the goal is to keep eating from being a mindless activity, done on automatic pilot. Failure to be cognizant of what one puts in one’s mouth is the number one killer among human beings–and not just the obese. OK, I admit that I made that statistic up. But of how many statements can it be said that one is better off behaving as if it’s true–regardless of whether it is or not.
On a related note, I also applaud the act of periodic and/or partial fasting as carried out by many religions, as long as the safety of the individual is put before religious dogma, which–to my knowledge–it usually is. One shouldn’t be what my father called a Red Lobster Catholic, the kind who went to Red Lobster on Fridays during Lent and ordered the most sumptuous seafood feast they could afford–missing the point entirely by treating themselves. One also shouldn’t fast to the point that one feels starvation, and then binge and gorge. One should cut one’s intake in a safe and reasonable manner in order to observe what it’s like to feel biological hunger (as opposed to cravings of the mind, or boredom hunger.) Then take advantage of the fact that one’s stomach capacity shrinks surprisingly rapidly, allowing one to control one’s intake much more easily.
One needn’t believe that one has to make oneself suffer as a sacrifice to a higher being to see the value of fasting. Fasting done mindfully, and not dogmatically, increases one’s bodily awareness, one’s thankfulness, and one’s pleasure in eating.
Taken October 9, 2013
I’m a hole-in-the-wall kind of guy. I like good food wherever I find it, but I find it particularly pleasurable at tucked away little places.
This week I ate at Citrus in Leela Palace. It’s one of the swankiest places in Bangalore. The food was excellent, but, of course, you know it’s going to be excellent. It’s expensive and has a French sommelier on staff. There’s great food, but no surprises.
Green Onion is a little first floor (second floor to Americans) Chinese place on a short side-street off of MG Road. I’ve been there twice, and it’s been almost full both times. It’s good food at a reasonable price. Today, I had the above fried wontons along with kung pao chicken (which I order as much because it’s fun to say as because it’s delectable.) As can be said of most any Chinese place in Bangalore, it’s Indo-Chinese. That is to say, dishes don’t taste like they would in Beijing. That doesn’t make them bad, just different.
I don’t know if it’s cultural bias or not, but I think good Chinese food in America mirrors Chinese food in China more closely than does good Chinese in India. (Of course, bad Chinese food abounds in the U.S. and probably outnumbers good Chinese restaurants.) It may be because American food doesn’t have the extensive and potent flavor palette Indian food does, or because the China and India have shared a border for long enough to have developed a third entity cuisine over time in the manner that Tex-Mex food is distinct from Mexican. All this being said, it’s still tasty, just not in the same way Chinese food in China is.
1.) Vegetarian restaurants: While I’m not of the vegetarian persuasion, my wife is. This can make finding a mutually acceptable restaurant a pain. However, it’s vastly easier to pick a restaurant in India. Except for the very rare American-style steak house, she can eat anywhere and the menu will be at least half vegetarian.
In Atlanta, I’d estimate that she could eat healthily and well in about one in five restaurants. American Southern cooking doesn’t offer one a side of green beans without a ham bone in it. I’d say we’ve cut our restaurant selection time to about a quarter of the time it took in the US.
2.) Cheap books: While English is secondary to Kannada as the spoken language here, it’s not second in the bookstores by any means. Bookstores are common and offer some new options. I’ve spent a lot of time in bookstores, so I usually don’t see a lot that’s new, but there are books printed by Indian publishers here that don’t usually appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble.
And, unlike in Cambodia where books are cheap by means of photocopying, the books here aren’t cheap by virtue of stiffing the writer.
3.) Amazon: On a related note, I can still buy Kindle books just as easily as I did in the states. There are some websites that don’t work here, such as Hulu and Netflix, but Amazon operates just fine.
4.) Walk-centric life: Bangalore is not an easy city to walk in because the traffic is horrendous, there is no system for traffic lights, and sidewalks are about as dangerous as walking in the street. (If your eye isn’t constantly on the sidewalk, you might just plunge into a sewer.) However, being in the heart of the city, there’s nothing I need that I can’t get via a short walk.
5.) Servants: I haven’t mowed lawn, swept a walk, done laundry, or washed a dish since I left the US, and yet it’s always done. After a brief period of feeling awkward, it’s beginning to grow on me. The hardest part will be going home, once I’ve become accustomed to a certain level of service.
6.) Climate: There’s been a pleasant breeze coming through my window pretty much all day. I haven’t had to use the AC since we’ve been here. And it’s starting to not rain every night. Of course, this one is not so much about India as Bangalore specifically. On the whole, India’s climate is not so pretty.
7.) Loan words: I suspect it’s harder for the locals to talk about foreigners behind their backs here than most countries because there are so many English loan words. They’ll be a couple of locals talking in Kannada, and you’ll here: “Waa-wah-waa-wah-waa-wah-super convenient-waa-wah-waa.” So it’s like having a rudimentary grasp of a language, you can kind of get a feel for the general drift of what is being talked about-even if you don’t know any specifics. At least this makes bad-mouthing foreigners a mental exercise.
Bengali Full Meal; Source Nandinissaha (via Wikipedia)
When I tell people that I’m moving to India, a common–but strange–response is for them to issue warnings about the food and water. I find this odd for two reasons.
First, said warnings are often issued without much firsthand experience of developing world dining (not including high-brow resorts), and without knowledge of my dining history.
Here are few facts that might help one to better understand my approach. I’ve dined on cold seafood salad in a Phnom Penh cafe. I’ve noshed on snake-on-a-stick in China. I once supped at a home/restaurant in the Peruvian Andes whose latrine consisted entirely of a squat-hole cantilevered out over a cliff side. A couple of days in Bangkok, I consumed nothing but street-food. I was raised on a farm with non-pasteurized milk, and had a father who wasn’t above cooking up a nice-looking piece of road kill. Not a bloated opossum mind you– but I’ve gnawed clean the drumstick of a pheasant that died not by birdshot, but on the grill of a Peterbuilt. (Funny story, spellcheck wanted to change “pheasant” in the preceding sentence to “peasant.” That would have really freaked you out.) So while my home life has been first world, I’ve got a little third world in my gut.
Now you’re probably thinking, “This idiot is infinitely lucky to be alive, and given his behavior he will probably die soon.” Au contraire mon frère. It’s not that I randomly engage in high-risk behavior. Even locals get Delhi Belly if they don’t choose wisely–despite the full panoply of aggressive gut organisms working on their behalf. I’m quite aware of the hazards, and take calculated risks backed up with sensible precautions.
It’s funny that people live in terror of street food–not that there aren’t some carts that one should run from screaming. However, do you really know what the pimply-faced teenager is touching or scratching during the act of assembling your burger at Chili’s? I know exactly what the hands of the old lady grilling my moo ping on Sukhumvit Road looked like. I got a good look because there was always a line that I had to wait in– and gladly so. (FYI – sanitary wipes or hand sanitizer are one thing you should take with you wherever you go in this world.)
I’m not saying that I’ve never gotten an upset stomach, but I’ve done some remote third world travel and never experienced anything worse than resulted from any given trip to Taco Bell.
I’m quite fond of Indian food, and am sure I will cope well with having it for the majority of my meals for the next couple years. Yes, I’ll have to severely reduce my intake of ice-cold beverages and raw foods. (Ice and wash water are the hidden killers that probably cause more food-borne ailments than anything else.) However, ice-cold beverages –while refreshing and pleasant– are not really that healthy for a body in high temperatures anyway. (Flash heating or cooling of things at the other end of the temperature spectrum is bound to cause problems–one’s organs aren’t that different.) While I like raw vegetables, the human body is more efficient at extracting nutrients from cooked food, so there’s a side advantage there as well.
I think people freak themselves out and miss out on some excellent food. One individual who traveled widely once told me that she never ate the local food for fear of getting sick. I felt bad for her. She traveled to the source of some of the world’s best food, and then dined on American fast food–that’s a squandering of no small part of the travel experience. Of course, some people have very weak systems, and that may have been the case for her. (American fast food may be bad for you, but it is uniformly bad throughout the world.)
The second thing that I find strange is that when I was moving to England 25 years ago, no one warned me that I would be going to one of the most gastronomically unappealing places on the planet. Let’s face it, the reason Britain took over India in the first place was so that they could get something decent to eat. Curry is also the reason they didn’t let go easily.
Is there some bias whereby people tend to respond with negativity when one says that one is moving to the developing world, versus positive responses to moving within the developed world? One probably shouldn’t respond with negativity to news someone is moving anywhere, but–if you must– you should tailor it to the individual concerned. For example, if one said to me, “That shrill flute in their music is going to get on your last nerve.” Well, sorry, but that’s probably a correct statement. (No offense, I’m sure it sounds lovely if you were brought up with it, but it will be–at best– an acquired taste for me.)
Take June 29, 2013; High Falls, GA
Owing to a freakish and inexplicable popularity of this blog with Norwegians, I recently received a quasi-lucrative endorsement offer from the King Oscar Canned Fish Corporation. In exchange for tweaking this blog’s content, I will receive all the canned fish products that I can eat– for life. Yeah, that’s right, I get all the minced mackerel, pickled herring, and fish balls that I can stomach. (FYI- Fish balls aren’t aquatic rocky mountain oysters, if you were wondering.) This is almost as good an offer as was received by Flipper, and he had immense star power. The first truckload arrived this morning as promised, putting me on retainer. Therefore, from this moment onward, the content of this blog will be devoted to the delectable joys of such foods as herring fillets in monkfish sauce or Kipper snacks in oil.
Rest assured, I’ll continue to present the same type material I have in the past, but it will now all have a canned seafood theme running through it. For example, for those who have enjoyed my poetry, I have a doozy coming up entitled “Ode to the Happy Anchovie.” I will continue to produce humorous postings. There is only one subject off the table… no, not pedophilia… I will never make fun of the delicious Norwegian canned fish snacks of the King Oscar Corporation. However, I have a scathing rant against people who don’t want anchovies on their half of the pizza that I think you’ll find particularly rib-tickling.
In conclusion, I’d like to wish you all a happy April Fool’s Day.
My salami has a first name, it’s B-E-S-S-Y.
I’m a member of a group that has long suffered the bitter pill of discrimination. How is it–you may ask–that a white, heterosexual, suburban, graduate-educated male knows the foul taste of discrimination? I love meat, but my wife is a vegetarian. This makes me a lonely omnivore. When I go to the market, I can’t find meat packaged for my kind. No individual could cope with such quantities of meat as packaged by supermarkets. Well, that is besides those not averse to contracting colo-rectal cancer from the rotting carcass wedged in his transverse colon, e.g. Adam Richman.
One option–the healthy option–would be for me to go vegetarian. Did I mention that I love meat? I love bacon and beef and poultry and pork and rabbit and reindeer. I would eat meat on a boat. I would eat meat with a goat, and then I’d make a stew out of the goat. Cut off the beak and the bung, and you’ve got yourself a customer. You say you got horse meat in my beef? Sounds tasty. So option one is a nonstarter. I’m out of the omnivorous closet. I’m here; I eat steer; get used to it.
Another option is to find the store butcher and ask him to wrap me a solitary steak. The problem is two-fold. First, the butcher is never just hanging out at the counter, and so there will be a PA announcement. In the 1950’s, before computers with Facebook and solitaire, the butcher would hang out at the counter, but now he’s in the back–presumably goofing off like 90% of the workforce. The announcement will be quick and neutral, but it will sound enough like the following to garner widespread attention, “Attention in the meat department, there’s a pathetic soul with no one to love him who needs steak for one, I repeat STEAK FOR ONE.” Then everyone in the store has to take a peak at the lonely omnivore. Don’t stare, Johnny, it’s just a hobo.
The second problem is that, while the butcher is smiling and polite, I know he is thinking, We have half a mile of prepackaged meat, and you really want me to take a break from my hectic schedule of playing solitaire in the back office to cut you one steak? Haven’t you heard of a nifty invention called a “freezer?” It should be located somewhere in the general vicinity of your refrigerator.
The third option is, of course, the freezer. If you had any idea how disheveled my mind was, you wouldn’t even suggest this. Using the freezer would require that I anticipate that I will eat again in the future so that I can take the meat out to thaw. Here’s how it really works. I’m sitting here typing and think, That steak would really be good about now! However, presently it isn’t a steak, it’s a block of meatcicle. So I take it out of the freezer. I stare at it for a few minutes, hoping to use my ill-developed Superman-like powers of heat vision. Then I try running hot water on it, but it remains crystalline on the inside. Then I leave it and go back to typing. Then I check on it in three minutes. Then I go back to typing. Then I check on it after two minutes. Sensing the beef will never thaw, I break down and make myself some unsatisfying but filling Top Ramen. The next time I see the steak it’s a soggy and unappetizing lump hanging out in my sink.
Now if you’re an outline-and-note-card kind of writer, you may wonder how a writer could be so unskilled at planning. I’m not that kind of writer. If you haven’t guessed it, if it hasn’t shown through, I just make shit up as I go along. For me, writing is a process of paginated diarrhea, with an admittedly messy cleanup process.
My final option is to go to one of the huge “farmer’s markets” that we have in the area. (I use quotes because I’ve never seen an actual farmer there, and the food is as likely to be from Armenia as it is from Americus, Georgia.) These markets have heaped slabs of meat on ice, they’ll and cut it however one wants. I do this sometimes. There’s a very cool thing about these places. Because they serve such a diverse population, they hire a lot of immigrants. However, while it’s cool that my butcher is a native Lao speaker, it can be problematic for me as a non-Lao-speaking English speaker. Inevitably, my desire for ONE PIECE of meat is translated into ONE KILO of meat or ONE CRATE of meat. I know, you’re saying that there’s one simple and obvious solution: learn the Lao language. The problem is that the next time I go I might get the Urdu-speaking butcher.
I don’t like to complain about my plight [which is why I have a regular series of posts called TODAY’S RANT], but we should make room in our society for those of different meat needs.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 