Food Carts – New York City Landmark

You can’t miss them. They are everywhere in Manhattan. From Pondicherry Masala Dosa to Pretzels, Hot Dogs to Curry and Peanuts to Falafel, New York City’s thousands of food carts offer a dazzling choice of hot food. A food cart in New York City There’s even an annual Vendy Award to honor the best food […]

Chinese Mirch – Indian Chinese Delight in NYC

Like most Indians, there are two things we’re passionate about – Bollywood and food (no, cricket is not that hot on our list). In a long life, we’ve watched several hundred Bollywood movies (Hindi and Tamil) and dined at scores of Indian restaurants in Asia, Europe and North America. North Indian or South Indian, Gujarati or […]

Tamil Nadu Bhavan – A New York Rat Hole

Update: Tamil Nadu Bhavan Re-opened by NYC Health Dept Our earliest memories of South Indian restaurants are of dark and dingy interiors, food served in dirty plates or banana leaves and water poured into tall tumblers by sweat-drenched waiters in the dusty small towns and cities of Tamil Nadu in South India. Four decades and […]

McDonald’s = Windows; Chinese Restaurants = Linux

We have yet to read Jennifer 8. Lee’s new book The Fortune Cookie Chroniclers: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food but we plan to pick it up soon. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from today’s New York Times review of The Fortune Cookie Chroniclers: Lee presents an intriguing idea in a chapter called “Open-Source Chinese Restaurants,” […]

Anjappar Chettinad USA – Awful Service, Lousy Food

Anjappar Chettinad NYC Review Anjappar Chettinad in North Brunswick, New Jersey gives a bad name not just to the famed Chettinad cuisine but to all Indian restaurants in the U.S. Disgusting service and a distasteful kitchen come together to deliver a dreadful experience to diners at Anjappar’s new outpost in North Brunswick, NJ. A far […]

Bhut Jolokia – Burn Baby Burn

Indian food owes its attraction to the rich amalgam of spices and, of course, the hot chilies that go into its famed curries. Today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) brings us news of an Indian chili called Bhut Jolokia that is supposedly 200 times hotter than jalapeño pepper. Apparently, Bhut Jolokia is the world’s hottest chili […]