Midsummer East Coast Tour, The U.S.

File under "offer you can't refuse": my agent, David, asked me what I was doing around the beginning of August. His wife is from Hawaii, and every year they head down that way with their kid and visit the in-laws. Would I be interested in house-sitting for him in Jersey City? Oh: and cat-sitting a ten-year-old cat. How hard could that be? Jersey City is a couple of stops on the PATH rapid-transit system from Manhattan, and although it was August, there'd be stuff to do there. My publisher for The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 1 was having a typical publishing August -- ie, not doing much -- and wanted to sit down and chat about the book. Playing around with Google Maps with a vague idea of renting a car and going somewhere for a day came up with all kinds of interesting suggestions. And best of all, it'd be free, at least up until the last day, when I'd hop on Amtrak and head to Montreal for a few days.

So I said yes.

David's house is about a mile from the PATH station, Little India, and many other attractions. I was determined not to over-plan anything, except to nail down a lunch with the publisher and explore JC. I'm still planning to leave Austin as soon as it makes sense -- ie, not for a while yet -- and wanted to see what the place was about.

After a conversation with last-minute details (which I should have taken notes on) I went back to the Ramada (the only hotel except for that weird Indian one I stayed in a couple of years ago in that part of town) and crashed. The next morning, I checked out, carefully picked my way down JFK Boulevard, and arrived at the place I'd be occupying for the next ten days. No sooner had I arrived than Maud, the cat who I'd been assured would mostly sleep while I was there, emerged and started yowling, hissing, and spitting at me. No matter that, over the rest of my stay, I would feed and water her and clean her litter box, she didn't ever warm to me. Far from it.

Maud, none too happy

I actually had no clear plan for touristing, except I did want to go to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's collage of medieval buildings in Ft. Tryon Park at Manhattan's northernmost point. I hadn't been there since I was a teenager, and by now I've seen lots of stuff of the sort it contains, as well as having visited the church in St. Guilhem le Désert where they got one of their cloisters. Plus, I heard they had a piece by the Master of Cabestany.

My first day, though, was spent finding a grocery store and familiarizing myself with the surrounding neighborhood. There would be a farmer's market the next day at the PATH terminal in Journal Square. Didn't expect much from that, but it'd be worth looking at. I took a quick look around Lincoln Park as the sun set and walked back to the house.

Monument to the early settlers of JC who fled the Irish potato famine, Lincoln Park

There was no doubt where I wanted to eat that night: Deccan Spice in Little India is one of the best Indian restaurants I've ever enjoyed. Thing is, I forgot something important about them: as you approach Newark Avenue from JFK, you see their sign, so naturally you suppose the restaurant on which it hangs is Deccan Spice. It's not. Deccan Spice is two doors down, and if you're walking up Newark Avenue, there's a sign facing your way on the right building. I chose the wrong restaurant, and paid for it: it's called Home Kitchen, although it also has another name, too. The menu is confusing, but not as confusing as something I thought I spotted on the way in: a Bible, a picture of Jesus, and a rosary with a crucifix on it. The chicken dish I had was very ordinary, except for the effect it had on my intestines an hour later. That was impressive.

That farmer's market was also a surprise the next day: only one farmer was represented, along with a Puerto Rican food truck and a bakery, but the vegetables looked top-notch. With the idea of making a salade niçoise, I bought lettuce, a red potato, some green beans, and some black cherry tomatoes. Now all I needed was some good tuna and I was ready to rock. And I knew where to get that: David's printed guide to JC mentioned Carmine's Italian Deli, where he said cops and firefighters went to get sandwiches. It wasn't far.

Not, that is, if you read the address right. Instead, my brain told me it was on a nearby street, albeit a fair walk down that street. So, after walking the mile back to the house and resting up a bit, I started walking down that street. And walking. And walking. Finally, a sign I was looking for came into view, but not Carmine's. Cool Vines was the wine shop David had mentioned, so I went in and looked around. They seem to import everything in the shop themselves, so there was nothing I recognized, which was good and bad. The proprietor was a bit sniffy, but I bought a couple of interesting-sounding bottles and walked all the way back to the house. I sat around until I got hungry and realized there was no vegetable steamer in the house with which to make the salad. I consulted the list again, and started walking down that same street to downtown JC in search of Razza, an upscale pizza joint. For some reason, pizza was just what I wanted, and there was apparently no old-school pizza joint in JC any more. Razza more than fulfilled my expectations. Let's just say that I rarely eat all of the crust. I ate all of the crust. The heirloom tomatoes with a chive vinaitrette was also a perfect opener. And let's face it: after all that walking, I was ravenous. I took a cab back and collapsed into sleep.

JC Astrology #1

I was annoyed enough the next morning that I'd made so many mistakes that I decided to do something I knew how to do: go to the Cloisters. And I did. It was a beautiful day for it, too: the Hudson's palisades were as lovely as I remembered them, and Ft. Tryon, or at least its site (Washington thought he could invade New York City from there and boy was he wrong), a cool and quiet place to spend time.

Note to Founding Father: you can get there from here, but it's not a good idea.

The Cloisters' collection had been added to considerably since I was there last, and I was gratified to see that I could pick out pieces from places I'd spent time, most notably Catalonia, Germany (a bunch of Tilman Riemenschneider wood carvings) and of course the Eastern Languedoc.

And there it is: the cloister from St. Guilhem le Désert!

There was a lot of stuff to see, and yet the place was small enough that I believe I saw it all. One note I made was that the familiar yellow Valencian pottery that had unexpectedly entranced me all those years ago in Castellón was using identical colors to Moorish pottery made in the same vicinity. I found this exciting because I will be in Valencia in a little over a month and am hoping fate steers me into more information about this. I realized after visiting the Cloisters that I seem to have picked up a hobby after all these years: figuring out the three-part society of pre-expulsion Spain, as the Moors, their fellow North Africans the Jews, and the Spanish worked out a way to live together, albeit with some tension. I attribute this to the pieces that clicked into place this spring in Girona.

And here's the Master of Cabestany's piece, considerably larger than I thought.  If he existed, this is by him. 

I left the Cloisters feeling great: between the weather, the views, and all the stuff I'd just seen, I was in a good mood. I pulled out my phone to send the Cabestany picture to a friend in Austin and a grandmotherly black woman with a teen in tow asked me if I were playing Pokémon Go. I told her no, I was trying to send a photo, but had just discovered I couldn't, and also told her that seeing me with my phone was a rare sighting indeed. She clearly approved. I walked a bit further and came upon a setup where a photographer was erecting lighting and tripods and such and a tall, thin black man had a drone in his hand. A couple in full wedding gear were sitting waiting and suddenly I put the pieces together. "If you don't mind," I told the drone pilot, "I'm enough of a geek that I'd like to watch this." "Sure, just stay out of the shot." Easily done from the bench once the couple stood up and too their places. The drone hovered in front of them and then shot out over the Hudson River. Then it hovered a bit and he brought it in, more slowly, as they waved. Man, they don't do wedding videos like they used to.

Bride, groom, drone

Eating Québec (And Elsewhere)

The vacation I ended last week was intended to clear my mind in preparation for the hard work of writing my book, which I have just a year to do. I couldn't think of any better way to do it than to fly to New York, meet a friend in Jersey City, eat Indian food there, then take the train up to Montreal for a week. I figured it'd be coming on to peak foliage season, and I was right. So right, in fact, that the Monday I went up was the first day Amtrak added the Dome Car to the run: a car with a glass dome on it for maximum sightseeing.

It's not easy to take pictures from a speeding train, but this gives you an idea. The glass is thick, so it mutes some of the colors, and I decided to check out the special equipment to see what advantages it would bring.

The view was nice, but the car was crowded. The head in the picture belongs to a fat woman who sat down at a table meant for six and spread her crafting supplies all over it and played with them while ignoring the scenery. So this was as close as I got. I spent most of the time listening to green-shirted folks with "National Parks Service Volunteer" on arm-patches talk about the landscape and the history ("Ethan Allen, who ran the Green Mountain Boys? He was a thug. They were all thugs. Fortunately, they were our thugs." Pretty accurate assessment, actually) and passed on the occasional bit of misinformation: water hyacinth is not an alga, sorry. But Lake Champlain, like most places with water in them, is pretty choked by them now.

Having a ten-foot raise in your view doesn't really help, especially when you can't get to it, so I listened to the Parks Service folks for a while and went back to my seat. The upper reaches of the hills were bursting out in color, particularly the red maples and sumac trees, which do a darker shade of red. It was a great show.

Then the sun went down and the rather boring ride between Plattsburg and the border station at Rouses Point and then into Canada ends in a rather dramatic view of Montreal all lit up, which I, of course, forgot to snap.

No matter; I was among friends, ensconced in an ultra-deluxe hotel I'd scored rooms in via a discounter, on the edge of Old Montreal, which is picturesque, at least, although it tends to be clogged with tourists. My usual guides, Terry and Patricia, were on hand to help me through a city I learn just as I leave -- every time! -- and we decided on a well-reviewed fish-and-chips place not far away. It was pretty good, especially for someone like me who hasn't had fish and chips in an age, but only pretty good, and it had all kinds of breadings, which I didn't understand, and a lot of other kind of nouveau trappings. I lost the address, so if you feel inclined to challenge my opinion or check it out yourself, it's on the edge of Old Montreal. Somewhere.

The next night, though, was filled with anticipation. Ages ago, Terry and Patricia took me to Cuisine Szechuan on Avenue Guy. Its huge menu was filled with stuff I never thought I'd see in a restaurant outside of China, and it's always been superb. Terry reported a downward slide in the two years since I'd been, but he'd heard it was back in action. There was no way we'd miss this, so off we went.

Left to right: fried lotus root sticks, twice-fried fish, Chinese spinach with pickled Szechuan chiles.  Grease stains in bowls and on plate due to Szechuan dumplings in chile sauce and Szechuan dumplings with peanut sauce.

The bad news was there were only three of us, so the amount of stuff we could order was limited. Not shown was a dish a guy cooks in a wok on your table, which was very good. The lotus root was like French fries, they're that starchy, but with a completely different texture and, of course, green onions and two kinds of chiles lending their flavors to the oil the lotus root's fried in. The fish was also wonderful, although I didn't get as much of it as I'd liked, and the spinach wasn't overwhelmed by the pickled chiles, although they were certainly powerful, and I intend to find some next time I'm shopping at the Vietnamese-Chinese supermarket. The appetizers were, unsurprisingly, also great: those cloud-like dumplings with a little ball of pork hidden in them somewhere, one batch swimming in a delicious deep red sauce, the other napped with a peanut butter and soy sauce with other ingredients. You don't want to know how inexpensive this place is, but you definitely do need to know how to find it next time you're in Montreal:

Don't forget to tip: the place attracts lots of Chinese students from China, and the staff complains loudly of their parsimony.

The next evening we somehow managed to pull off a coup. Patricia had been wanting to go to Joe Beef, which seems to have replaced Au Pied de Cochon as the in restaurant in Montreal. Like Pied de Cochon, it's been visited by, and raved about by, Anthony Bourdain. Unlike Pied de Cochon, it doesn't post its menu on its website, but I pulled it up and the first thing I saw was a photo of Ai Wei Wei with a kitten, so I figured it'd be okay. Then followed a comedy of sorts in which Patricia attempted to use the website to make a reservation and discovered they were booked up until Christmas or something, then called and was told there'd be a table tonight -- or was it tomorrow? At any rate, we headed down there secure that we'd made a reservation and stood in line in the freezing evening temperature and the young woman with the iPad came and told us she couldn't find our reservation. So we stood around a bit more and finally got escorted to a tight table with windows onto the street, and discovered there's no menu.

Or, rather, there's a menu, but it's written on a chalkboard above the bar, surrounded by tiny Christmas lights, and impossible to read. That's all the menu you get. So you twist in your seat, squint at the words (all of them in French, but that usually doesn't faze me), try to make stuff out, and try to construct a meal out of that. Eventually, crafty Terry and Patricia chose two things I don't like, with him getting "veal liver" (which I remember being called calf's liver) in a red wine reduction, and her getting trout prepared some way that she deemed excellent, neither of which I was going to try. I got pasta with lobster, since I hadn't had lobster in over a decade. Oh, and now it's time for the wine: this menu is written in even smaller letters on its chalkboard and is in all kinds of languages. Naturally, a party of three can't crowd around it with the waiter to discuss it, so I volunteered myself and wound up with a very, very good Ardèche Syrah. Luck of the draw, I assure you.

So by the time the starter arrived (salads for T&P, croquetas made with Montreal smoked meat for me) I was pissed off. Not allowing diners full access to the menu and wine list is just plain arrogant. Diners at a place as upmarket as this need time to weigh choices when spending this much money. (Well, actually, it's not that expensive, but it's expensive enough that you want to choose well). They definitely need extended access to the wine list to make a good choice. Hell, during the meal, Patricia spotted the word cheval on the blackboard. I probably wouldn't have ordered horsemeat, but the waiter hadn't even mentioned it while running down the list. Who knows what I missed during my hurried confab at the wine board? We left feeling a bit mistreated -- or I did, at least. I felt like I had a shot at a wonderful meal but hadn't had the opportunity to make a fully informed choice. I liked what appeared to be, from our small sample, Joe Beef's approach to food, but I definitely did not feel like going back. I should also note that the "croquetas," a common Spanish tapa that, in its simplest form, is sort of like a Tater Tot made from mashed potatoes and then gets more complicated as you put other things in with the potatoes, didn't have potatoes in it. There was a sour taste, and I never tasted any of that famous smoked meat (aka pastrami in the USA). I was enjoying the wine too much to pay attention, but boy, when I got back to the hotel and ran into the bathroom, I realized what had happened: they'd substituted goat cheese, to which I'm violently allergic, for the potatoes. That's what the sour taste I didn't like was. Not their fault, but a printed menu might have mentioned that. And there wasn't one.

It's worth noting that across the street from Joe Beef is a pizzeria called Geppetto, and later that week, after I'd come back from Québec City, Terry got three pizzas to go from there. They could have been the best designer pizzas I'd ever had: all three had a tomato sauce base, but in each case, the sauce was different, aimed at complementing the toppings. Just subtle differences, true, but it's the mark of a serious place, and I'll happily go for a sitdown meal there any time.

I interrupted my Montreal stay for a quick trip to Québec City, the provincial capital and scene of a lot of Canadian and American history. I wasn't sure what was there, actually, just wanted to see another piece of the province I've been visiting off and on since the '70s. Unfortunately, when I checked in at my hotel (a charming place where my room was just a tad too small), I was told there would be five cruise ships in the harbor the next day, and 25,000 tourists in the street. Fortunately, the lady in the hotel said, they'd stay in the "lower city" and wouldn't be rampaging up where I was. I had no idea what she was talking about, having just arrived on the train, but I'd find out the next day.

Dinner that evening was at one of the older houses in town (not as old as the town by any means because the Brits bombed the hell out of it in 1760, and caught the mostly-wooden city on fire), a semi-hokey-looking place called Aux Anciens Canadiens, featuring Quebecois food. It was an impressive menu, although I knew that the real deal was fairly simple, and, in fact, that's what I went for: the mixed plate with two kinds of meat pie (tourtière), pig's knuckle, meatball stew, and "salt pork rillettes," which sure looked like cracklins to me. The leg of Inuit-caught wild caribou with Labrador tea spice, cooked sous-vide with a green alder sauce was extremely tempting, but not the price, not even at 85¢ to the Canadian dollar.

The next day I was hoping for a kind of historical museum of the province, but the nearest thing was to walk a bit up the hill and into the Citadel, built by the British to protect their investment in this city at the narrows of the St. Lawrence River once they'd bombarded it and chased the French away. Security was high due to the visit of the Governor-General, who has a residence there, and our excellent teenage guide ordered us to stick close to her and not go off and investigate stuff on our own because there was a good chance people disregarding this would be frog-marched off the property and/or arrested. (Not that this stopped a couple of Japanese tourists from running towards a landing military helicopter at one point in the tour. I was kind of hoping it'd either shoot them or land on them, to be honest.) It was a bracing walk on a chilly morning, but I rather enjoyed it.

Québec means "narrows," and, at 700 meters, this is as narrow as the St. Lawrence gets. Enemy in sight at far left. 

At noon, we got to watch the firing of the salute.

Ka...

BOOM.

The museum in the Citadel proved to be boring, concentrating on the regiment's time in World War I rather than the history of the Citadel, so a quick turn and I was gone.

Next was the Plains of Abraham, the battlefield where, in 20 minutes, the French lost Canada to the British and both sides lost their generals. The French one, Montcalm, was from Montpellier, where I used to live and where his family's seat is now a tourist restaurant.

Ground Zero for the Cajuns? Uh, no.

This battle, of course, meant the final expulsion of the French farmers from Acadia, the parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia where they'd been living happily for about a hundred years until forces larger than they decided the land could be better used.  A couple of shiploads became homeless people who drifted down the Atlantic coast of America, finally arriving in Haiti, where they hated it and eventually escaped to Louisiana, whose governor gave them a ton of land. Mostly swamp, of course, but at least the peasants didn't settle in New Orleans. I wanted to pay a visit to it as the place where the whole Cajun story started, but as it turned out, the French had been moving them on for some time by the time the battle happened. Oh, well.

I then decided to head to the Museum of Civilization, a kind of undefined museum in the lower Old Town where Terry told me he thought a historical exhibition on Québec had been moved. I knew they were having an exhibition of classical Greek stuff that was being heavily hyped. And after a bit of getting lost, I found my way down the steep hill, not looking forward to going back up, and gazing over the edge at one point to see a street deep in tourist gridlock. Pickpockets would faint for the choices down there, I thought, but fortunately where I was going was elsewhere. Turned out that the Greeks were from the Greco-Roman museum in Berlin, where I'd seen them years ago, and, idly wondering whether the pornographic pottery was in the show (I'd come upon it when a high-school art class was sitting there, impassively sketching and I noticed that the pots showed a bunch of very graphic hetero- and homosexual goings-on; this being Germany it's likely nobody cared one way or the other), went down to the Québec stuff. I was pretty bushed by now, so I didn't really give the exhibit as much attention as I should have (and I have to say it was mounted and lit oddly, so it wasn't as easy to decipher as it should have been). It did manage to clear up the whole British-French thing, as well as the anti-British thing that had Canada declare its independence (albeit within the British Commonwealth), as well as reminding me of the incredibly destructive iron grip of the Catholic Church on French Canada, which lasted well into the 20th century. Another bit of history was in a park at the top of the hill: this statue of a man Terry's descended from, the first settler in Québec City.

Limping by now, I went back to the hotel to put my feet up for a while, and later went down to a place I'd seen earlier, the Clarendon Hotel, whose menu looked as good as any (attempting to get my network to come up with suggestions was unproductive; the only concrete suggestions were Schwartz's and Au Pied du Cochon, both of which are in Montreal), and turned out to be quite good, although the hotel itself seems locked in the past. The food was excellent for the '80s, and I was given a couple of rolls with this little device, which I figure must've been in the basement for decades:

Not a world-beating photo. Sorry.

If you look carefully at that thing in the distance, it's a pewter cylinder with a grid in it, on which sit little spheres of butter, each with nubs on them. The most antique serving-device I've seen. The rolled-up smoked whitefish and salmon was very good, and the roast wild boar tremendous. Not as au fait as Joe Beef, nor was the wine as good, but perfectly okay.

It rained the next day as I headed back to Montreal, but it was finished once I got there, and that night was the night of Geppetto's. Fall had fallen on the province of Quebec, and I was headed back to New York for a meeting with my publisher and a visit to my agent. And a quick shopping trip to Chinatown in search of an odd ingredient, which I found.

I'm back now, the book has been started (albeit not to my total satisfaction, since I'm still finding my feet, having not attempted a narrative this large in a while), and it'll be a while before I hit the road again. But this sure was fun.

* * *

Intrepid readers who were as excited about the Indian cuisine in Jersey City as I was will want to read this report of a place I wanted to try but didn't. I'd gladly attempt a story for some magazine about this neighborhood if they'd fly me back!

A Week (Almost) in India, New Jersey

Want to know how to stay in New York for four nights for less than the price of one night in a hotel? The answer is, stay in New Jersey. Specifically, stay in a crazy Indian-run hotel called the Haiban Inn on Newark Avenue in Jersey City, the heart of that town's Little India. And if you don't mind the room being shaken until all hours by drumming and singing and dancing, book your time in the middle of the nine-day annual religious festival known as Navratri. You won't get much sleep, but on the up-side, a lot of the restaurants are open til 5am.

And you'll want to eat at the restaurants, trust me.

I arrived on Thursday, after a chaotic series of events that made it so it took me almost as long to get from JFK to the hotel as it did for me to get from Austin to JFK. Some of it was my fault: at one point I was steps from the hotel, mis-read the street numbers, turned around, and walked a mile, with my computer bag and my suitcase. But here's the point: at least I got there.

The Haiban isn't going to make anybody's list of luxury hotels, even in Jersey City. In fact, it's barely a hotel. The current owners bought it ten months ago, rid the property of its bedbugs, and started renting out rooms with an eye towards long-stay Indian guests in town to do short gigs in the tech sector. For around a hundred bucks, I got a big room with a bed, another room with a sink, a fridge and a microwave, and a bathroom. No furniture except for a little chair that looked sad that the rest of the dinette set had walked off and left it, no glass to wash your mouth out after brushing your teeth, no desk at which to set up your computer (the wi-fi was great), and nothing much else. The walls are paper-thin and there's a chance the businessman in the next room is using Skype in the wee hours to make a deal. In the morning, basic breakfast is provided: tea, bread to toast, cereal. The people running the place are extremely friendly. And you can't beat the location:

These are just random grabs of the block of Newark Ave., a long street that starts downtown and winds its way until just past Little India. You will notice the huge number of restaurants. We will return to this, never fear. What's not a restaurant is probably a shop selling saris, a money-transfer operation, or a superette or meat market. I would have gone nuts in the superettes were it not for the fact that I have two well-stocked Indian markets right near my place in Austin. Not even they sell curry leaf (neem) plants, though. Gotta get me some of that.

Of course, my never-ending quest for great Indian food, and particularly south Indian food, would bring me to stay in a place like this, but there was another factor as well: PATH. This is a small subway system that connects places like Newark, Hoboken, and Jersey City with Manhattan. Really: in very little time at all, I was able to walk to the Journal Square PATH station and, with a regular New York City Metro Card, ride as far as a block from Penn Station. This proved to be amazingly convenient, and, in terms of getting where I needed to go, not much different than staying at a non-midtown hotel in Manhattan. Except for the price.

And Navratri. I got in about 10pm, thanks to the screwups, and heard the music coming from the parking lot across the street. The enthusiastic young man at the hotel desk told me it was the most important festival of the year, nine nights long, and many Hindus spent the entire nine nights praying, not bothering to sleep. I figured that was okay as long as they let me sleep. In fact, it appears to be a festival that's been celebrated since prehistoric times, as the excellent Wikipedia article hints. I was unaware of Navratri before this trip, but the whole world's currently aware of it as a result of the Indian Prime Minister's announcement that he's happy to have dinner at the White House with the Obamas, but he won't eat. It's also a fast, you see.

Well, I didn't want to fast, so I headed up the street to a promising-looking place called Deccan Spice with over-the-top encomia from the Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsma in the window. It was a very strange, but wonderful, experience. I was with a friend from Malaysia who'd, unfortunately, just eaten. (Well, you can't expect people to wait for you when they're starving and you're two hours late). Overwhelmed by the menu, I ordered something called Special Pakora to start. This was described as "paneer and cashew mixed with spices and gram flour and deep fried." We've all had pakoras: they're bits of vegetable coated in spiced chickpea (British: gram) flour (besan) and deep fried, so I figured this would be hunks of paneer, that amazing chewy Indian cheese, treated similarly. What I got was a big plate of crunchy tidbits, a bit like a bar snack for the beer they naturally don't serve here. (I had a Limca, an allegedly lime-flavored soft drink made by Coca Cola India which contains no juice at all, just some kind of unspecified "acid," and tastes sort of like lime-scented disinfectant. I have to order Limca once a decade to remind myself how little I like it). It was, its form notwithstanding, delicious, and I had to watch myself because I am all too aware how besan expands. Next up was the house specialty, Natu Kodi Vepudu, described as "spicy country chicken cooked with poppy seeds, coconut and curry leaves," which sounded astounding. It was. It was also not boneless. My Malaysian friend said there's a very similar-tasting dish back home, also not boneless. You're supposed to suck the marrow, crunch the cartilage, and, of course, eat the meat. The spice mixture was out of this world, and I'm going to go looking for it so I can treat some boneless chicken this way. As it was, my current dentition found it challenging, especially when a bone shard got under my denture and found its way to where my teeth had been extracted. I asked the waiter if I could have some rice on the side. He said, and I quote, "No."

Bizarrely enough, this didn't keep me from returning two nights later. I went with a Jersey Citizen of my acquaintance who'd never eaten in Little India, but who is somewhat spice-averse, which is okay because I suspect the Deccans are all too willing to blast you out if appropriate. For appetizers, she ordered samosas and I ordered chilli paneer. Her samosas were definitely southern Indian style (the restaurant advertises itself as Hyderabadi) and the filling, although it contained potatoes and peas, also contained other stuff that made it sublime. No sticky sweet chutney accompanied them, because really, nothing else was needed. For a main course, she got charminar ka murgh, "boneless chicken cooked in spinach gravy and spices," and I got a goat curry from a new state that had split off of Hyderabad and isn't listed either on the takeout menu I lifted or on line. The goat wasn't boneless, either, which was okay, because I'm used to Jamaican goat curry, which isn't boneless, either. It was pretty good, although, again, dentally challenging for me. My friend lucked out with her chicken: there was far more than spinach in that thick green sauce, including mint and fenugreek and cilantro. I do have one of those little Indian cookbooks back in Texas that claims to be Hyderabadi, and I'm going to look for it. Oh: how was my chilli paneer? No idea. It never came, despite two reminders to the waiter. Finally the manager showed up and my friend allowed as how the white rice she'd ordered hadn't come, either. That, at least, was produced post-haste.

In sum, I suspect that repeated visits to Deccan Spice would reveal a bunch of superb Indian cuisine of the sort I, and probably most gringos, have never had. There would be service problems, and if you order the "goat fry" you'd have to remember it's goat brains you're eating there. They're opening various new locations, and if they'd like a tip on a strip-mall property just down from an Indian grocery on William Cannon Boulevard in Austin, they should contact me. I promise to deliver customers if they promise to deliver the full order.

(Deccan Spice, 771 Newark Ave. Jersey City, NJ, 201-604-1772. www.deccan-spice.com. Open 11am-1am Mon-Thu, Sun, 11am-5am Fri & Sat. Other locations, check website).

* * *

The next day, not having had enough, I went to a place across the street and around the corner from the hotel for "pure vegetarian" food. Sapthagiri is another burgeoning empire that can have that space down from Man Prasand Grocery if Deccan Spice doesn't want it. It was lunchtime and I was, again, hungry, and this place's menu had a bewildering number of items on it. It also had a rabbinical certificate declaring the food Kosher. It serves both northern and southern Indian vegetarian stuff, but I was going to stick to the south, since that's less familiar and, if you make it at home, more labor-intensive. 

I started out with rasam idly, two little puffs of rice flour left to ferment and rise overnight and then steamed, then soaked in that deceptively fiery thin lentil soup called rasam (which I have made, and loved: it's not hard). I don't have an idly maker, though, so here it is:

Prepare to sweat, gringo

The coconut raita, the white stuff, was exquisite. And those little puffs kept puffing when they got inside. 

Which made my next choice a little prolematic: a dosa. Some day someone will teach me how to eat one of these mammoth pancakes, which are folded like a crepe over a filling that only makes a bit of a bump in the overall dish. Mine was a Mysore masala dosa, whose description on the menu says that it's "spread with spicy home made sauce and filled with mash of potato & onion and green peas and cashew nuts." I attacked this so fast I didn't have time to photograph it until I pulled up with the certain knowledge that a stomach ache awaited me if I ate another phenomenal forkful:

Coconut raita, amazing rasam, three killer chutneys and that filling...

I kind of ripped open the dosa to show off that filling. Man oh man. 

That did me for the day, despite a trip into Manhattan and back and very good intentions to visit one of the biryani joints that was open late. But I noticed that Sapthagiri offered a breakast buffet on Saturdays and Sundays. My Malaysian friend was all ears at that -- and stomach, too. Saturday morning we were there:

Umm, let's see, clockwise from noon, fried things that had gone cold, some farina dish with onions and I think kalunji (nigella) seeds and other stuff, a cup of rasam, some fried parathas, a cup of coconut chutney, a close relative of that dosa filling, a blob of chutney, a blob of ginger chutney, two idlys and in the center more chutney. No, not real helpful. Just go get some on the weekend. 

There was excellent masala tea and less excellent masala Nescafé. This is the way to start the day, boys and girls! 

(Sapthagari, 804 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ, 201-533-8400, open seven days 11am to 10pm. Another location in Franklin Park, NJ).

* * *

There are many, many other restaurants on the block. I want to try one of the biryani joints, myself, specialists in what might be termed South Indian jambalayas, which can be fiendishly difficult to make at home, or not, depending on how complex the recipe you're making is. (I once made one with the rice in three layers, orange, white, and green, the colors of the Indian flag, each layer with different stuff in it. I almost died before I got it on the table, but, unbelievably, it was amazing. I'm not sure where the recipe is and am disinclined to go looking for it). Up the side-street from Sapthagari is an egg-based Indian restaurant, probably the only one in the US. I need to check that out; eggs aren't much eaten in India, from what I can tell. Another Jersey Citizen tells me that Dosa Hut is good, while another remembers going there -- or was it Dosa House down the street? -- and getting a dosa with a frozen center due to bad microwave technique. There are a couple of places obviously catering to a younger crowd with names like Chutney's that deserve a visit. Am I going to check back in to the Haiban when I get back on Monday so I can continue to investigate? Stay tuned. 

* * *

Of course, each night starting about 8 there was dancing in the streets, big ring dances with men and women and loud live music, although the shenai and santur and sitar and other instruments were all synth presets played by one guy. There were, however, several drum kits to keep people shaking. There was a shrine in the parking lot, one by the stage, and another down the street in the front of a travel agency. 

The main shrine

The travel agency shrine

People started dancing about 8, but things went on, with various vocalists, one of whom was a boy about 4 years old (who kept going flat, as kids do) singing pop-ghazal until about 1:30. 

Live music! Except for the presets. (Kid not shown: he came up later).

Only gives a hint of the chaos. Later: roman candles. 

Even on Thursday and Sunday, when there was no band, recorded music blared out. I was, amazingly, able to fall asleep to it, but unless you're going to celebrate, this might be a nine-day window to not stay in Little India. Of course, from Manhattan, it's the cost of one ride on your Metro Card, and the food won't break your budget at all. 

I'm writing this in a considerably different hotel in Montreal, and the second chapter of this adventure has started. I will not be eating Indian food here, although I understand it's on offer...