Category: food

Vidyarthi Bhavan

Ok I give this one to North Bangalore. The best masala dosa in town is found at CTR in Malleswaram (ok I’m going by one data point, haven’t been there more often). The thing that goes by the name of masala dosa in Vidyarthi Bhavan is a completely different animal. It is thick, it is literally deep fried, and tasty, yes. But it’s not a masala dosa.

The problem with restaurants having “flagship dishes” (like the masala dosa at either CTR or Vidyarthi Bhavan) is that you are usually loathe to try out their other dishes which could be quite tasty as well. For example, the idli-vada at Vidyarthi Bhavan is quite good, and I’m told that the rava vada is awesome (unfortunately I went there on a weekday morning when they don’t make rava vada). And I don’t know if it’s good business practice for restaurants to have a “flagship dish”.

Coming back to “real” masala dosa and Gandhi Bazaar, you should definitely go to this quaint old little place called Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room on DVG Road, between Gandhi Bazaar circle and North Road. It’s a fairly old-fashioned place, doesn’t serve sambar with masala dosa (only chutney), happily serves one-by-two masala dosa and is generally not very crowded.

It is one of those places with a wooden door, with a wooden shelf in the corner which has pepsi, mirinda, etc. The service is quick and efficient and the food is tasty.

Of late I’m not too impressed by the masala dosa at Adigas, which not so long ago I used to absolutely crave (for example, when I returned to Bangalore after a 10-week trip to London 5 years ago, I went to an Adigas for masala dosa straight from the airport. Now it doesn’t seem to be all that worth it). Or maybe I’m biased in my opinion because the Adigas I most frequent is the one at Embassy Golf Links, where my office is located.

Oh and I need to mention here that I absolutely loathe the Madras masala dosa, the thing that is white and not very crisp, with soggy palya and served with some three varieties of chutney, and flat sambar.

Dal Fry

Have you noticed – about how most Indian fried snacks are protein rich?

Vada – check (urad dal)
Maddur Vade – check (besan)
Boondi – check (besan)
Pakoda – check (besan)
Bajji – check (besan)
Sev – check (besan)
Papad – check (urad dal)
(you have several varieties of papad, and most are heavy in some dal or the other)

Even Chakkli and kODbaLe which are thought to be rice-based have a major proportion of Urad Dal flour in them. Go on and make a list. List out any popular traditional Indian fried snack, and you will find that it is protein rich!

Wonder what it is about protein and fat that they so commonly enter the stomach together!

Booze and volatility

Another of those things I’ve been intending to write for a really long time. Occasionally when I’m not feeling too good mentally, people ask me to go have a drink telling me that everything will be alright. However, given my limited experience in this I’m not too confident it will work. In fact, the only one time I tried drowning my sorrows in alcohol (this was over four years ago) I ended up feeling significantly worse, worse enough to have not tried it since.

The thing with booze is that it increases the volatility of your state of mind. This means that it will flatten out the curve according to which your mental state moves. So after you’ve had a drink or few, you are unlikely to remain in the same state that you were in that you started off at. You end up feeling either significantly better or significantly worse – and the chances of both these go up tremendously when you drink.

I know I have been so far acting based on one data point that went adversely, but I don’t know what causes the selection bias in people who have been through both sides significantly! Of feeling much worse and feeling much better after having some drinks. Why is it that even though all of them would’ve been through significantly worse after drinking at some point of time or the other, they tend to forget about it and only think of the times when they’ve felt better?

Is it that whether you feel good or not is some kind of a binary payoff depending upon the level of the state of mind (basically state of mind < cutoff => “bad”; state of mind >= cutoff implies “good”)? If this is true, then whenever you are “out of the money” (feeling bad), you dont’ really care if you go even more out of the money – your overall feeling doesn’t change by much. And so you don’t really mind the cases when the alcohol starts making you feel significantly worse. But then the barrier is ahead of you so by increasing volatility, you are giving yourself a better chance of surmounting the barrier so drinking makes sense! But then under this condition it doesn’t make sense to drink at all when you’re already feeling good!

Are there any other reasons you can think of for this selection bias? Why do people give more benefits to positive movement in state of mind as a function of drinking than to negative movement in state of mind? Or is it that volatility is a non-intuitive concept and “there’s a better chance you’ll feel better if you drink” is a simple way of communicating it? And let me know your experience about drink making you feel worse..

CTR

Ok this is a post that has been delayed by about a couple of weeks. One of those things that has been in my head now for a while so writing it. So some two or three Sundays back (more likely to be two) I went to the famous CTR in Malleswaram for breakfast. For the first time ever. Yeah I now it’s supposed to be a classic place and all that but it’s only now that I’m getting acquainted with north/west parts of Bangalore so had completely missed out on this so far.

So as per what several people had told me at various points of time in life, the Masala Dosa at CTR was brilliant. Unparalleled. The difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan is that the former makes masala dosa just the way that other restaurants do, but only much better and tastier. The dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan is a different animal altogether and am told the has very different composition to what is made in other restaurants.

There is another important difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan and thats in terms of service and crowd management. Vidyarthi Bhavan does an excellent job in this regard, striving to “rotate table covers” as quickly as possible. Within moments of you taking your seat, your order gets taken, the dosa arrives, as does the bill and a look from the waiter asking you what the fuck you are doing there considering you have finished your tiffin. Extremely efficient from the point of view of the restaurant (in terms of maximizing capacity) and for customers looking for a quick dosa, but not so from the point of view of people who want to linger for a while and chat.

Unfortunately the one time I’ve been to CTR (2 sundays back) I was in a bit of a hurry since I had to go attend a quiz. Maybe the intention of the restaurant is to allow customers to sit for a while and chat up, but I don’t know if you can actually do that since at any given point of time (reports might be biased since this was a Sunday morning, 9am) there are four people waiting for you to leave so that they can grab your seat. This large crowd that is in waiting is also I think a result of slow service at the restaurant (simple queuing theory – for a given arrival rate, the slower the service rate, the more the average queue length).

There were some simple tasks in which CTR didn’t do so well. For example, making a customer wait for ten minutes before you take his order is not only ten minutes wasted for him, it is also ten minutes of absolutely unproductive “table time” – something that a fast food place like this can’t really afford. And then the ordered items also took a long time to arrive (again, most people at CTR have the same order – one “masaal” so I do hope the make dosas “to stock”) – but then their kitchen capacity may not match up to the capacity of the seating area (which isn’t too much). You pay bill at the table itself rather than at the counter which means you sit there for even longer. And so forth.

This post is supposed to be a part of this series that I was writing some four years back examining the Supply Chain practices and delivery models at various fast food restaurants in Bangalore. I have only one observation with respect to CTR and based on that I don’t give it very high marks in terms of supply chain and delivery efficiency. However, the dosa there is so awesome that I’m sure that I’ll brave the crowds and go there more often and might be able to make better observations about the process.

The Switch

Cafe Coffee Day is among the most unromantic places to go on a first date, or so they say. But then you need to understand that the venue can do only so much when it comes to creating the right “atmosphere” for the date. So if you think you are yourselves capable enough of doing a good job of creating a good “atmosphere”, you don’t need to bother about trivialties such as how “romantic” a place is or how good it is in creating “atmosphere” and just pick a place that makes practical sense.

There has been so much of One Day International cricket of late that it is difficult to keep track of various series and tournaments. One tournament that similarly got lost, mostly because the ultimate result was unremarkable (Australia won yet again) was the Champions Trophy, which happened (I think) in South Africa. I don’t remember much of the tournament; I don’t think I watched much of it. All I remember was that there was a game where India played Australia, and that Australia batted first.

Seating arrangement plays an important factor on a first date. Optimal seating arrangement ensures the optimal arrangement of eye contact. Sitting beside each other means you need to put too much effort to establish eye contact, and that is way too much energy. Sitting opposite each other can lead to overexposure – if things aren’t going that well, it’s tough to keep looking into each other’s eyes and that can lead ot awkward moments. It might be interesting to do some academic research in this matter but my hunch is that for a first date a ninety-degree seating arrangement is optimal.

For a few months now I have been on a diet. It has not been without results – my weight has come down by almost a fourth in the last six months. I haven’t done anything drastic, just a set of simple principles. And one of them is “no sugar in coffee”. I’ve given up on tea altogether since I can’t have it without sugar. When you are on a date, however, it is not nice to show off that you are on a diet, especially if you are a guy. it doesn’t give a good picture. So a good strategy is to order something like espresso, which you can claim tastes best without sugar!

I think it was an appeal for LBW that triggered it, but I’m not sure. I do remember, however, that it was a strong appeal that was turned down, but I don’t remember the nature of dismissal. Ashish Nehra was bowling if I’m not wrong. I have no clue who was batting. Maybe it was Haddin, or was it Paine who was opening in that tournament? Not that it matters.

Onlookers might have thought that the move was choreographed given how well we executed it. I don’t even remember their being too much eye contact as it happened. I don’t remember there being any conversation about it as it happened. All I remember is that one moment I was being distracted by Ashish Nehra’s appeal, and the next I was sitting with my back to the TV, comfortably settled where she had been settled a moment earlier, with her having taken my original place.

And I remember that our coffees had also exchanged places along with us!

Orange Juice and Petrol

So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a view that I completely endorse.

One of the big fears about deregulation that he mentions is the fear that volatility in retail prices of petroleum products might increase, and he argues that this is a good thing and is much better than the government artificially hiding the prices and subjecting the junata to major price shocks once in a while. While I agree with him on this, I don’t think prices will change frequently in the first place.

While I was reading this article, I started thinking about the neighbourhood Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice (yeah there are a dozen of those in every neighbourhood in Bangalore) center. About how the guy keeps the price of orange juice constant throughout the year, despite the price and availability of oranges themselves fluctuating wildly across seasons. Yeah he might do minor adjustments such as changing the proportion of water but he can’t do too much of it since he needs to maintain quality.

The basic funda here is that customers want certainty. Every time they go to the shop for their fix of orange juice, they want certainty in the prices. Even if you are on an average cheaper, you will lose customers if your price is more volatile than your competitor’s. Of course there are occasions when you can’t help it and are forced to change your price – and on these occasions your competitors are also likely to do the same. But as far as possible, you try your best to decouple the price of orange juice from the price of orange which is pretty volatile.

Now I don’t know if the volatility in crude oil prices is more than the volatility in orange prices (it’s likely to be) but considering that oil companies are supposed to be more sophisticated than your neighbourhood juice shop guy, I would expect similar behaviour from them – of keeping retail prices of petroleum products as stable as they can. Of course they are likely to follow long-term trends but they are surely not going to pass on the short-time noise in prices to the customers.

So this fear of increase in volatility of retail prices is unfounded, assuming of course that the oil marketing companies are good businesspeople!

Coffee in America

I could have finished this post in one word  – “horrible”. But for the sake of blogging and detailed description, let me sacrifice brevity, like I usually do. I’m writing this after having drunk a cup of absolutely atrocious self-made coffee. Yes, it is proper traditional filter coffee made using Coffee Day Ultra Rich powder, but somewhere I seem to have messed it up. And the quality of this coffee, the first time I’ve made the brew after returning from America, reflects the general quality of coffee they make in America!

I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had good coffee. One was at a friend’s place in New Jersey, where I had traditional South Indian filter coffee out of a steel tumbler. Another was the Turkish coffee at The Hummus Place in Greenwich Village which I’ve talked about in my previous post. That is it! Maybe the odd capuccino somewhere but I can’t remember anything else specific.

The funny thing about America is the size of the coffee lOTas. The average coffee cup in my office was some 400 ml, and each time I would put it under the machine and ask for capuccino it would get filled up! It was extremely disorienting for someone like me who is used to several small doses of coffee during the day. There was another dispenser which dispensed decoction but that was horrible, too. But later on I started drinking from that since I could then control the volume of each dose!

I think I have mentioned this in some other post but another problem in America is they give you hot black coffee and COLD milk. Again extremely disorienting for someone who is used to coffee made with boiling milk. I’m told that the typical American puts such little milk in his coffee that the temperature of milk doesn’t matter. Just that I found it hard to digest (not literally).

Then there was this coffee maker in my apartment. I had to google to figure out how it worked and then realized that an essential part of making it work was to buy filter paper (the first time I’d come across this thing since high school chemistry lab). Since I didn’t have enthu to buy the said paper, I just made do with the two complimentary sheets that had been kindly provided in my apartment. Needless to say the coffee came out to be horrible and I didn’t use the machine again.

One of my regrets of my America trip is that I didn’t order coffee post my several Italian meals. Maybe the Italian restaurants would have made coffee much better than what was available in the rest of the country. And one of the amusing things i remember from the trip is the length of the queues at the Starbucks outlets! That made me realize that people actually go to Starbucks for coffee unlike us here who use Cafe Coffee Day as a convenient hangout location!

Yesterday I did my bit to make up for all the horrible coffee that I’d endured during my America trip. Had two awesome cups of filter coffee at a friend’s place, and then three doses of “sugarless strong” at three diffferent darshini-level places. Unfortunately this morning’s mess-up (now I realize I put 2 spoons of powder into the filter instead of the usual 4) has taken me back to square one, of American quality coffee.

New York – Food Diary

Ok back to inputs now. I suppose this is much more palatable than outputs. One of the things that I did successfully on this trip to New York was to sample various kinds of cuisines. There were some repetitions, and there was this one particular restaurant I ended up giong to thrice, but overall I had an extremely good culinary experience. I’m writing this in the past tense as I’m on the way out of New York as I write this. I’m at the Emirates Lounge at JFK Airport (more about this in another post).

On most weekdays, breakfast and lunch were at office. There wasn’t much variety in lunch (our cafeteria wasn’t very diverse) so I ended up eating salad on most days. Breakfast I experimented and had a variety of things. Dinner, however, I ate out on all days, and though I couldn’t keep up completetly with my initial aim of a different cuisine each day, I did quite well. One of the reasons for not achieving my “target” was that Battery place, where I was living, wasn’t very well served by restaurants and on several days I put NED to take the train.

There were only 2 days when I didn’t have salad for lunch at the office cafeteria. Two fridays back (8th of Jan) I had some thai vegetables with rice. It was extremely heavy and I had trouble finishing. Oh and one of my regrets of this tour is that I didn’t have a good Thai meal anywhere. Green curry with rice types. Then, today I had mexican rice for lunch at the cafeteria. Rice with beans, roasted sweet corn and lettuce. Was pretty good stuff. Liked it.

Breakfast I tried a variety of stuff. I had “home-style fries” (basically south indian alu fry), scrambled eggs, omlette (really liked the omlettes in my office; had it several times), fruit salad (usually a supplement to other stuff; avocado, kharbuja, strawberries, grapes and pineapple), cream of wheat, oatmeal, etc. I realized how you need to add stuff such as raisins, honey, etc. in order to make oatmeal porridge more palatable, and if you add these stuffs it can be made really tasty while yet being healthy.

Dinner diary:

  • 3rd, 10th Jan: Chipotle mexican grill. Excellent stuff. Had been ages since I’d had Mexican stuff and it was extremely tasty. Highly recommended
  • 4th, 18th, 21st Jan: Alfanoose, Maiden Street, off Broadway. Mediterranean place. Excellent veg platter. One main dish (hummus/baba ganoush/falafel/.. ) with rice or salad, one side dish (chickpeas, tabouli, etc.) and a pita bread. Very filling and very tasty. I also had falafel sandwich as a supplement a couple of times. Excellent again.
  • 5th Jan: Wendy’s Fresh Mex. Right next to my office on Vesey Street. Supposedly authentic Mexican. Maaaajor letdown.
  • 6th Jan: Maoz Vegetarian, near Times square: Hummus-falafel sandwich with unlimited salad helpings. Brilliant. And cheap.
  • 7th Jan: Taj Tribeca, Murray Street. North Indian. Surprisingly excellent. Broke my no-Indian-food policy since some friends wanted to eat there. And it was extremely good.
  • 8th, 15th Jan: Adreinne’s Pizzabar, Stone Street. Bloody brilliant pizza. The Margherita I had on the 15th is the best I’ve EVER had. crunchy thin crust, just the right amount of cheese, etc. Can’t praise it more!
  • 9th Jan: Uncle Nick’s, Hell’s Kitchen. Greek. Had just a starter since it was so heavy. Essentially capsicum bajji with cheese. Decent.
  • 11th Jan: Hangawi, 32nd and 5th. Where else but in New York will you find a Korean Vegetarian place? Insanely brilliant salad and awesome soup. Main course (stonepot rice) wasn’t as good as the starter but ranked high on an absolute scale!
  • 12th Jan: Meskerem, Macdougal Street, Greenwich Village. Ethiopian. Cold dosa with 3 dals, 4 sabjis and one dal-level thing with wine. Pretty good stuff. But bad ambience. Too crowded.
  • 13th Jan: The Hummus Place, opposite Meskerem. Buggers didn’t accept AmEx cards so had to pay in cash. Fawa beans soup, roasted eggplant for starter, some hummus and chickpeas thing for main course nad Turkish coffee. the coffee was absolutely brilliant. Out of the world. Heavily laden with spices and extremely strong.
  • 14th Jan: Capri Caffe, Church Street. Authentic cuisine from the island of Capri. Again main crib is they didn’t take AmEx. Pretty good salad and excellent soup (green peas).
  • 16th Jan: Harrington’s. 31st and 7th. It’s a pub. Had some fried cheese and capsicum for starter. Panini for main course. How good can you expect the food to be in a bar?
  • 17th Jan: Some mexican place in Hell’s Kitchen. Decent but not brilliant. Expensive (ok friend’s wife’s relative paid for it, so I didn’t even expense it! ). No value for money. But excellent dessert (friend’s wife’s relative described it as a liquid Tiramisu – coffee, tequila and whipped cream). And this friend’s wife’s relative (US-settled) was surprised that you get Tiramisu in India!!
  • 19th Jan: The Village Trattoria, Greenwich Village. Lentil soup, bruschetta, some pasta with pesto sauce. Again brilliant. Excellent stuff. And not too expensive.
  • 20th Jan: Ancora Ristorante Italiano: Somewhere near Broad Street. Don’t konw exact address. It’s a high-class looking underground Italian place. Again pretty good. Ok I’ll reclassify that to brilliant.
  • 22nd Jan: Ok this was more of an evening snack preparing for the impending flight. Greek Salad at Cosi’s opposite my office. Excellent.

Ok I suppose I haven’t mentioned the times I ate breakfast or lunch out but it isn’t that significant so I’ll leave it out.

More on food in New York

Just a collection of pertinent observations:

  • It’s amazing how so many restaurants which might get classified as “fine dining” in Bangalore are run out of such small places in New York. Of course, in Manhattan real estate is at a premium but the amazing thing is how these restaurants maintain their class despite putting tables within a foot of each other.
  • Tipping here is serious business. For the first time in my life I’ve left a minimum of a 15% tip wherever I’ve gone. And despite paying the tip by card, I follow the standard Indian policy of rounding off so that the total amount is a round number.
  • I’ve had mediterranean food thrice in three different places and each has tasted much different from the other. Hummus and pita bread has been the common factor in each.
  • Went to an Indian restaurant once during these two weeks (when I was catching up with some IIM friends) and it was surprisingly good. Especially since my benchmark was the Bangladeshi places in London, I suppose
  • As I had mentioned in an earlier post, large cosmopolitan urban agglomerations such as New York lead to extremely niche restaurants. What are the odds of finding a “high class vegetarian” Korean restaurant (called Hangawi; brilliant food and even more brilliant ambience) or a Caprese (serving food supposedly native to the island of Capri) restaurant?
  • I’ve taken a fetish for soup – had soup thrice this week. Veg dumpling soup at Hangawi, fawa beans and green peas soup at the Capri Caffe and a mixed vegetable soup at The Hummus Place. All extremely thick and excellent. I should try soups at more places.
  • I had the much-recommended ethiopian food the other day. The main item is some dosa-type thing. It’s a bit sour and is served cold, though. Extremely large and similar to home-made plain dosa. I had a veg platter for the main course. Got four dals (two of which tasted like the pappu you get in Andhra meals and one had wine) and four sabzis. Not ideal with dosas but was good only.
  • The Greenwich Village area seems to have a good congregation of high quality (but cheap looking) restaurants.
  • The way they make the omlette in my office cafeteria is interesting. First they just put the vegetables onto the tawa and then they take pre-beaten egg/egg white and pour it on top of the vegetable using a bowl. And they spray something on the tawa so that it doesn’t stick. And they actually toss the omlette in the air to flip it around on the tawa!
  • When we were kids we would hear that American kids can’t do arithmetic and use a calculator even to add two single digit numbers. Restaurants have taken advantage of this. For example, on today’s dinner bill, at the bottom it said something like “for 20% tip leave $4.64” or something. So basically since most people don’t have patience to do the arithmetic for 15%, they just take this number given to them and put it. Profit for the waiters!
  • I hope to eat many other kinds of tasty food in my one remaining week here.

Urban living and restaurants and liquidity

Last night I had dinner at Alfanoose, a small Mediterranean joint off Broadway. I had hummus and salad with pita bread, and had also brought along a falafel sandwich which is now sitting in my fridge and is likely to get consumed today for breakfast. Excellent stuff. Absolutely brilliant. And not expensive at all – ten bucks for the hummus and salad, and six for the sandwich. Considering that USD = 10 INR according to the Idli index, this is extremely reasonable, insane value for money.

I have been intending to write this post for ages, about how one of the best positive externalities of urban living is restaurants. When you are living in a desolate area, with not too many people around, there is no option but to cook your own food. Even if you live in a village ora small town, the number of people who are willing to eat out will be small, which means it makes little business sense for someone to open a restaurant there. You are likely to find a handful of them, but the lack of competition will mean that you can’t really trust quality.

There is a network effect in restaurants. Some people don’t eat anywhere but at home, and some don’t cook at home at all. However, there is the large middle ground of people whose consumption of restaurant food varies directly with quality and liquidity. And these two concepts are inter-related – the bigger the town is, the greater the required supply of restaurants which means more competition and thus higher quality. And higher quality leads to higher demand (more fence-sitters converted) and the virtuous cycle goes on (of course, population and the fact that some people don’t like to eat out limits the boundaries of the cycle).

Another thing is that the larger a town gets, the greater the liquidity of the food market in there, there is more variety. If you remember Bangalore in the 1980s, when I was growing up, there was one standard type of restaurant. Where you would get cheap idli and dosa and a few other standard snacks, and a few “north indian” items at meal times, and every time you wanted to eat out you had to go with one of these. And you would have noticed how with the growth in the restaurant market in the 90s you got more variety.

What makes cities such as London and New York such foodie havens is their size, and also that culturally people here are more inclined towards eating out than in other places such as India. This leads to insane liquidity in the market, and as I explained above that leads to more variety, and so you get more niche food. And when you have cities as large as New York or London, what you get is full-fledged liquid markets in cuisines that are everywhere else considered niche!

So because of liquidity in otherwise niche markets, in each cuisine you will find various kinds of restaurants. Like yesterday I had awesome hummus at this self-service place! While in a place like Bangalore to get any kind of hummus you’ll have to go to a fine dining place and spend a bomb.

Another thing I realized is that when liquidity is thin it usually occupies the top end – like how in Bangalore you get non-Indian stuff only in high end fine dining places. But I suppose I’ll write about that in detail some other day