Category: chow Page 1 of 2

The phone rang eventually. Progress, but no resolution. I guess I’m waiting until Monday, then. Aaargh.

In the mean time, though, here’s something to chew on: a foodie does Puebla. Oh my stars and garters, does this make me hungry.

Hokey smokes. I have just discovered a new beloved lunch place to add to the shortlist. Oh, heavens.

The Kati Roll Company is on 46th between 6th Avenue and Times Square. They sell kati rolls, which are six-inch rounds of paratha bread wrapped around a filling. It’s Calcutta’s street-food answer to the wrap sandwich. Apparently they’ve had a teeny tiny little place down in the Village for a while, but I’d not heard of them until they opened their new spot a half-block from my office. It’s a long skinny restaurant with a few tables and a mess of Bollywood movie posters. The posters featured the same actor over and over. I’ll need to find out who he was.

KTRC only serves the one thing: kati rolls. I bought two of them. The first was a shaami kabab roll. Shaami is ground lamb spiced with cardamom and plenty of black pepper. It had a crumbly texture, with plenty of crispy bits, reminiscent of a really good griddle-fried hash. The meat was mixed in with a vegetable pickle (peppers, sweet red onions). The dense paratha was warm and just a little greasy. By the time I finished the thing, my sinuses were singing, and my taste buds were dancing. Yow. So good. The other roll was chicken tikka—spicy, a little sour (lime juice?), a little charred—again served with the pickle. Other rolls contained a spicy potato mixture, paneer cheese, other grilled meats—even one with meat and egg, which I’ve since learned is one of the most traditional forms. You can bet I’ll be back to sample the menu further. Damn, that was tasty.

The two rolls made for a filling lunch, and cost me about $9, which is at the high end of their price spectrum. Depending on what you order, you can do two for $6. If you’re not all that hungry, or just looking for a snack with some substance to it, you’ll be fine with one, and the most expensive of them costs under $5. Check it out.

I’m in San Francisco this weekend, back in the metropolis of my birth for the first time in what seems like forever. I’m on this completely insane fly-by; there are a zillion people I should have called to say “let’s get together,” only there’s no time to see any of them. If you are one of these people, and you are only learning about my visit now, please accept my humble apologies; better, I thought, to slip in and out unnoticed than to dangle the promise of something that I’d never be able to pull off. (Although I guess I’m blowing my cover by posting this. Bad idea there.) I flew in last night, coming into SF more than two hours late, having sat in a seat that at irregular intervals smelled strongly of puke. Sunday night I go home on the red-eye. Monday I spend the day tripping over the furniture. For now, I’m staying with my cousin.

I’m here for Reuben’s wedding. Tonight was the bachelor party. I worried that there would be straight-boy jiggle-bars, but I figured I could see how the other 90% lives for an evening. Instead, we were told we’d be going to a SF comedy club to catch the 11:00 act. But first we were going to have dinner at some tiny restaurant I’d never heard of.

Oh, the meal. May I please recommend this restaurant to you? It’s Albona Ristorante Istriano. Hot damn, what food. I had pan-fried gnocchi with a hint of nutmeg in a sirloin sauce; this indescribably wonderful mushroom soup; a veal shank that melted off the bone; and a heavenly ripe-canteloupe sorbet that Bruno, the proprietor, had improvised today because he’d found these amazing melons at the market. Throughout the meal, Bruno went to great lengths to make sure we knew all about what he was serving, what he recommended, and how he had cooked it all. He put together sampler dishes of some of his favorites for us to enjoy. He made us feel like family.

We never made it to the comedy club. We decided to linger over the meal instead, swapping stories and drinking much wine and making each other laugh our asses off. I don’t regret that decision for an instant. If you’re in the area, I can’t recommend Albona highly enough.

Man alive, what a beautiful day. Paul and I just got back from a walk ‘round downtown. The San Gennaro Festival is in full swing, which we’d forgotten about, but it just served to force us off the more familiar streets and onto the ones we’ve never before explored. Which is fine, really, because as a result we discovered Dumpling House, at 118A Eldridge Street.

Get thee to the Dumpling House. Right now.

It’s one of those teeny tiny little storefronts that’s maybe six feet across and twenty feet deep. There’s seating for maybe four people. Everybody else is standing at the counter or piled up on the sidewalk, ordering through the window. And why? Because their food is incredibly cheap and delicious. Fried dumplings that will just blow you away, piping hot and savory and gingery and everything you could want in a potsticker, five for a buck. The cooks—five people crammed behind a tiny counter, maybe six, it was hard to tell—were cranking out dumplings as fast as they could, because the minute they came off the stove somebody bought them. We knew that we had to wait a moment or we’d burn our tongues, but the smell coming out of the little styrofoam clamshell made it hard. Eventually, we had to succumb to our appetites and risk getting scorched. I nibbled on one of Paul’s while I waited for my own order to come up. Heaven.

But if the dumpling was heaven, then superlatives fail to describe the beauty of my own lunch. A ‘sesame pancake with beef,’ they called it: it started with a pizza-sized round of soft dough, white and chewy and dusted with sesame seeds and then fried like a dumpling. The dough was cut into sectors (again, think pizza here), and then split through the middle, so the top could be peeled back from the bottom. Into the middle they layered handfuls of fresh grated carrot, fresh chopped cilantro, and cold roast beef flavored gently with anise. Over that, they squirted a peppery-vinegary red sauce. Then they close the thing back up, slip it into a pale wax-paper envelope, and there you are. For a dollar freakin’ fifty.

That was maybe three hours ago, and my taste buds are still all twinkly. We walked from Chinatown to Chelsea and I had a big goofy smile on my face the whole time. And, and I just bought tickets to go see Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence tonight with the boys!

What an excellent day.

For another look at Dumpling House, see cityrag. Or you could just take my word for it and go: here’s a map.

EDITED: although its dumplings are indeed excellent, the name of the place is just “Dumpling House.” The “Excellent Dumpling House,” on the other hand, is that place on Lafayette (which is good, sure, but frankly not as good as the just-plain-Dumpling-House).