1/16/2004 » Food

I went to Chinese Mirch, a new Indo-Chinese restaurant in Manhattan's Curry Hill, last night. I had veggie won-tons and a gobi (cauliflower) Manchurian. The restaurant was fairly empty late at night, so meeting the owners and the fellow diners was easy; I met Carl, a Goan Catholic from Bombay with a Portuguese last name, and his Spanish girlfriend from Barcelona. We had an interesting conversation about Sevilla and Valencia, Arab/Moorish architecture in Granada, Chinese hairdressers in Bombay, Spanish and Hindi flicks, and the Barca-Real Madrid futbol match. Carl extolled the virtues of Indo-Chinese cooking ('on every corner in Bombay, I swear, yaar!') and bemoaned the paucity of such places in Manhattan.

There's a new wave of Indian restaurants as lifestyle businesses being started by young, desi Manhattan professionals. Indian Bread Company, Chinese Mirch, and their granddaddy, Kati Roll Co., remind me of the second wave of upscale restaurants in London's Brick Lane; they're slicker than the usual desi joint and assume a level of cultural understanding or interest beyond the curry / dosa basics. As young restaurants, owners, friends and relatives still work behind the counter, and they're people much like me, educated urbanites, often from Delhi or Bombay, people I could easily run into at parties. A lot of the initial marketing of these places goes through word of mouth, friends of friends in the high-speed desi network; it's the 'I'll open a little restaurant' dream made real. Call it the West Village wave.

Indo-Chinese is potentially an interesting new food category in the U.S., similar to Asian-Latin fusion at popular places like Asia de Cuba and Sushi Samba. The Chinese community in Bombay, which came over during the tea trade, invented this fusion cuisine, just like the Japanese in Peru invented a form of Asian-Latin food. The cooking uses Indian veggies in Chinese spices and cooking methods. Gobi in Chinese spices tasted novel; but the reverse wouldn't make much sense, Chinese veggies in Indian spices would probably just taste like Indian food. I'd expect the Village Voice, which is pretty literate in things Indian, to jump on this place first, then Chowhound, followed after a very long while by the Times.

The novelty of all this multi-culti will probably feel commonplace in the future. One of the things that struck me in Europe was how explicitly multicultural everyone was due to the proximity of neighboring nations. Spaniards and the French often speak each others' languages, and small nations such as the Netherlands speak multiple languages since few speak Dutch. With the advent of the euro, a single point of visa control, and budget airlines such as Easyjet, you really can hopscotch across the continent as if between New York to Chicago. The only entry stamp I had on my U.S. passport after my Paris-Madrid-Amsterdam jaunt came, embarrassingly, upon re-entering the U.S.