(a.k.a. Harold and Kumar Go to Chai Castle)

After gorging on kati rolls this weekend, my cousin the orchestra conductor decided he just had to have some masala chai. I vaguely remembered a Midtown chaat house I’d been to once six years ago which began with the letter ‘A.’ We texted GOOGL and settled on Amma as the most likely candidate. The 10-block walk uptown wouldn’t take long.

We hadn’t checked the cross streets. Amma turned out to be five long blocks east of 6th Ave., and the mile and a half took us half an hour. At every long block we realized the restaurant wasn’t even close, and we were getting near the East River. At every intersection my cousin muttered to himself about missing rehearsal. By now this fabled masala chai wasn’t just a wish, it was a mission.

We finally found Amma. It wasn’t a chaat place at all. It was a pleasant, sit-down Indian restaurant with a funky wire chandelier. My cousin ordered masala chai to go. We sat. Waited. Waited some more. My cousin was in a hurry. He summoned a server: the chai was apparently being made with a plain old Lipton’s bag. ‘Are you going to put some masala in there?’ he asked sharply. ‘Milk? Which spices?’ No waiter in the history of the world has been interrogated so closely about the contents of a cup of tea. I sat there giggling helplessly like a little girl.

The chai arrived fifteen minutes later in generic paper cups. My cousin paid eight bucks for two cups to go and tacked on a dollar tip. ‘What’s the tip for? It’s to go,’ I asked. ‘Just so I can complain about it later,’ he replied.

Perverse. Runs in the family.

The chai was nothing special. The cab cost another twenty bucks so he wouldn’t miss rehearsal. The restaurant owner is probably wondering whether he should open a sideline serving his famous chai. And this morning I looked up the chaat house. It didn’t even begin with an ‘A.’ It was probably Dimple.

More NYC fun… Moo Shoes in LES for faux leather shoes and bags:

Mango rolls at a Chinatown bakery:

Roasting Plant has a great gimmick: choose from seven coffee varieties, and a patent-pending Rube Goldberg gizmo hoovers up the beans through clear pneumatic tubes. The beans go rattling around the ceiling into a combination grinder and espresso machine which also adds a precisely metered amount of milk and foam.

Roasting Plant… relies on new technology and Wonka-esque spectacle. Founder Mike Caswell, an engineer and a veteran of the Coffee Connection and Starbucks (where he held the Orwellian title of “director of profit improvement”), spent five years developing a system that would emphasize freshness, a crucial, if often ignored, requirement for great-tasting coffee… when your order is entered into the computer, the chosen beans are sent clattering through overhead pipes and into the custom-modified super-automated Egro espresso machine, where they’re ground and brewed. [Link]

I ouldn’t find this one either at first — it was like a crossword (’from the J train, go two down and one across’). It’s too new to be listed in 411 directories. So I ducked into a $2 Chinatown Net café where the kids were LAN gaming, the monitors were huge, and Windows was set to Chinese. The only other places I’ve seen with Net cafés this cheap are Morocco and India.

The Tibet protest in Bryant Park kicked off with throat singing:

Harold and Kumar 2 at AMC Times Square: