The fall of the house of naan
Punjabi Dhaba, of which I had such fond memories, has jumped the naan. Last Saturday evening it took 25 minutes after ordering to get my food because of a large number of takeout orders ahead of me in the queue. One vegetable thhali and an aloo parantha cost eleven bucks. The thhali didn’t come with dal, papad or achaar. The food wasn’t spicy enough. The gobi ki sabzi was watery, sloppily-made and contained lima beans. You know, lima beans. Which are native to Punjab.
The coup de grace: the aloo samosas were a brilliant white inside. Not only did they not have any masala, they didn’t even bother to add haldi to make them an appetizing yellow. C’mon, yaaran, you aren’t even trying.
It brings to mind the famous quip: nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. This falldown in quality is bizarre for a place which calls itself a dhaba, hangs a dhol from the ceiling and blasts a cheesy Punjabi channel at high volume. What does it all mean? There’s a business opportunity in Inman Square.
on Saturday, March 1st, 2008, 10:42 am in Food › 
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C’mon man. I’ve always thought that Punjabi Dhaba is desi food for non-desis who want to go ethnic. It was cheap in its early days, but the addition of a couple of dollars over time have mostly eliminated that advantage, except for the vegetarian platter which has second-grade food - usually with aforementioned lima beans and assorted frozen vegetables dumped in some mixture of water and chilli powder - for $4.95 or $5.95 or whatever. What is good in the Dhaba:
1. The naans.
2. Chole Bhatura
3. Punjabi omelet.
What sucks:
1. Everything else on the menu
2. The long wait due to the measly kitchen. I always call in my orders because of the ridiculous waits.
3. The smell of garam masala and the generic curry sauce they use on your clothes for the rest of eternity, thanks to the lovely open architecture that wafts the kitchen vapors right into the waiting area.
I think it’s because every time I went before, it was with someone who knew what was decent. This time I asked a South Indian :)
Speaking of stereotypes and food, what’s the best idli sambar joint around here?
Well, much better than all the suckers I see ordering Saambur and Doe-sa at the average Punjabi restaurant :)
None in the neighborhood. The nearest one is the cheesily named Dosa Temple (previously Chennai Woodlands), out in Ashland, conveniently located to nab the dinner-and-a-temple crowd. The food there is excellent, with the chutney tasting of fresh ground coconut, the sambar actually containing drumsticks, and the pongal fragrant with fresh ghee.
This time I asked a South Indian :)
too bad Manish…south indians have good taste for north indian food and also cook north indian food like north indians too..
gobi or aloogobi made punjabi way with ginger is dry and is one of those sabjis which needs right proportions of everything to make it taste good..aloo palak also needs a good cook..right balance of salt and all that..so does paneer masala..they all need a good cook..
easy bet is chole, mattar paneer, dal makhani, dum aloo,punjabi kadi…most people can make them easily..and dont need the exact spice accuracy..if there is any right word for that..
I had great punjabi food at punjabi dhabha in international drive florida..
woodlands is good in general for south indian food..
not all south indian restaurants have good udli or dosa..udipi dosas and idlis are sometimes terrible depending on which udipi u go to..
BTW easy way to make idli is GITS ready made rava idli and idli mix..add a lil bit of curd or buttermilk along with water to ferment the idli mix for 10minutes and then steam it.. Priya rava idli and idli mix are terrible.
If u want to make idli at home..soak one glass of urad dal.grind it into a paste..soak two glasses of idli rava..remove water from soaked idli rava and mix it with urad dal paste and add salt…ferment and make idli..it is simple and healthy..
Also easy way to make dosa is one glass of urad dal, two glasses of rice, 1/4th glass of poha (flattened rice) soak them for half a day , grind them into a moderately thick paste adding salt, let them ferment for half a day atleast, after fermenting add a lil bit of milk just before making dosa and on the pan just add ghee + oil mix just a drop and then make dosa by flattening the dough..
And my friends and all my friends parents , aunties and uncles tell me my dosas are better than restaurants..this recipe never fails..and also I dont add any oil sometimes..these dosas come paperthin with no oil and dont stick to pan at all..
Also best way to make dosa idli chutneys is.
take fried chana dal, add Deep’s frozen grated fresh coconut, add yogurt a lil bit, salt and sometimes u can put fresh green chillies too for spice..grind them in soft paste..then add choka with mustard seeds, karipatta, fresh green chillies or red coarse chili powder…easy to make , takes5 minutes to make and is yummy..
best way to make groundnut chutney for dosa is fry groundnuts/peanuts remove chilka.. add lil bit of oil fry onions in oil with mustard seeds, karipatta. Then grind fried onions with fried groundnuts with green chillies , a lil bit of tamarind and salt..not too much salt as this chutney should taste a lil bit sweet and spicy as onions and tamarind make it a lil sweet and green chillies make it spicy hot..it is perfect balance of that taste..easy to make and tastes great with dosas..and healthy too..
Lima beans. The surest sign of inauthenticity and selling out! :)
Indian restaurants are about to become victims of their own success. Authenticity and taste goes out the window - blandness with an exotic name is where it’s going. Just like what happened to Chinese food - the colorless, tasteless aloo in the samosa is our equivalent of the ’sweet-and-sour’ anything that Chinese restaurants pioneered in America.
I’ve seen (white) Americans come in to Indian restaurants - and order things off the menu in an overly familiar manner, expecting things to be just so and such (because it was just so at the sellout restaurant they normally eat at) - and then chide the befuddled waiter who doesn’t follow, because his restaurant has not yet given up on making it like it should be made. These things then add up and determine trends and ruin it for everyone.
Hey , haldi in samosa is not too authentic! Never saw haldi in the samosas sold back home in Punjab! The aloo filling should have: jeera, dhania, ajwain, chopped red chillies, lil’ cilantro-some even add a bit of ginger and garlic. Few places have matar and cashews (not seen in pendu recipes). The mixture is lightly tava fried sometimes for flavors to blend in before you stuff the samosas.
That is a very unfair comment, Manish!
Yup, real samosas don’t have any haldi. The aloo masala is dark grey dude to jeera, ajwain and other masalas.
I don’t know what jacked-up samosas y’all’ve been eating (recipe with haldi) :) But they’re not supposed to be bland and blinding white inside.
idli is not worth all that effort :)
i’ll prefer a dosa over idli any day.
manish - forget about the samosa recipe. I’m talking about the REAL stuff that you get in the halwai shop. I’ve grown up eating samosas in india be it in delhi, lucknow, chandigarh or kanpur. The samosas that u get at the halwai shops don’t have haldi. This doesn’t’ mean that they are white inside. The darker the aloo inside, the spicier they are.
I consider myself an authority on this :) I used to eat samosas every single day at my school canteen (for 10 yrs!).
My range in samosas has been pretty wide. I’ve eaten 20 paise samosa and Rs 250 samosa (the crappy ones that u get at the airport)…and I’m not converting dollar rates into rupees.
Punjabi Dhaba is more hype than anything. It always takes forever and the food is so average. Upudi in Ashland used to be good for South Indian but that was maybe 10 years ago. For Punjabi food, Gold Star in Framingham was decent, but I haven’t been there recently.
Calcutta samosas are the besssssst. Sigh.
I quite liked the Panju food at Bombay Club in Cambridge (?) - or some suburb of Boston, I forget which one.
But by and large the places that cater to firangs make egregious changes to food that get me really worked up too. I once had to scold the guys at this fairly fancy desi place in DC (Dupont Circle) for their ‘biryani’ which was super bland and had weird vegetables in it and didn’t resemble anything I’d call biryani, and they said “what can we do, this is what the firangs want.” Ditto with an Indian buffet in a nearby town that had sauteed bell peppers and onions and some weird salad with the tandoori chicken, and no onions or limes. Best of all are the “ethnic” food guides who rave about some really crappy desi restaurant and say things like “we don’t care if it’s authentic or not but we like it” (which makes me want to say “then don’t CALL it desi food, dammit”).
I suppose it’s similar with the desified “Italian” and “French” food one gets at home sometimes, full of white sauce and hara dhania garnishes. I had a particularly execrable “Italian” meal at this fancy place in Santushti in Delhi that Sonia Gandhi was supposed to like, called Basil and Thyme. I guess she’s been desified too.
Udupi is only mediocre (despite securing the mark of pride and quality for a desi restaurant - the failed health inspection) and it has been shuttered now, in any case., Dosa Temple (nee Chennai Woodlands) has been consistently good though.
Bombay Club has a decent buffet, with chaats on the menu. I actually don’t mind Royal Bengal on Mass Ave (between MIT and Central Square), especially their Bengali dishes which have a generous splattering of mustardiness, but true blue Bengalis haven’t been impressed with it.,
And Cambridge is not just SOME suburb of Boston :)
Apologies, IB. I just couldn’t remember which town it was in as have flitted through Lexington, Sudbury, Burlington and Cambridge at various points.
Feature creep.
In the “fusion” Indian restaurant business there’s been a steady feature creep about what constitutes
Indian food/ingredients. Any good examples of the reverse? Non-Indian restaurants carrying
typically Indian dishes?
At Rustic Pizza (close to Upenn) they serve Samosas… bland, thin and greasy but still an odd inclusion.
I’ve seen naan-type breads at a few Greek places. The pita has entered the mainstream esp. among dieters.
The Green Pappaya near Rt. 128 & 95 in the Boston Metro is decent. Moody-street restaurants are similar
in quality to those found on 2nd Ave & 6th St in NYC — mediocre at best.
They make excellent samosas in Bihar and, I gather, in Kolkata. In Bihar they’re called singharas, for some unknown reason. The samosas they make taste so good partly because of the kind of fat used in making the cover. I think most of them use hydrogenated fats (usually Dalda), which makes the cover extra flaky and crispy.
Because they’re shaped like singhadas.
Shingaras are very popular in Bengal too, they are slightly flatter and have a flakier shell.
brown_dbd: you are spot on about “halwai ke samose” :). He he, and those airport samosas are so blah!
Fascinating discussion.
No haldi in samosa, at least where I come from.
In my experience wrt samosas, people who make them at home (the little ones - bori samose or cocktail ones filled with keema and assorted yummy vegetables+aloo) and fill them with aloo,add haldi to their filling (perhaps because people make the filling like their usual dry alu ki sabzi). If you eat ‘em off the street or from the venerated local shop that all in the area claim is ‘best-one-in-the-whole-city/india’, they have no haldi. They are white but will usually have jeera, ajwain, a sprinkling of dhania, mattar, kaali mirch, proprietary mixture of spices, and maybe cashews, and very rarely raisins.
Never bland, but quite, quite white, albeit stained with dark and delicious masala.
Just like my dupatta.
The Punjabi Dhaba once had the best papri chaat. But then a few years ago something happened - they renovated, got new management (?) and ever since it hasn’t been the same. I used to make a special trip there whenever I visited Boston but not anymore!
I went back to check Improper’s tips. The chhole bhatura is oily but good. The tikki chhole is so-so, it’s hardly Vik’s.