Text 15906, 86 rader
Skriven 2011-09-20 20:46:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: shipp trip descrip 927
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Next day: as Mango Grove is gone, and we all had had our taste
buds set on Indian, Sapphire, where we'd all enjoyed the buffet
before, was next on the list. This time there must have been an
apprentice in the kitchen, and almost everything was a bit salty
and at the same time a bit underseasoned.

Sambhar, the traditional vegetable soup/stew, was salty rather
than tart and quite uninteresting, though the vegetables looked
fresh and were nicely cut.

There's this weird street food in I think Bombay called pav bhaji,
a vegetable curry served on buttered rolls. Here, the bread
component looked like hamburger buns, and the curry was a mush,
so it was even weirder. I took a scoop of the curry, which was
quite good, actually, with a tomato base, but didn't see the point
of diluting it with starch.

Mini puri breads (papri puri) were good, though cold and on the
borderline between crisp-fresh and chewy-not-fresh. They came
with cold aloo chhole, which was bland - chickpeas and potatoes,
unless well seasoned, is subsistence food; I tried to interest it
up with a scoop of onion chutney - that was bland too.

The headliner on the buffet was a big wok of chilli chicken: it
tasted like a slightly southernized version of Cantonese sweet and
sour, with a handful of mildish dried chiles tossed in (and which
I fished for to the degree that my ingestion was in a 3 or 4 to 1
chiles to chicken ratio). I suppose I could have eaten more of
this, but I couldn't find any more peppers.

Dal makhni was, to me, the best dish in the place - properly
seasoned, meaning medium hot (for a change), and very creamy (not
an asset for me). One could liken it to a very good vegetarian
chili, such as the one with which Kathy Pitts once fooled her
husband Wes. I went back eventually for a bowl of it.

Fried okra could have been good, but it was a little too
salty and had sat there a while so a little stringy and tough,
where it should be shatteringly crisp but still with the
flavor of the vegetable.

Black chickpea curry - bland, with an undertone of mustiness.
Very brown spicing scheme. I didn't like it at all.

Eggplant and lima bean curry - some genius had substituted snow
peas and had cooked them as long as limas would have cooked
for, having salted the heck out of them; they had turned to
grayish slime, the strings the only clue that they once had been
a vegetable. The eggplant, what there was of it, was in little
salty shreds with virtually no flavor. This has the singular
honor of being the worst dish I have ever had in an Indian
restaurant. Some of the things tonight were bland or boring
- this was actively objectionable.

Eggplant and tofu Thai-style - in contrast to the above, this was
well flavored, though the eggplant again was on the salty side and,
oddly, undercooked. Blocks of fried tofu, pretty good. Dale said
that there were mushrooms as well, but I didn't get any.

I don't know what the above dish and chicken in green curry were
doing on this buffet. This latter was more authentic-tasting than
any green curry I've had in years and makes me speculate that the
cook was southeast Asian (not Thai, as even these dishes were
not nearly hot enough) rather than south Asian. The balance of
flavors was about right, erring toward the galanga side. I
speculated that the curry paste was a Thai canned product. The
chicken was big sheets of white meat, which didn't really impress
me, except that it was impressive.

Ginger chicken was thigh meat in brown sauce with just a little
spice. Pretty decent but as with everything not as flavorsome
as I would have expected.

A thickish noncrisp coating undid the masala fish, otherwise
good flaky white pollocklike meat. I perhaps should have had
more of this - I was suspicious of it and took only one piece.

I had a big marrow bone out of the goat curry, which was
savory and with a nice brown gravy that as usual would have
benefited from a few shakes of hot pepper. It was a nice deep
bone, plenty of marrow, some of which I couldn't get to for
want of a suitable utensil.

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