Wednesday, August 3, 2016

FUSING IN VENTURA

Well, a weekend in Ventura, 60 miles or so up the coast from Los Angeles.


A so-so martini was had at the Aloha Steakhouse – “Ventura’s only beach front restaurant.”  It was good and cold, decent olives, but awful watery:


A much more serviceable martini was had at the Sportsman Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, which I suppose is to be expected at a place that calls itself a cocktail lounge:


But hey – you know I’ve been obsessing a little about curry – and I’ve often thought that Indian food is to the British what Mexican food is to Americans, big hot flavors, much of the food fairly mushy, involving the homogenization of massive regional variations, and yet even in LA there isn’t an Indian-Mexican fusion restaurant on street corner, though admittedly there is a restaurant named Cowboys and Turbans, and indeed a food truck called India Jones.


However, in Ventura, on Main Street, there’s the Taj Café – a thoroughly, authentically Indian establishment, 


but there on the menus is something called the Lamb Frankie, which is fusion to the max:


It’s described as “Homemade egg-washed Bombay style burritos, stuffed with lamb, cooked in a special sauce, with vegetable pickle.”  I couldn’t tell you with absolute certainty whether that’s a chapati or a tortilla on the outside (I assume the former), but the inside was just great, the hot spices bringing out the lamb flavor rather than masking it.

It worked really, amazingly well, but when you think about it, why wouldn’t it?  In my mind it will perhaps always be thought of as the Bombay Burrito, and I’m keeping my eye open for the Tijuana Tandoori.

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