INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF CURRY

I think my dad was traumatized by a curry he ate in Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was called when he was there.  In fact I suspect he was traumatized by a single mouthful.  He was in the navy and they’d gone there for R and R, and he and the other sailors expressed some interest in the local food – which is a good thing, right? - and so the locals offered them some curry.  And one mouthful was enough, more than enough.  The taste was so terrible, so shocking, to my dad that he never touched curry again for the rest of his life.  That’s him in the picture below, second from the left.

Of course in retrospect you have to wonder whether the locals hated the presence of the Royal Navy and deliberately presented them with something vile and inedible.  We’ll never know, although my dad never spoke ill of the Ceylonese people, only of curry, all curries.

Obviously therefore, as a family, we never ate curry as I was growing up, but like most Englishman of my generation, as soon as I was old enough to eat out under my own steam (i.e. as cheaply as possible) I went to what we always called Indian restaurants, though we now know that they were run by people from all over the subcontinent.  We’re talking 1970s, when the balti was still ahead of us.

Thinking about it now, the truly surprising thing is how consistent all English curry houses were back then.  Chicken biryanis in London or Sheffield or Manchester or Birmingham all tasted amazingly similar.  I don’t for a moment think they were authentic, but I suppose word must have gone out on some immigrant, culinary grapevine about how the English liked their curries, and the vast majority of restaurants cooked to exactly that standard, seldom lower, seldom much higher.

I do remember the first Indian meal I ever had in America – in a restaurant in Berkeley.  The place was certainly run by Indians but the food didn’t taste at all like Indian food I’d had in England.  It may have been more authentic, or it may just have been remodeled to local American tastes.

Here in Los Angeles today there’s by no means an absence of Indian restaurants but I don’t really seek them out, and when I do go to one, of course it doesn’t much resemble the curry houses of my youth, which is probably a good thing.

I probably go The Electric Lotus, in Los Feliz about once a year: “We at Electric Lotus are committed to preserving a culture, tradition and standard in culinary tastes that a Nawab would appreciate.” 

I think that’s the lamb jelfrazi above, though it’s a little while since I took the pic, and in fact all the dishes came looking pretty much the same – I’m still not convinced that raw red onion is the very greatest garnish, but the lamb was good.

And of course in this town there’s plenty of curry that isn’t Indian.  I’m still basking in my Japanophilia and for a while I’d been eyeing the Little Tokyo Curry House, in the Weller Court Shopping Center, downtown.  It’s part of a chain, very bright and rather austere but quite Tokyo-looking.  Mostly I wanted to go there for the pork katsu, but since it came with curry why not?

That’s my plate above at the front. I thought I was being authentic by having rice (it’s hiding under the pork) but the plate you see in the background is my companion’s which came with spaghetti and had melted cheese on top.  I was struck with a bit of food envy – the cheese really worked, even if it felt a little like we were eating the food on some international space station.  Here incidentally is a staggeringly complex graphic showing how curry got to Japan:

And just the other night I ate at Pimai – Sawaddee, Yindee Tornrup , (Hello and welcome !) on Franklin Avenue.   It’s a Thai restaurant as you see (I do like a bit of corrugated metal):

I had the duck curry, which looked better it tasted (eat with your eyes) – kind of heavy on the duck skin, kind of light on the duck.   

It wasn’t great but it wasn’t traumatizingly bad.  And the Pimai has an incredible advantage that no other restaurant in L.A. has. It’s just half a mile from where I live.  If only a few more restaurants could try to work on that.

HEAVEN AND EARTH AND PLASTER

Well, inevitably, things got better after Woking, and although I wasn’t in England for a culinary tour, I did put on quite a few miles, and found myself eating all over the place: enjoying a very English curry in Sheffield, a game pie from the Chatsworth House farm shop, a pork and stuffing sandwich in the George Hotel in Castleton, Derbyshire, then a meat pie in Hardwick Hall, much improved by the addition of Henderson’s relish.

 There was a roast pork Sunday lunch in the Leather Bottle in Pleshey in Essex – no stuffing but with a piece of crackling.  The crackling could have been cracklier but you at least they tried.  It also came with two kinds of spuds and 4 other vegetables, which might be trying too hard,

But of course when you really want to get fancy, it’s London that calls.  My fancy dining companion Joanna and I went to lunch at Hix Soho, named after Mark Hix who seems to be considered a kind of god in Britain.  He is also apparently “controversial.”  

 In 2009 celebrity chef Keith Floyd ate lunch at the Hix Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis, then a few hours later died of a heart attack.  Hix put an item on the menu named “Keith Floyd's Last Lunch.”  (Certain sources have it as Last Supper, but that surely can’t be right).  Some claimed to find this offensive, but I can’t for the life of me see why.  I assume Keith Floyd, or anyone with a sense of humour about eating, would have been royally amused.  For future reference, any restaurant that wants to put my last meal on their menu will have my blessing to do so, and I hope it isn’t just hospital gruel.

Anyway Keith Floyd's Last Lunch wasn’t on the menu at Hix Soho, but there was something called  Heaven and Earth, which turned out to be a globe of black pudding (wrapped in caul to keep its shape, I think) sitting on a bed of mashed potatoes and apple.  Pretty much impossible to resist: and tasting every bit as good as you’d want it to be.

And for main course we had cuttlefish in its own ink.  I was pretty sure I’d had cuttlefish before, but I really couldn’t remember when, and since this came with sea aster, which I had never even heard of, I followed my “eat what you’ve never had before” rule and ordered the beast.  Of course I felt a little bit Husymans-ish, ordering a mostly black meal, but I could live with that.  It looked like this: (actually much better, the light was poor, and the photographer didn’t want to look like a hayseed).

I’ve since discovered that sea aster is sweeping the nation as part of the ongoing foraging kick.  I remember when the same happened with samphire, and sea aster grows in similar places: salt marshes and estuaries.  I heard somebody on the radio describing it as a hip and happening ingredient though since Waitrose now sell it, it may have lost some of its hipness.  Uncooked it looks like this:

Once cooked it was texturally like a strip of cabbage or celery, but since it was drenched in squid ink it was hard to know what it really tasted like.  And actually that squid ink sauce was the killer element of the meal.  It was good with the cuttlefish, but it was absolutely GREAT with chips.

Any disappointments?  Only that some of the best-looking food wasn’t available for eating.   In a gazebo at Hardwick Hall, there was a fine array of vegetables grown in the garden, good looking spuds and leeks, and the longest parsnips I had ever seen, even if I’m not absolutely sure that a thin, two and a half foot parsnip is really what we’re looking for, but I'd have been keen to sample.  In any case they were only for display.

And in the Turret House of Manor Lodge in Sheffield there was a display of a medieval feast featuring a boar’s head and a mouthwatering venison pie, but they were made of plaster: nobody’s idea of a great last meal.