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| - Yesterday we were craving some cheap Indian street food and decided to try out this restaurant to check out what they had to offer. We ordered Pani Puri, Vada Sambar, and Masala Dosa. Things went downhill pretty soon. Now being born and raised in India, I am always (consciously or not) searching for a taste of "authenticity" when it comes to Indian dishes. Especially when an Indian restaurant lists regional street food (like Papri Chaat, Paani Puri, Vadas) in their menus, it generates high level of expectations along with great anticipation especially for immigrants to relive memories of their childhood, holidays and decadent street food in their original homeland. Some tastes are not to be messed with, even to try and justify the changes as innovation or "to make it more suitable for North American taste-buds".
I shall start with the Vada Sambar first. It was A TRAVESTY to say the least. I have been having Vada Sambar for over 28 years and have tasted it in different parts of India and outside of India too. This was the first time I saw anything like this. The Vadas came soaked in the Sambar, making them soggy and listless. One essential rule of thumb of Indian cuisine is that the bread cannot be soggy and if it loses its crunchiness, its unacceptable for the plate. Hold on,this is not over. As I took a small sample of the Sambar, I was confused. For the uninitiated, sambar is a lentil dish which is made with lots of vegetables (like eggplants and okra) and an essential ingredient in it is tamarind. Sambar is not authentic Sambar if not tempered with tamarind and a specific blend of spices (sambar powder). Here, the sambar they gave us, forget the T of tamarind, did not even have a single V of any vegetables. It was an unrecognizable flavor of a daal mocking to be sambar! The disappointment did not end here.
The masala dosa came next. Though it was as spicy as it claimed to be, the sauces/daals it came with again proved to be a blunder. Dosas, nowhere in the dosa world is ever served with pudina (mint) chutney. It is always accompanied by two lentil dishes, yellow sambar and the white coconut sauce. Here maybe because there was a third compartment in the tray and they didnt want it to remain empty, filled it up with pudina (mint) chutney. Guys, pudina and dosas do not go together. And they are not MEANT to be together either. What is meant to be together is Tamarind and Sambar. Please get chefs who are aware of complementing flavours of Indian spices, sauces. It seems they are stuck in generic North Indian onion-ginger-garlic paste flavoured dishes and needs some training in managing other regional food varieties. By this time, my disappointment had reached such a high level that I just wanted to end the experience and leave. I am a puchhka (another regional version of paani-puri) lover at heart and always felt that I am cheating on puchhka if I happened to like a paani-puri. Thanks to this restaurant, my loyalty to pucchka remains steadfast.
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