Day 342: Favorite places to eat
Nov. 1st, 2012 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Have I done this one before? I might have. That random generator is starting to cough up repeats, a LOT. Well, maybe I will come up with some different places. I will not confine myself to Oakland. In fact, I will focus on my youth.
Favorite restaurant of my childhood: My father firmly believed that one way to broaden his children's cultural appreciation of the world was to eat in different (cheap) ethnic restaurants many Friday nights. I mean, he enjoyed it too, obviously. And usually ordered whatever national or regional beer went with that cuisine. We ate at: Ethiopian, Polish, Salvadoran, Brazilian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Himalayan, Chinese (Szechuan usually, but not always), German, French, Korean, Greek, Generally Middle Eastern, Persian, Lebanese, Portuguese, Japanese, Pakistani, and Swedish restaurants. Chicago was an ideal place for that. But of all of those types of cuisines, and all of those various restaurants, my favorite by far was (this is not going to be a surprise, if you've read me for a while) an Indian restaurant on Devon Avenue called The Family Corner. This was an unusual name for an Indian restaurant on Devon, and it was a somewhat unusual Indian restaurant. It had the basic familiar Indian dishes -- of those, my favorite, and the dish that made me want to learn to cook Indian food, was Kheema Matar, which was basically ground lamb and peas in a subtle and complicated curry, over rice. MMMMmmmm. But the restaurant also had Indian-adapted pizzas, and honest to god, they were the best pizzas I've ever had. I don't actually like tomato sauce, so pizza is usually a lukewarm experience for me. Sometimes the cheese and pepperoni and mushrooms and/or spinach can MAKE UP for the tomato sauce. But this pizza... man, it was good. It was the other kind of Chicago style -- not deep dish or stuffed, but a sort of floppy-ish, grease-laden thin crust. And the pizza sauce tasted different, but not outrageously so. It wasn't sweet. And the pizza had well-cooked (not crunchy) cauliflower under the cheese. It was MONSTROUSLY good. The restaurant closed when I was a teenager, sadly, and I've regretted it ever since. I wish I knew their pizza recipes. I learned how to make kheema matar as good as (and very similar to) theirs -- from Madhur Jaffrey's recipe. But the pizza eludes me.
Favorite restaurant of my childhood: My father firmly believed that one way to broaden his children's cultural appreciation of the world was to eat in different (cheap) ethnic restaurants many Friday nights. I mean, he enjoyed it too, obviously. And usually ordered whatever national or regional beer went with that cuisine. We ate at: Ethiopian, Polish, Salvadoran, Brazilian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Himalayan, Chinese (Szechuan usually, but not always), German, French, Korean, Greek, Generally Middle Eastern, Persian, Lebanese, Portuguese, Japanese, Pakistani, and Swedish restaurants. Chicago was an ideal place for that. But of all of those types of cuisines, and all of those various restaurants, my favorite by far was (this is not going to be a surprise, if you've read me for a while) an Indian restaurant on Devon Avenue called The Family Corner. This was an unusual name for an Indian restaurant on Devon, and it was a somewhat unusual Indian restaurant. It had the basic familiar Indian dishes -- of those, my favorite, and the dish that made me want to learn to cook Indian food, was Kheema Matar, which was basically ground lamb and peas in a subtle and complicated curry, over rice. MMMMmmmm. But the restaurant also had Indian-adapted pizzas, and honest to god, they were the best pizzas I've ever had. I don't actually like tomato sauce, so pizza is usually a lukewarm experience for me. Sometimes the cheese and pepperoni and mushrooms and/or spinach can MAKE UP for the tomato sauce. But this pizza... man, it was good. It was the other kind of Chicago style -- not deep dish or stuffed, but a sort of floppy-ish, grease-laden thin crust. And the pizza sauce tasted different, but not outrageously so. It wasn't sweet. And the pizza had well-cooked (not crunchy) cauliflower under the cheese. It was MONSTROUSLY good. The restaurant closed when I was a teenager, sadly, and I've regretted it ever since. I wish I knew their pizza recipes. I learned how to make kheema matar as good as (and very similar to) theirs -- from Madhur Jaffrey's recipe. But the pizza eludes me.