some random lunches

I really felt like doing another food/travel post, but the furthest from home I've been these past few weeks has been down to Minetta Lane in the Village for the Minetta Tavern's French Dip sandwich. They serve it with French fries. The roast beef is rare and tender, there's a touch of grated horseradish on it, the rolls are warm and crisp outside without tasting like toast - I love toast but not on a roast beef sandwich - and they'll bring you extra "jus" if you run out. It can be a very sloppy sandwich to eat if it's in the jus too long, but that's how it's best. This goes with one or two lovely Bloody Marys. I don't think it needs dessert, but to help me navigate getting back home I sometimes finish with a cup of hot tea.

Minetta is one of those old Native American words that turns up in this area. It was originally the name of a brook that's now under Minetta Lane. The same word, also referring to a little lost brook, turns up on Long Island, in street names, like Manetto Hill Road. Not clear if the difference is due to a difference in dialect among the tribes, or a difference in transcription among the newcomers. In either case, I'm sure that the English settlers used their semi-literate grasp of the Roman alphabet to spell something that they were mispronouncing anyway, as they do, and that the way the word as pronounced by its originators probably sounded like Schultz. Look what happened to Irish Gaelic when it was written down by careless invaders: a whole language is famed for its evocative poetry and gallant calls to battle - some Brit writes it down, randomly assigning characters to phonemes, and on the page  it looks like gargling.

the butter chicken

So anyway, I've been fighting a cold, and didn't feel like soup. Himself's idea of curing a cold is with food, of course, and so this week, in addition to today's roast beef sandwich, we met for an early dim sum lunch at Shun Lee Cafe (dipping the little things in red hot chili sauce), and the other day we had lunch at Moti Mahal Delux. MMD is new to the area, it's a small place that holds an amazing number of people as long as they sit still and eat. Which they do. There's a lengthy dinner menu, and the lunch is a set lunch. Really a set lunch. You set, they bring. The choices are Vegetarian or Not. Lots of different flavors, lots of lovely veggies even on the Not lunch, and pleasant people. The restaurant is part of a large chain centered in New Delhi (India, not Ohio). In India it's famous for doing Butter Chicken right. In New York, they import the butter for this recipe from India themselves, and I will tell you, this Butter Chicken is worth eating.

At lunch it's the kind of service where when a customer says "I really don't like lentils," the server smiles and replies "I will leave it here and maybe you will taste anyway. And if you don't, you get plenty of other things."

all you can eat

At dinner there's a written menu and you discuss your choices with the manager, who wants you to be well fed and happy. There are branches of Moti Mahal Delux all over the place, I am told, I wonder if they're as nice and careful with their food as our local place is. I'm very happy they're in the neighborhood, even if the food was not blisteringly, cold-vanquishingly seasoned.