u235

I like to eat out. Often I'll go out for lunch with peers maybe 3 - 4 times a week, with family to dinner maybe once on the weekend. I enjoy Thai, Cambodian, Japanese, good Chinese (as opposed to cheap Chinese, I've never gotten over the unnatural color of those bbq ribs, the weirdness of egg-foo-young or the coagulative qualities of chop suey). I savor a good meal at Indian restaurants, BBQ houses, a rough-hewn pub meal. There's a certain grimy-chic to the diner (or even the chromed, neon of the posh ones with the glass dessert cases that look big enough to preserve Snow White AND all the seven dwarves laid out end to end). There's a savior faire to a nosh at the local bagelry, fresh bread at Panera, sauces and rolls at the chains of Bertuccis. I'm spoilt, and freely admit it, when it comes to the unparalleled options of gastronomical offerings in the North East, not just the variety and flavors of cuisine, but the quality of meat, fruit, vegetables, delectable fresh fish. However, nothing quite offends my palate than the rude interruption of what I consider to be an alien on my plate.

It's true that chefs are artistes, and should be understood in their efforts to incorporate the liveliness of local produce, but lets get it clear here - I honestly don't think that cherry tomatoes belong in chinese cooking. When I think of chinese vegetables I think, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, chinese broccoli. I think of the bizarre and esoteric things I've seen in the Chinatown markets being shoved onto those hanging scales fresh from mounds of chipped ice. I can forgive them celery, but I'm sorry a tomato in my stir fry is simply as unacceptable as the topic of Taiwanese independence in Bejing.

I've come to a sudden halt at Indian restaurants as well. Not with tomatoes mind you, but with other vegetables (...is, is that really a pimento in my curry?). Eggplant, okra, potatoes, chickpeas, yes, yes, yes. Acorn squash? No, no, no. I support your right to experiment, but please - don't disguise it in a "typical" dish that I came here expressly to enjoy. When I want my korma, I want it just as Gandhi would have had it, please, thank you.

It's alarming that even in the North East the tolerance for anything as long as it's either:
a) deep fried or
b) covered in cheese
is considered palatable as an appetizer. I have no issues with nibbling slices of dubiously mottled roots either as a pakora or tempura - but please must I be subjected to gargantuan hunks of corn saturated in grease and plomped unceremoniously on a plate? Corn in India? Maybe... Corn in Japan? Go on, yank it again.

The only place I've yet to come across an unwelcome cellulose intruder is in Spanish/Mexican cooking. I'd like to think (perhaps naively) that the ingredients are so basic, so relatively inexpensive, that there's little to gain in introducing more exotic produce. Rice, beans, meat, a touch of dairy, maybe an onion or some lettuce (and of course tomato) for garnish. In the shrine of authenticity, most South American restaurants, even the chains, stand alone in guaranteeing that what you order is more or less what you think you'll get.

Of course, this is now. I don't choose to speculate on the potential impact of current immigration and border policies on my lunch faire, but of course if our relationship with our southern nature were a meal then the analogy ends with fortune cookie instead of a flan.