Uru Swati Review

I ducked into Uru Swati recently for a quick snack.  Two things were a bit unsettling off the bat.  I observed an all-female kitchen staff (in India I found mostly men doing the cooking), and the really scary thing?  I saw a white guy in the kitchen too!!  What in tarnation?  I was pretty sketched out at that point, but I still ordered my Masala Dosa.  Nothing special.  The flavor was pretty bland and I'd be reluctant to order it again.  The menu was pretty standard, featuring dishes from all over the country.  Billing itself as "Healing Through Food", just another average place in the average Chicago Indian landscape...quickly tiring of the local Indian options, my jaunt into cooking up this stuff starts next week..I bet it's a lot harder than I think!

4/10

Udupi Palace Review

Udupi Palace Site

Udupi Palace, 2543 W Devon Chicago

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Please give me some Indian

That doesn't smell like poo

Now that I have un-whetted your appetite and alienated every female reader, let's talk about Udupi Palace.  Named for a town in Karnataka in Southern India along the Arabian Sea, it's also the namesake of a type of cuisine cooked in India's Vedic tradition.  Udupi cuisine typically brings together a wide range of fruits, vegetables, and grains and excludes onions, garlic, and all types of meat.  The venerable masala dosa is indigenous to the Udupi cuisine, and it is very representative of the Pure Veg South Indian food I have come to know and love.

I wanted to try the avial, a unique concoction of carrots, pumpkin, potatoes, and coconut that I hadn't eaten before, but my waiter talked me out of it.  "I do not like", he cryptically explained, making me think he wanted to steer me in a direction he believed more suitable for a western palate.  Instead he recommended a starter of the Udupi Special Assortment appetizer and a Masala Dosa.  I explained that I'd just eaten a dosa and wanted something else, and settled on the Dal Makhani, a dish that was not South Indian in origin, but from the arid Punjab region in the Northwest of the sub-continent, sharing its geography with Pakistan.  Punjab food is often heavy on the beans and features fewer vegetables than its South Indian counterpart.  

Udupi Special Assortment

The waiter-recommended Udupi Special Assortment appetizer was probably the most disgusting thing I have ever been offered in an Indian restaurant.  Thick layers of haphazard deep fry covered possibly frozen vegetables, and there was no flavor whatsoever.  Composed of a vada (fried lentil donut), an alu bonda (fried potato dumpling), a vegetable samosa, a vegetable cutlet, and an onion pakora (more deep-fry in chickpea batter), this basket direct from the bowels of hell nearly made me sick to look at.  There was no artistry or craft whatsoever in the food, and all of the fried turds appeared to have been sitting in a ziplocked bag in some freezer, waiting to be deployed in a murky vat of boiling oil.  My companion and I were unable to finish a single piece, and expectations vastly diminished, we awaited our bowl of beans.

Avial

In the meantime, the waiter returned with a tiny sample of the Avial, which he wasn't too keen on.  "Want to try?", he asked.  I sure did!  The dish had the most curious flavor and texture, a mix of coconut oil and fiery chiles, with a whiff of Indian eggplant.  There was also some stringy vegetable I couldn't identify, and it was both weird and memorable, but probably better as a side accompaniment in a thali than as a main dish (in fact I think I saw it included in several thali combos).

Dal Makhani

The Northern Indian Dal Makhani dish ended up being the star of the show.  Garnished with chopped coriander, the dish was moderately spicy and filling, with the classic Indian flavors of fennel, turmeric, chilli, and cumin, as well as ginger and garlic.  My companion and I found the dish rich and hearty with a tiny bit of cream, and I think it would be especially tasty on a cold winter's evening by the fire.  The texture was rich, and the array of sauces brought out with the dish added a tremendous complement to the flavor.  

Assorted sauces

 All in all, this was an ok place that was redeemed by a tasty bowl of beans from Punjab.  I would never order the appetizer again, and the Avial was curious, but not quite what I'd want for a main dish.  I will return, and hopefully get some dishes from the Udupi region next time to check out the specialty.

6/10

Udupi Palace

2543 w. Devon ave
Chicago, IL 60659

773-338-2152

www.udupipalace.com/  

Mysore Woodlands Review

Mysore Woodlands Restaurant, 2548 W Devon Chicago

I began my quest for Chicago's best Indian food at Mysore Woodlands in the standard Devon corridor in Rogers Park.  Known for its vegetarian South Indian fare, Mysore Woodlands had received high marks from eaters at Yelp and Citysearch.  As I neared Devon, my appetite for Indian food was nearly rabid, and I couldn't wait to dive into a dosa.

A little about what I am looking for: Indian food is all about taking a few mostly modest vegetables, spicing them, cooking them with love, and turning out incredibly delicious food.  Freshness is key.  Eating out at some of the finest Indian restaurants in India, I often found that the tastier places would run out of certain menu items.  This indicated three things to me: the food was made fresh, likely with crisp, new vegetables.  The meals were not mass-produced.  And most importantly, I needed to show up a little earlier to get the goods!

Dosas, a breakfast staple in South India, should be savory, with a tender pancake shell that's fluffy in the middle and crisp on the edges, not tough, and made with new batter.  A dosa is easily ruined with overcooking, and the potatoes should be similarly fresh and not stored in a steam table or refrigerated overnight.  The chutney should be made daily and the sambar should contain potatoes and exude a mixture of glorious spicy smells.  Triangle shapes aren't really the real deal - we are looking for cylinders here. 

Mysore Woodlands failed in a number of my lofty expectations.  The dosa shell was tough and not shaped into a cylinder; it was just folded in half.  Old dosa batter seems to be the likely culprit. It was far too chewy, and not savory as it ought to be.  Strangely, the chutney was served in a massive dish, and it seemed to be mass-produced.  Dole out the chutneys in tiny servings, guys!  You can't just slop a trough with chutney, you got to ration it out!  The sambar accompaniment also seemed tired and dated and overall the dish didn't seem to be cooked with much passion, essential to all cooking but especially South Indian fare.  The potato filling was the saving grace with the tumeric powder shining through.

My final item was a bowl of Mulligatawny soup.  This is more of an Anglo-Indian dish and I don't recall encountering during my travels in South India, but it sounded interesting and tasty so I decided to give it a try.  It tasted like lentils and possibly some carrots, but again it didn't appear to be made fresh.  It was completely homogeneous and the texture was boring, although the spice was slightly interesting and flavorful.  I probably wouldn't order it again, but it would be reasonable to warm up on a cold winter's night.

Overall I was not very impressed.  If this restaurant was located in India, it would be closed down within a week, and much more passion should be coming through with the flavors. My biggest concern was with the freshness of the food.  If the freshness improved, this restaurant has a chance of being quite tasty, but it's nowhere close to the proper South Indian food I enjoyed so much in Tamil Nadu and other locales.  I'll return and hopefully I can revise my opinion.

4/10

Mysore Woodlands Site

2548 W Devon Av
Chicago, IL 60659

Phone: (773) 338-8160

History Of The Hankering

Following over sixty bus rides, twenty-four flights, and countless taxi rides (many of them haggled for), I found myself right back where I started, in Chicago, Illinois. 

Wheeeeeew!

What in tarnation just happened?

Long story short, I got a chance to travel around the world and I gladly accepted.  Piling all of my clothes into my trusty red Kelty backpack, I plunged headfirst into Cochin, India, located in the far southern state of Kerala.  After a couple months in the subcontinent, I showered off the dirt in ultra-modern Hong Kong, sunned myself at the beaches of Boracay, Philippines and helped myself to world-class street food in Singapore.  I partied all night in Phuket, climbed the highest peak in Peninsular Malaysia, and watched the sun go down at the temple of Borobudur, Indonesia.  Weights were lifted in Bali, trails were trekked in Nepal, and beers were drunk at a footie stadium in Melbourne.  Capping off my six month la-di-da was a few weeks of hiking around New Zealand's fiord area in the south of the island.

But the smells I smelled in India never left me.  The unbelievable tastes of Pure Vegetarian South Indian still haunted me.  My addiction to those beautiful spices and lust for eating off a banana leaf has taken over my brain.

I am the curry fiend.