Y&H had been trading phone calls with the mysterious Atul, owner of the previously mentioned Masala Art in Tenleytown, before we finally connected this afternoon. Atul, it turns out, is Atul Bhola, a man with just a little bit of experience in Indian cuisine. He was manager at Heritage India for ten years.

“It was always my dream to open a place of my own,” says Bhola, who has also served as a Hyatt banquette manager back in India.

Bhola says he would have already opened the 45-seat Masala Art if it hadn’t been for his first choice for chef. “I selected a person, and he never came through for me,” Bhola tells Y&H.

Read More “More on Masala Art in Tenleytown” »

Y&H took this picture as soon as I noticed the sign gracing the facade of the old Kuma space. Forgive the pic quality. I shot it through the car window while waiting at the light on Wisconsin Avenue at Albemarle, hoping I could snap it before the signal turned green and before the vehicle next to me blocked the shot.

Read More “Tenleytown to Get Masala Art” »

Restaurant Rater audreys does what every good critic should do: not just review the food on the plate but provide a little perspective on the restaurant in question. Check out audreys’ review of Rasika:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Rater audreys on Rasika” »

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

When I want to eat vegetarian, I don’t visit one of those mock-meat places that press mushrooms or tempeh into something that resembles a chicken breast. That strikes me as wishful eating, the saddest of all possible dining experiences. I prefer to sample cuisines that have a rich history of vegetarian cooking, like South India’s. Every day, Udupi Palace in Takoma Park offers a grazing tour of the South Indian cuisine inspired by the ancient Vedas texts. For a modest sum, you can have, if not a religious experience, then at least a damn fine meal pulled together from a buffet table filled with idly patties, vada doughnuts, sambar soup, pullavs, and an ever-changing lineup of curries, some so hot you’ll drink every drop of water from the carafe on your table.

 Udupi Palace, 1329 University Blvd. E., Takoma Park, (301) 434-1531

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The pizza naan at Spice Xing

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

The greater D.C. area has some terrific Indian restaurants, whether Heritage India in Glover Park or Bombay Indian in Silver Spring, but none of them are like Sudhir Seth’s Spice Xing in Rockville. You likely know Seth as the man behind the spice-perfect Passage to India in Bethesda, which may make you wonder why the hell he’s opening another subcontinental outpost under a different name. Well, because the new place ventures beyond the standard regional cuisines that many Indian restaurants peddle. As the name implies, Spice Xing specializes in the unique cross-cultural dishes that have been incubated in Seth’s home country. It could be a simple roast chicken, influenced by the bland British diet, which has been dressed up with East Indian spices, or it could be the shrimp Balchao, a Portuguese-inspired dish of crustaceans in spicy vinegar sauce that comes from Goa in western India. There are also nods to the Italians (pizza naan, don’t bother) and the Persians (a lamb and apricot stew, don’t miss it) as well as many of the traditional Indian dishes that we’ve all come to embrace. Which means that at Spice Xing, you can either experiment with Indian fusion—or just fall back on an Indian classic, which may actually be a cultural fusion that has merely passed the test of time.

Spice Xing, 100-B Gibbs St., Rockville, Md., (301) 610-0303

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

Enough about the crispy spinach chaat, OK? We’ve heard about it a thousand times already. Yes, it’s a great appetizer—crispy and sweet, with an undercurrent of heat—but chef Vikram Sunderam can impress you in so many other ways. My current obsession is Sunderam’s tandoori lamb chops—these Frenched and marinated chops that are dropped in the clay oven until charred on the outside and juicy pink on the inside. Good God, I could eat those chops like Popsicles on a summer day.

Rasika, 633 D St. NW, (202) 637-1222

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

I have such a love-hate relationship with this Glover Park institution. A while back, my wife had a serious, sudden afternoon jones for Heritage India. It was the kind of urge that reminded of the Randy Newman line: “You better get a burger or something in her right away. If you don’t, you’re gonna pay.” Well, when we arrived at the place a few minutes after 2 p.m., a good 25 minutes before Heritage’s lunch cutoff, they told us they were closed. The wife was crushed, and I had to adopt a tough-guy persona to get the staff to relent. On other visits, I’ve had to adopt thick skin, since the wait staff tends to treat you as if they have a hundred better things to do. It’s a good thing, then, that Heritage’s food forgives all sins. Its rich, fragrant curries, prepared with painstaking care to the art of Indian cooking, make all others seem anemic by comparison.

Heritage India, 2400 Wisconsin Ave. NW, (202) 333-3120

Photo courtesy of Heritage India

What started as a simple request on the DonRockwell.com board has blossomed into a full-fledged Indian crab dinner/book signing/general-foodie-wonkiness dinner at Spice Xing in Rockville on Sunday, July 12.

Sudhir Seth, chef and owner of both Passage to India and Spice Xing, will team up with cookbook author Monica Bhide to offer a three-course dinner completely focused on blue crabs. The feast starts at 6 p.m. with crab tikkis, which are essentially Bhide’s take on Maryland crab cakes, and moves on to pollachi crab masala (crab sauteed in fennel, cinnamon, pepper, and poppy seeds) and crab gassi mangalorean (crab in a curry gravy).

Sandwiched around these courses will be an aperitif called “pomegranate delight” — Bhide’s rum cocktail with pomegranate juice, lime, and grenadine — and a dessert called shrikhand, which is a strained and flavored yogurt with fresh strawberries, kiwi, and mango. The opening course will be in audio form: Bhide will talk about her latest cookbook, Modern Spice, and sign copies.

The whole shebang will set you back $60, which includes a copy of the cookbook. So what’s the catch? You have to go through DonRockwell.com to get your name added to the list. Sounds worth it to Y&H.

To many, Rasika has become the go-to Indian eatery in the District, but starting this summer, Rasika will also be available to go. Well, at least the restaurant’s most popular sauces.

Rasika owner Ashok Bajaj told Y&H this afternoon that three of chef Vikram Sunderam’s sauces will be available, starting in July, at Whole Foods Markets throughout the mid-Atlantic. Sunderam’s makhani, kashmiri, and goan curry sauces will be sold in 16-oz. jars and likely retail for about $6.50 each. Sunderam, for the uninitiated, was nominated this year for a James Beard Award in the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category.

“I wanted to do something different,” Bajaj says, by way of explanation. “I thought, ‘Why not sell them to the mass public who doesn’t come to the restaurant?’”

A contract has not been officially signed with Whole Foods, Bajaj said, but it’s a “done deal.” A facility in Pennsylvania is already producing the sauces now, Bajaj added, and the first delivery is expected in about 10 days. A Whole Foods spokesperson confirmed that the sauces will be available in July.

Read More “Rasika Sauces Available at Whole Foods This Summer” »

Over the years, I’ve sampled garlic naan, naan stuffed with goat cheese, kashmiri naan with nuts and raisins, and, of course, regular ol’ naan blackened and blistered straight from the tandoor. But until I dined recently at Spice Xing, the new Rockville restaurant opened by Passage to India’s Sudhir Seth, I had never tried khurmi naan.

It’s naan covered with tomato sauce and sprinkled generously with shredded cheese. It is, in other words, pizza naan.

The naan fits into Seth’s precise vision of Spice Xing, which features Indian dishes influenced by those European cultures that have had a presence on the Subcontinent, whether British, Portuguese, Spanish, or French.  But since the Italians never laid a colonial finger on India, the natives had to improvise their own version of the classic Neapolitan flatbread, which wasn’t so easy in a country with few pizza or conventional gas/electric ovens.

Read More “Khurmi Naan: The Indian Take on Pizza” »