Levi on Hegel and Indian cuisine

As a good vegetarian since early childhood I can’t bring myself to link to any post that’s about eating lamb. But the following words of Levi are worth citing:

“The cuisine of India is a bit like Hegel where philosophy is concerned: incredibly sophisticated, nuanced, and unfolding simultaneously on a variety of different levels.”

Agreed. I’ve been to India three times, and though the sheer adrenaline rush of the place was always the real motivation, I could easily imagine planning a return trip for the sole purpose of eating well for several weeks.

As I may have stated on the first incarnation of the blog, one of the owners of Moti Mahal on Belmont Ave in Chicago told me that there were some spices he simply wasn’t able to get in Chicago by any means of import. You can tell that’s probably right when you’re actually in India. A new and subtler spectrum of spices suddenly appears.

I suppose most Americans find they can often get a decent hamburger at some dumpy corner cafe in almost any American city. That’s sort of what it’s like with Indian food in India. Sometimes I would ask the advice of local residents on which places were the best, while other times I would just roll the dice based on the look of a place. But only rarely was I disappointed.

The luckiest jackpot I ever hit was a place in Panajim (Goa), just a random place that wasn’t even in the guidebooks. It was a strange place with a grungy local feel on the lower floor, feeding into a posh hotel dining room on the second floor, followed by corridors to the washroom that were as labyrinthine as normally only a serial killer wishes to build.

And that was right after visiting Old Goa, which in its heyday was considered a rival for Lisbon. It’s all deserted now. In fact, the name I came up with for Old Goa was “The Haunted Banana Plantation”. But the bones of St. Francis Xavier are there, and I sat through a rather unusual Catholic service there before visiting the bones. (Unusual partly because of the strange setting, and partly because despite expecting some sort of exotic Luso-Indo-Catholic church music, I heard mainstream Midwestern Protestant Sunday school music instead.)

Nornmally I like visiting new countries on trips, but India probably counts as about 10 different countries in cultural terms, so I’ve never regretted the repeat visits, and there is still plenty more I haven’t yet touched.