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Everest on Grand
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| Where to Go for Your Hotmomo | Going to Katmandu | |
| With its propensity to
seek out restaurants featuring food from other parts of the world, The
Lunch represents an "escape from the Midwest" of sorts for its
protagonists, and perhaps for its audience too. But, over the last
month, we—and especially B—have been effecting a more literal
escape. This reviewer spent a week in Europe, Dublin and Amsterdam, his
laptop in tow but ostensibly on vacation. This was much less adventurous
than B’s extended trip to South Africa, about which no doubt you can
read a little in the adjoining column, but I suspect I enjoyed better
food (recommendations: Chapter One in Dublin, next to the Dublin
Writers Museum, and the Indonesian Sama Sebo in Amsterdam).
So now we’re back, batteries recharged if wallets lightened, and The Lunch starts its second year with a visit to the sole Nepalese restaurant in the local area, Everest on Grand in St. Paul (Grand Ave.). This wasn’t our first choice, nor our second, but both Midori’s Floating World Café and Lalibela are closed on Mondays (as we found out the hard way), and we ended up a little further east than planned. I’d never been to Everest before and, being generally familiar with Northern Indian and Pakistani food, was a little curious to find out what was different about Nepalese cuisine. The answer is not a whole lot. However, Everest also boasts Tibetan dishes and the similarity here is to Chinese, not South Asian—noodles dishes and dumplings, the latter of which can be had with ground yak filling if so desired. It’s the word for the dumplings from which the proprietors have made up the unfortunate URL for their restaurant, www.hotmomo.com. For lunch, a buffet is available and that’s what we went with. The offerings here were curries for the most part. The two meat dishes were a strongly flavored, saucy chicken curry and a dry pork curry that was the only notably spicy-hot entrée. Vegetable dishes included fried okra and eggplant, both with potatoes. The ubiquitous South Asian lentil dish, daal, could be found here too, although in an unappealing watery version. White (basmati), fried rice, and pan-fried roti (flat bread) were also provided. Accompaniments and appetizers included salad fixings, raita—yoghurt with cucumber and tomato—of a good consistency but bland, nicely piquant potato pakoras (savory fritters), and potato achar—a spicy pickle. The buffet had one dessert, the Indian rice pudding, kheer. We ended our meal with chiya (read chai), Himalayan black tea brewed in milk and water with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon. The description makes it sound like a robust, strong tea, but it turned out to be disappointingly weak and milky. You could find all of the dishes in our buffet, in similar preparations, in Punjabi-style restaurants, although the spice levels and the grease factor would be higher. I found myself making liberal use of the achar. But if the food is reminiscent of south of the (Nepalese) border, the décor isn’t. The color scheme is a very non-Indian dark blue and white, and paper lanterns and lampshades and a few Buddhas and dragons provide the Chinese/Tibetan connection. The tables are glass covered and display photographs from Nepal. It’s a clean, attractive space; pleasant surroundings for lunch. The service is friendly if not super-efficient. You can also order from the full menu for lunch. In addition to the aforementioned dumplings and noodle dishes (which can be had in several variations), this includes about a dozen-and-a-half curries, both vegetarian and meat. "Lighter side" meals are also featured—for example, potato curry with fried flat bread and fried rice dishes. Rounding out the menu are "typical Nepali combination" meals, curries with rice, daal, achar, and dessert. I left with ambivalent feelings about Everest, but with good vibes about having resumed The Lunch after the brief hiatus. A |
Writing a column, I am
told, is like riding a horse, once mastered it isn’t a skill that is
easily lost. If the preceding is true then why is this the most
difficult review to date for me? Well the unkind might say that it’s
not easy to loose a skill that one never had. Comments like that I
intend to ignore and blame my lassitude on having spent a month south of
the equator, in South Africa. This once Promised Land of the Boers, now
a thriving multi-cultural country, not unlike our own, that can boast of
the only living saint in the world: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. In the
columns to come I plan to write about the foods and flavors of Africa
but for now it’s time to mention the current restaurant, the site for
The Lunch this week, Everest on Grand.
After not having written these reviews for over a month we owed you a seriously interesting restaurant which Everest isn’t – but our first couple of choices (Midori’s Floating World Café and Lalibela) were not open for lunch. In continuation of our theme on St. Paul we opted for this unpretentious little Nepalese restaurant that also offers Tibetan cuisine. How does one tell North Indian and Nepalese cuisine apart? We didn’t know so we asked the (solitary) friendly waitress to explain. Her explanation was that spices had to be carried in from India (visions of mule packs being harassed by Maoist guerrillas) and hence had to be used sparingly. My translation from this is that Nepalese food is quite like Indian but with fewer spices and that proved to be true once we tried it.Everest, like other smaller ethnic eateries, has the all-you-care-to-eat lunch buffet. Regular readers will note that we aren’t huge fans of lunch buffets but in order to taste a variety of dishes in one sitting (for a food critic) you can’t beat them. And this buffet is well stacked with Pakora (vegetables in deep fried batter), chicken curry (moderately spicy), pork with vegetables (fairly spicy), okra (cooked to an almost gumbo like consistency), eggplant curry and the omnipresent dahl (in this case of a watery variety that’s probably eaten in South India but without the spice). All this is served with two types of rice (white/boiled) and fried rice and Indian style deep fried roti/puree. There is salad with raita and a spicy achar (pickles) which really helps to spice up the blander offerings. The Tibetan entrées are noodle based dishes with dumplings and were not included in the buffet – a shortcoming that should be rectified. I thought the food was moderately good and probably healthier than its Indian counterpart in as much as fat and grease content are concerned. The dessert was the predictable kheer (shockingly sweet cold rice pudding). There appeared to be only one waitress working but since we had the self-serve buffet this wasn’t a problem but I know from previous experience that service is very slow in the evenings. The blue and white walls certainly don’t evoke anything Nepalese but the owners have tried to soften the harshness with pictures featuring Nepalese landscapes. On each table there are Nepalese snapshots under a glass top – an interesting touch. The price for our lunch came to about $25.00 this included a couple of Nepalese Chai (milk tea). I wonder how poor A managed to survive without his espresso but I am sure he’ll tell you. The South African trip allowed for a lot of introspection and I have returned relaxed and ready for our second year of doing these reviews. I should mention a few notable restaurants that I tried while on my trip: Simpson’s on Strand (London – traditional English restaurant known for its Sunday lunch), Baia Seafood Restaurant (Cape Town – Victoria & Albert Waterfront. A bit of a tourist trap but great seafood) and Turtle Creek (Peter Martizburg). South Africa produces wine of good quality and we only see a limited selection in this country. A wine tasting trip to a South African vineyard can often be coupled with a nice country lunch that most vineyards offer. B |
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