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Month: February 2011
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Phobidden Fruit
This review was originally published in Bangalore Mirror. Have made Vietnaam ke vaaste changes to this edition of the Phobidden Fruit review. 🙂
Phobidden Fruit is on 12th Main Indiranagar and is less than 50m from the Sony junction (with 100 ft Road), going towards Daddy’s Deli. Parking shouldn’t be too much of a problem, there is 12th Main itself and enough smaller side lanes.
Since the cuisine was specialist, I had the Pho sight to go prepared, and was accompanied by a few Nam ‘veterans’ – Madman, and Prateek and Nithya Dayal. 🙂
The place is a sort of glorified garage space. But though the ground floor is relatively uninspiring, negotiate the spiral staircase and you’re transported to a cheerful casual dining ambiance with wooden seating and pretty cushions. We got to hear some 80s pop and with the occasional creaking of the dumb waiter, this seemed just the right setting for a relaxed meal.
The menu offers a bunch of appetisers, and has quite a few options for vegetarians and non vegetarians. In fact, the latter would be spoilt for choice – chicken, beef, clams, pork, prawn, fish, squid, lamb…see? You can take a look at the menu below
We started quite well. The Banh Xeo, crispy rice crepes with a filling of button mushrooms, onion and sprouts accompanied by a spicy sauce ended up the favourite, as did the Fresh Spring Roll (Chicken), though Madhu did mention that it might have worked better with rice noodles inside instead of rice, and could have done with some more herb flavour. The Viet Spare Ribs were fairly good too, despite the ribs being stingy on meat.After the starters, it was time for the Pho play. The Pho (we tried Beef and Chicken) shared a common broth and the meat was added later, but it’s still a Saigon pick, as is the Viet Red Prawn Curry.The Saigon kick was delivered in the form of the Kho that I ordered, salmon cooked in a rich, sweet and spicy caramel sauce. There was notthing to counter the overly sugary sauce. The desserts were also bit of a disappointment. The Coconut Sorbet, while not lacking in flavour, missed out on the texture of a sorbet. The Lemongrass Ice Cream again got the flavour right, but was more like a custard. The Che too seemed to stray from its original version. We tried a Vietnamese Iced Coffee, but instead of the condensed milk and strong coffee that was expected, this turned out to be a much diluted version.The service is quite prompt and despite all the tables being full, managed to do a good job without any major trouble.
All things considered – a catchy name, a relaxed setting, and the possibilities of a unique cuisine, this place deserves a visit. So, if you’re feeling blue, and would like to ginger up your appetite with a new cuisine, but without an astronomic bill, you could try out this Vietnamese gastronomic experience.
Phobidden Fruit, #965, 12th Main, HAL II Stage, Indiranagar. Ph: 41255175
PS: If you’d also like an advanced user review, do read this. (HT: Madman) 🙂
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Plugging In
Since I have been on streams and brands for a while, I thought I’ll take a break and plug you in on a couple of discoveries and connections. For those reading this in Google Reader or actually anywhere else other than this site itself, kindly step outside. No, the hands can still be on the keyboard/mouse but please drop in at the site since it’s contextually relevant that you be here.
One of the fringe benefits of writing this column for Bangalore Mirror is that I sometimes discover interesting startups that are useful to me as well. Now I am associated with two of them – one on each blog. And since we’re on discovery, and I don’t want to bore you more with semantics, allow me to introduce you to Dhiti, a content discovery engine driven by semantics. I first read about them at Pluggdin and then got a mail from Aditya (at Dhiti) to try it out. I have, many a time, expressed my frustration about WP’s native search, the plugins I have tried to augment that, as well as the not-as-accurate-as-I’d-like YARPP plugin that I have been using so long. Dhiti arrived just in time and, from the short experience so far, has solved this to a very large extent. To see it in action, scroll away to the bottom of this post (later, after reading the post completely!!)
The Dhiti plugin, which you can download from here, has versions for WP.com, (thanks Ranjani) Blogger or self hosted WP blogs like mine. It provides multiple ways for you to get to more, and contextually relevant content in this blog – a ‘search’ function, a ‘Topics’ section displays the topics the post covers, a ‘Concepts’ section which shows the related topics, and ‘Nuggets’ which show excerpts from posts. Words in both Topics and Concepts are clickable and when you click them, the Nuggets show the excerpts of posts in which they have appeared and highlight them, so you can quickly understand the context and navigate to the relevant post accordingly. It functions just like a browser with ‘back’ and ‘home’ functions. You can even make it a pop-out within the page if that works better for you. Do play with it and let me know your feedback. I have asked for better customisation options and am also supposed to get some analytics from them.
So, Dhiti gives food for thought, and my new friends at the other blog give actual food. Ok, they help you find food, specifically restaurants. Zomato, formerly known as Foodiebay is now taking snippets from the restaurant reviews on my blog, and adding them to the menu and photos they already have. More than the hits that will hopefully deliver ;), I was really kicked about their Android app. If you have an Android, download the app right now from the market. It automatically detects your location, and then allows you to discover a random restaurant nearby, recommends a restaurant near you or just plain search. Pretty much all the website functionality is built into the app. There’s even a button to call! The showoff feature is the ‘Shake’ and though it doesn’t do the ‘slot machine’ like Urbanspoon, it still rocks! 🙂
until next time, scroll below for discoveries 🙂
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Whose line is it anyway?
When I wrote about the ‘notional boundaries’ in the context of the Arundhati Roy speech, I was reluctant to push the issue further. But while reading ‘The Argumentative Indian’, I came across a section called ‘Critique of Patriotism’ under ‘Tagore and his India’, in which the author – Amartya Sen – mentions that Tagore had once written ‘Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity.‘
Tagore also apparently used characters in his novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) to hint at how nationalistic sentiments could easily turn sectarian. Amartya Sen ends the section with the words of Bertolt Brecht “…of the corruptibility of nationalism. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others….” you can read the section in entirety here)
And that started a thought on nation states. If we consider attributing more than a functional (say economic, political, administrative etc) importance to it (despite its ‘freedom’ being earned after much effort and sacrifice), how can we logically dispute a demand for separate states intended on the basis of say religion or language, especially since these might be older than the boundaries of the nation state and could prove a better cohesive force than the idea of a country?
This is not to say that I’m in favour of this kind of a line or line of thought, but I would like your help in finding a logical conclusion.
until next time, line of reasoning 🙂
