Lobster time at Delmonicos, Los Angeles

The spread 

Claw time 

Nice Tails 

Turning a rich lobster bisque, decadent by adding a few pounds of lobster tails into it. 

Filandering Forker sets to make a video, finds Fish instead

Delhi's traffic is horrendous, absolutely mad, frenetic, the air choked with pollution and dust. A gigantic parking lot moving with the frustrating grace of a glacier. Who in their right mind would voluntarily decide to spend the better part of a day and night driving from one end to another, and repeat it again and again ?

  

Bollywood beats, thumping base, familiar tunes from those innocent years, new dance numbers fresh in the cortex from a recent wedding, all pretensions of high culture, requiems and amise buches now slowly washed over with a warm nape of Old Monk rum.... Adrenaline pumping, childhood memories edging us on, we set on a task, perhaps too tall an order but the mood was just right and a food adventure was in the making.

There is a reason I went with name Filandering Forker, among the other short listed choices, It's all about mucking about the city finding that perfect bite, that hidden gem in some forgotten alley.
A few clinks of glasses, a few Dunhills smoked, we set a future mission of finding what we thought would be the 10 best Seekh Kebab spots in Delhi. Just Seekh kebabs, hunted down live on camera, drinks in hand in all in one day. I wanted it raw, gonzo style, unfettered, real, no glossing over, no soft peddled bullshit. This was going to be the first video for a series that I want done around the cities and countries I travel and live. What better place to start where I spent my childhood, than Delhi. 

That was the plan, and we were ready to roll on a future date with all the logistics almost in place...almost... In the end I couldn't get the necessary time and technical resources together to get this pilot going. The dream lives on, and will probably happen first in China somewhere or Hong Kong, because stuff just happens faster here.

That settled, the boys were not going to give up, so we decided ad hoc to check out this fish shop that chief enthusiast and all around awesome dude Pawan had been raving about. From there on it turned into a memorable evening chasing down some favorite haunts supported by a cast that included Pawan's cuz, a fellow foodie and Delhi expert and my old friend, Nishit, Asterix to my Obelix.

I did realize over the course of the evening that to cover 10 places spread around Delhi we would atleast require two full days of shooting, This realization came about when hours in I had managed to cover just two spots for an actual review. The copious amounts of whiskey was not helping either. That said it is far harder to write a dining report than have shenanigans and drunken rumblings caught on camera.

Perhaps this introduction is longer than the actual review, but I had to share how we got here.

Paramjit Fish Wala 011 33106586

Moti Nagar › WZ 1, Opposite Metro Station, Basai Darapur Road, Moti Nagar, New Delhi

Front view of the famous Paramjit Fish Wala

Paramjit Fish Shop, has all the trappings of a Delhi Institution. Started post partition by a family that made their way from Peshawar via Amritsar. The food reflects the journey they took with local influences evident to the knowledgable. The history of these historical subcontinental cities is reflected in the food and its owners making for a winning combination.

The ultimate Paramjit fan, the awesome Pawan
who arranged the logistics and is a man in the
the know for some of Delhi's best eats. 

Talking about surroundings and influences, the Paramjit family has created an entire ecosystem that supports the take out only shop with a liquor shop, soda shop and amenities shop all serving the multitude of patrons sitting quietly in their cars waiting for some of the freshest and choicest fish on offer in the city.

All the cars on the road here are waiting
to get served before the stock runs out,
which is almost a daily thing. They shut
shop when they run out of fish.

There are no tables, there are car hoods served by waiters who's phone numbers the patrons know by heart and call to reserve a plate before they run out, which is almost daily. There is a parking usherer who takes his vocation very seriously guiding your car to one of the few spots, stretching a cool 100 meters along an extremely busy road. Like a crawling centipede this busy road is full of cars trying to get to Paramjit or wishing they were in for a fix of their favorite fish kebabs. 

Paramjit excels at fish kebabs, I think it's one of the finest in the city and can hold its own against the big boys. The fish procured daily from the same source as the Oberois, is cooked to a moist finish in the tandoor, glazed ever so often with what I was told was pure ghee from the country side. 

Fish Kebab cooked to perfection by masters of their trade

Served with a ubiquitous green chutney and some onions it worth a trip to this far end of delhi. The spice is just right, light to let the fresh fish and the mastery of the cooks shine through and enough to keep you salivating for more.

Fish Kebab Served with Green Chutney
& Onions

The journey is purely for the fish kebab, there is a small menu peppered with the usual tandoori fare, but it's purely for the kebabs that I recommend this treasured joint. A online name search highlights a sizeable following for their Amritsari Fish Pakodas. In fact to many in this part of Delhi they are known as, THE Pakoda wallas, which I mustvsay are quite good, but the kebabs are far superior in the opinion of this  reviewer and his friends. 

It is critical to note that these kebabs and pakodas do not travel well and the optimal cooking to your tongue time is really short. 

The menu is fairly small, but the fish is king
and I would suggest sticking to the
Fish Kebabs 

Mutton Seekh and Tandoori Chicken in the Tandoor

This is how most people get down to the business of eating
at paramjit, served right on the car.

Filandering & Forking around Model Town for some Fish Kebabs

Map 

No Meat For Old Men.

There are few things worse than being stuck in traffic for hours on end, in the most polluted city in the world, Delhi. Any major crossroad during peak rush hour is the best visual representation of a clusterfuck. It's worse when you are trying to keep an appointment or meeting anywhere. In the city. Which in itself is an extremely infuriating process because respect for others time just doesn't fucking exist here. I manage to maintain my schedule in 5 different, often conflicting timezones, yet am amazed how singularly hard it is to deal with time here, work or otherwise.

There is how ever one grudge worse than traffic, that really gets my goat and it's about people's issues around eating said, goat, chicken, cow, fish, even plan ole eggs. Look, I get it, there are many vegetarians in India. I understand the socio-religious, economic and historical reasons of why they are vegetarians, I also understand that many people are just not into food and it's just fuel. I can even overlook the absurdly restrictive Jain, Satvic food where people don't eat anything worth eating.  I can get my head around how Hindu Pundit Kashmiris eat meat but not onions and garlic, where as Kashmiri Muslims do use it. I am quite sure you get a Jehadi asshole to eat a slice or four of bacon and he will renounce his evil ways, but I get the mumbo jumbo. There are many reasons for all of this, however asinine and illogical, but I really do get it. Sure, sometimes I make fun of it, because it is kind of silly.-

What I don't get and can't stand is the self righteous moral indignation of so many vegetarians in India, and total fucking myth-ball of bullshit they create around their lifestyle choice. No where else in the world is there such a generalized castigation of a food preference as there is in so many parts of India. Where else does a 'family friendly' restaraunt mean pure vegetarian, as if we meat eaters are a marauding, goat fucking army of impotent bachelors. Visit the small cities in central and western India, where non vegetarian restaraunts are relegated to dingy corners of the city, serving shameful meat eaters indulging in sin, hidden in cars and small groups away from being seen by upstanding veggie-mights . Then there are those that only eat meat outside their house or on holidays because the sight of cooked flesh might incite riot at home, by disturbing the domestic balance between feuding wives and their meddling mother in laws. Our insidious patriarchal system is also well represented in this issue, where men hide and mischievously consume kebabs while the women, must remain pure to pulses. Glance through the matrimonial classifieds, and you will find plenty evidence of the staunch types searching for a fair and lovely vegetarian maiden for their newly minted MBA, because a carcass chewing dusky nymph in jeans might get the perpetually horny but under sexed male relatives a case of the twitchy cock.

Frequent any Indian food related blog or Facebook group page and you will see holy ideologues defending the virtues of the pious by throwing a frothing fit if anyone posts a picture of a holy cow dressed up with pepper or mushroom sauce. Same vitriol goes for anyone posting a picture of a juicy pork chop. Getting their underwear in knots over pictures of food they don't eat because they were told not to, by someone magical they never met.  Fucking Unicorns.

Detractors would defend and say, vegetarians do not have much options in restaraunts in the west. Well that's true, but it's not because we think vegetarians are weird as say, the vegans but because they are a statistical oddity. That brings me to the first of many talking points on the subject.

Lets get the facts straight, vegetarians are a minority and oddity the world over. Take Hindus out of the equation, and there would be more gay Mormon missionaries than vegetarians. I don't give a fuck that your bullshit hemp print magazine says otherwise, in the wider world, from Papua New Guinea, to the Caucuses, from the Middle Kingdom to the high Andes, meat is what's for dinner, lunch and many times breakfast too. "It's the meat lobby by that has changed our diet to consume meat" say some.... Right !! the American Association of Pork producers is working their sausage claws into the eating habits of the Arabian Peninsula, while the Chicken Illuminati is mind bending the rest of the world from Sichuan to Santiago into eating chicken wings. They seem to forget that these cuisines have a long history of serving up flesh in all forms.

History brings me to my next point: "we are not meant to eat meat, "our bodies are not meant to process meat" "our 6000 civilisation and our books say so" The fuck it does. Let's forget every historical context of meat in our diet, including ancient Hindu texts, especially pre-brahmanic bs. Let us discount every biological, anthropological and scientific proof including irrefutable evidence that mankind was and is a meat eater. Let's instead ask simple questions. We all know we were hunter gatheres, we have enough evidence as in prehistoric cave drawings showing man hunting. Then there is evidence of spear heads and cutting tools which sure as shit were not for hunting flying cucumbers or sprinting lettuces. According to scripture, old people should set them selves out to pasture and renounce all world things. This whacked Puranic ideology makes itself evident in eating patterns of those that consume meat in their youth only to shun it later as they get closer to the light, because...... no reason, just floppycock. No correlation to age and meat consumption exists in the scientific or the rest of the world, besides moderation. If there was any basis for it then 80+ % of the world would have caught on by now.

How is that only in parts of India did this realization that mankind must not eat meat. They must live the longest healthiest lives, Olympians the lot of them. I wonder why Ponderosa wasted his time searching for the fountain youth, when he should have been seeking rivers of daal instead. Because it doesn't make any fucking sense. There is a very easy way to check what works and what doesnt, it's called mortality rates. Next is the olympics, how many gold medals do we win in endurance and strength meets, and now delete the meat eaters from the few that do win something and check what you are left with. Basically you die younger and are a bit of a pussy, well done.

I am not in any way discounting the breathtaking range of vegetarian food in India, it is monumental in its variety and flavors. There are epic vegetarian  meals to be had across the country and they are worth traveling for. My rant is not against vegetarian food, vegetarians themselves, or their life choices, but solely against the brow beating so many veggie-mights do around the rest of us. Just a reminder, the most famous asshole the world has ever known, Adolf  Hitler, was a veggie-might.

*Just as I am about to post this blog, I wake up to the news that the state of Maharashtra has banned beef and made possession or sale a 5 year jail sentence with a 10,000 Rupee  (160USD) fine offense. These self righteous bastards want to dictate to others who don't share there beliefs or faith. Want to disenfranchise a people, ban what they eat, slippery slope I say.

The sauce of life and legend.

There is a certain sadness to strip shop malls that I can't quite explain. They are convenient but seem depresingly out of place, like those lonely BestBuy vending machines in airport terminals. Pick one anywhere in the country and you will find the ubiquitous Vietnamese owned nail salon with the population of a small village wearing masks and filing away, next to that, a Chinese owned dry cleaner with a dour attendant unhappily sorting through your stained clothes and smells. Some of those smells are coming from the newest Hot Yoga studio that just opened up, with stringy, toned gurus trying to get fat suburban folk to stick their heads up there own arses and while trying not to suffocate in escaping gale force 4 bean burrito induced winds. They probably ate that fart bomb at a Mexico Lindo next door, that serves up bottomless pre-mix margheritas and stale nachos with canned salsa.

But, that is not always the case. In one such strip shop mall on a quite stretch of the PCH in Long Beach, there is a gem of a Jualisco style Mexican, serving up a secret so fucking good, they have to keep it off the menu because it can cause a small riot. It is in such high demand, it usually runs out by late afternoon, and they just don't have the space to make more.

The secret, a Pork Shank with Tomatilo sauce on a bed of spicy rice is a thing of legends. Cooked slowly for 8 hours the massive and I mean gargantuan, like Kim Kardashians ass, the shank is super juicy (you are free to draw your own parallels here). Served for one, it can easily feed a small Chinese army unit, or half a Texan (once again, you are free to draw your own parallels).

It is however the sauce that elevates this dish to stratospheric levels of goodness. The roasted Tomatilo sauce with bits of crispy pork is so fucking good I would actually sit down and have a philosophical debate with Paris Hilton as long as she fed me spoonfuls of this culinary marvel. I can't emphasize how good this is, seriously !! I would vote republican and dance with Ann Coulter if they promised me a daily supply, courtesy the Koch brothers. Since it is a closely guarded secret, I couldn't get the recipe, even after offering them my next born. Maybe somethings are best kept secret.

Southern California has the best Mexican in the country, and this dish easily stacks up against the best SoCal has to offer.

An awesome cheat sheet on everything worth grilling

Your Opinion: Who Next ?

I want your suggestions folks. Who do you think should be reviewed or a dining report put out, on the Filandering Forker? 

Categories: 

• Street Food Eats: Roadside vendor or a hole in the wall, both qualify as street food for the sake of this blog. 
• Local Legends: Self explanatory
• High Street: Established tables, Hot Tables, Culinary temples. 

I would love you support, so please leave your suggestions on the blog comments below, or on The Filandering Forkers Facebook page. All of this will end up on the The Fat bastard website, when it launches in a few weeks. 

I am always happy to share a meal with friends and we can review some of these places together if time, schedules and will permits. 

Roasted Duck Soup with Glass noodles: Thai Boat Noodle Style

I was not a big soup guy, especially the healthy, brothy with floating veggies and lentils kind. My idea of a proper soup was a thick, hearty New England Clam Chow-Dah or Lobster Bisque in Boston, or a spicy Gumbo with Andouille south of the Atchafalaya, maybe a Cioppino in the San Francisco mist. The lightest soup I liked was perhaps a Saffron seeped Bouillabaisse after a few glasses of wine at the Vieux-Port Marseille. 

You get my point, hearty, calorific, stick to the ribs, booze soaking, hangover curing thickness. I just got excited writing this :) 

That is, until I had a steamy, aromatic, punchy, cloudy broth made with pork and beef, served over noodles and accompanied by slices of pork, beef, offal, and crunchy deep fried lard, Yummm !!! You can also ask for a swirl of pork blood if you want that extra kick. Its all the right things in just the right package to shake you out of those Chang Beer and SangSom thai whiskey sweats. 

Now back at home, and away from the naughty, sweaty, streets of Bangkok, we were trying to re-create the flavour profile without the grind of the original recipe, when Nino came up with the brilliant idea of using roasted duck. 

Now Roasted duck soup exists all over Asia, but we were looking for that Boat Noodle flavour, and sort of achieved it. It's a bit of cheating but who the fuck is judging? Just shut up, slurp and swoon in delight and then have this WTF !! moment while watching Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport. Seriously, WTF was he so surprised about? 

Those not living in East or SE Asia will find it hard to find roasted duck, unless there is a Chinese or Asian supermarket around you. You can use the roasted duck as you will, just save some of the meat, the legs, all the skin and the carcass for the the soup. 

Use glass noodles( aka. cellophane), soak them in hot water or stock till they get soft and pliable (3-5 minutes) and then drain and put them in single serving bowls just before you add the soup. You should be able to find them in just about every Chinese or Asian grocery store or the Oriental section in a decent supermarket. If you shop at Wal-Mart, then you are probably not, I am not judging, but.......

The Recipe: By Nino, minor embellishments by Sid  

Roasted Duck Soup with Glass noodles: Thai Boat Noodle Style 

• Roasted Duck (Chinese) Whole : Break down the carcass into small 2 inch pieces, cut the skin into 2 inch strips. Cut the breast meat into 1/4 thick slices and keep aside. The Legs should be left whole.
• Cooking Oil: 1 Tablespoon
• Onion: 1 onion rough chopped
• Ginger: scraped add sliced into 1/4 inch rounds
• Celery: 2 large stems rough chopped
• Carrots: 2 carrots rough chopped
• Baby Bok Choy: cut lengthways into quarters 
• Glass Noodles: 1 pack typically should have 5 servings. 2 packs
• Soy sauce (regular or table): 1 tablespoon
• Dark Soy Sauce: 1 tablespoon
• Dark Vinegar: 1 tablespoon (available in any Chinese market)
• Black pepper: 1 teaspoon, adjust as desired
• Salt: to taste after it has cooked down
• Stock: 2 litres of any meat stock, duck prefered, but no fish.
• Bouillon: add a cube or 1 teaspoon of maggi if using water instead of stock

Tableside dressings and garnish. 

• Thai Basil: large handfull of leaves
• Red Chili: chopped and added table side as desired
• Fish Sauce (Nam Pla): 1 teaspoon added tableside as desired
• Sprouts: small handful to be added tableside if desired 

Servings: 6-10 depending how big your eaters are, this is a light broth, so people can eat in large amounts.  

Heat the oil in a stock pot and cook the chopped onion on medium heat for 3 minutes. Add the chopped celery, carrots and sliced ginger and cook for another 3-5 minutes until the vegetables get a bit softer. Add the chopped duck carcass, the whole legs and the skin, with any fat stuck to it for added flavour. Cook for another 3-5 minutes and then add the meat stock or water(with bouillon) up to the top of everything in the pot and then add another 2 inches on top. Add the dark and regular soy and then increase the heat, letting it boil for 2 minutes and then reduce to a simmer. 

Let the soup simmer down to the level of the vegetables which should take about 30 minutes and then add the vinegar and another 1 inch of stock or water. Once again let the soup simmer down for 15 minutes and then add the pepper and taste to adjust the seasoning. If you prefer a stronger soup, simmer down further, if you like it lighter, stop now. 

Strain the liquid through into another pot, pick out the legs and some of the skin and discard the rest. Shred the meat from the legs and discard the bones. 

Reheat the strained soup and add the bok choy to cook for 2 minutes. Adjust any seasonings before serving. 

For serving, put the soaked and drained cellophane noodles in a single serving bowl, ladle the soup over the top, add the sliced duck breast, bits of skin and shredded leg meat. Add a few chopped chili bits, a splash of Fish Sauce, some sprouts and as much thai basil as you desire. 

Once you have taken down a few bowls, walk over to the mirror and gloat. 

Please let me know how it went for you, in the comment section.