Homesick At Rasika? Get Over It

Minutes after raving about his first taste of palak chaat, Rasika's famous crispy spinach dish, my dad suddenly stops chewing and stares down sadly at the table.

"I think I miss authentic Indian food," he says.  But then he takes another bite and perks up.  "Nope, nevermind."

Rasika's post-modern, imaginative style has been called the "gateway drug" for people who don't like Indian food.  For those like my dad who do like Indian - who don't just tolerate but get off on Bitter Chutney Face and firebomb chilies - the best analogy for Rasika might be homesickness.

My Indian friend said it well: unlike other restaurants, Rasika serves food her mom would never be able to make.  If you were weaned on traditional Indian cooking, diving into Chef Vikram Sunderam's creations is like moving someplace where everyone's having a great time but you don't speak the language.

Like with homesickness, the best way to adapt to new culinary stressors is practice.  And Rasika is so good, before you know it you'll be feeling like a kid at summercamp who just made his first friend.

That first friend will most-likely be the palak chaat.  It's the appetizer the waitstaff always recommends, and, says General Manager Atul Narain, it's a Chef Sunderam original that's unique to Rasika.  (Learn how to cook palak chaat, here!)

Palak Chaat

It's amazing there haven't been any copy-chaats.  Sunderam applies a flour batter to the spinach, flash fries it and then tosses with traditional chaat ingredients like cumin, black salt, chili powder, sweetened yoghurt, date and tamarind chutney.  The spinach gets crispy, and in a way it's similar to khakra, the salty, crunchy flatbread from western India.  But Rasika's dish is also balanced by sweet and spicy flavors; the yoghurt itself could pass as a decent milkshake.

One of the benefits of getting an order of palak chaat to go for your  girlfriend - getting to see all the individual parts: (clockwise from top left) onions; sauce with chili powder, date and tamarind chutney; crispy spinach; and sweetened yoghurt 

Rasika's other signature dishes, according to Manager Atul, are the black cod, tawa baingan, and apple jallebi.

Cod is an easy, mildly enjoyable fixture in my weekly cooking routine; I grill it on my stovetop and it tastes ... well, good enough.  At traditional Indian restaurants, they give fillets the high, dry heat of a tandoori oven, and the result is smoky and a little tough. 

Buttery Black Cod

But when I got my black cod at Rasika, I felt like a kid at my own surprise party.  This is cod? 

Rasika rejects the tandoor for regular oven baking, which gradually melts the meat to a consistency even more buttery than sablefish.  In between the tender flakes of flesh live streamlets of fish juice.  With a fish this good, you don't want to bother with too many authentic Indian ingredients, and Sunderam keeps the marinade - fennel seeds, star anise, honey, fresh dill, and cheddar - thin and low profile.

Tawa Baingan

The tawa baingan is another dish that trades bold spicing for well cooked ingredients and innovation.  The eggplant and potato come together in a unique arrangement that reminded me of tiramisu, and the eggplant is so soft that it cuts like cake, too.

I haven't yet tried the apple jallebi, but if there's one dish I'm surprised doesn't get more acclaim, it's the banana chaat.

Here's how I know this chaat is good: Like many aspects of our relationship, Marcy and I have a competitive rivalry going with our food orders.  In the excel file where we record our restaurant scores, I usually only type the dishes I ordered, and she does likewise - adding one of her dishes to my spreadsheet would be a concession that she ordered better. 

But we both wrote down banana chaat. 
.
The dish is like the answer to a question you haven't thought of yet - banana gets paired with avocado, and somehow that combination works perfectly when seasoned lightly with pepper, cumin, date, and tamarind chutney.

It's enough to make you never want to go home again.

A couple more recommended dishes at Rasika:

Fish Chutneywala - tilapia, mint, cilantro, coconut

Lobster Goan Masala with onion, tomatoes, kashmiri chili, malt vinegar

 

First my dad tells me I should include more pictures of people on my blog.

Then he does this: