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Alright I am a horrible racist bigoted person of color who can’t even say that I’m a person of color so you are right I am wrong bye
I’m with you. You spent time crafting a truly great post - filled with excellent, descriptive content about a restaurant that I and I’m sure most of us have not been to yet. Thank you! And you added in some colorful personal anecdotes and reflections - exactly what a forum like this should be about. I promise to go to this place myself very soon and post my own reflections. I might disagree with you on some things about this restaurant, which would be great! Let’s get into an argument about the quality of the food and service! I invite everyone else in this thread to join me! Put @anon6418899 in his place by going to this restaurant, discussing it, and telling him all the ways he is wrong about it.
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Our restaurants and food sources absolutely need each and every one of our voices. Please. Be. Civil. Talk about food and, to paraphrase Oasis, don’t post in anger.
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Not trying to wade into the controversy here, but I will add my own explicitly anecdotal experience based on working in an industry with many South Asian ex-pats whom I routinely press to recommend restaurants in Greater Boston that they like. More than eighty percent of the time, the response is along the lines of, “I eat in local South Asian restaurants out of convenience, not because they are particularly good, but here are one or two that I find not bad.” (Godavari, Ritu ki Rasoi, and Royal India Bistro are among the frequent mentions. I’m a fan of all of them.)
If the respondent is a dude, it’s usually qualified by, “Because my [wife or mom] cooks much better food at home for me.”
Again, purely anecdotal. My sample size is probably under 200, and dates back 20 years or so, which includes a period when the number and regional diversity of options here was much smaller. For instance, I can recall some general excitement about the arrival of Indian-Chinese options on local menus maybe 15 years ago, and they’re hardly a novelty now.
When I first settled in Boston as a dewy youth, it was nearly impossible to find many regional Indian cuisines beyond a dish or two here and there, never mind Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan options. Our current assortment may be underwhelming for people with a highly educated perspective on South Asian cuisine – I’m not one of those, though I’ve long lamented the lack of fine-dining options comparable to multiple places I’ve visited in London and one in Manhattan – but I still think we’ve come a long way from the bad old days of identical Punjabi / Mughlai menus with one Goan option. (We have had brushes with fine-dining refinement: Mantra and Tamarind Bay in their early days.) I remain grateful for the overall steady improvement in quality and diversity here.
I’m thrilled to read a rave for Tashan, did not expect much of it based on the owners’ first splash here – being the best thing in the Burlington Mall food court is a pretty low bar – only wish it served lunch. I hope to make a dinner trip soon.
(One more anecdote related to service, which indeed was dismal in South Asian restaurants here for many years, perhaps because workers were paid so stingily. I talked up a Back Bay place I liked, the long-gone Kebab n’ Kurry, but warned my date that the service was comically surly, like, “Meet every request with a disgusted eyeroll, drop every dish from a height of six inches” hostile. We went and got the sweetest, most solicitous server I’d ever had in a local Indian restaurant to that point, to my date’s great amusement. A good way to be wrongedty-wrong-wrong!)
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Let me stay away from controversy, by agreeing with you absolutely. We do need as many voices as possible here and any disagreement I may express with others is never meant as an attempt to chase them away, simply to express my opinion (which I think I ought to be able to do). If people disagree with my disagreement they can say so – this may disappoint many of you, but I’m not one to leave because what I say may be disliked – or they can simply ignore me. Hey, half the time even I ignore what I am saying.
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WARNING: The Surgeon General has determined that if you have the slightest sensitivity to disagreement, read no further. Whatever you do, do not quit the site.
OK: I’ve tried to be strong, I really have, but this is a foodsite and this quote is too, too delicious to resist:
I’ve never met anybody in this country who speaks in “accent-free English.” Really, has anybody here talked to somebody from Boston lately and understood them? Would this be an acceptable, or even accepted-by-you, comment if it were made when you order roast beef on the North Shore? (Our server “warmly greeted every table in his easy accent-free English”) Has anybody from Brookline talked to somebody from Brooklyn and understood them?
If there are preferences for accent-free English, why did people on this thread
obsess about the correctness of the accents, not argue that they should be absent? (Unless, of course, in your worldview, some accents are more acceptable than others.)
Many of us, including myself, have said “let’s only talk about the food”. I know that some of you will say “What are you doing now – this ain’t no [trying to affect an accent] food tawk?” I’m quite willing to talk only food if a post is only about food. I do not wander into cosmology in a discussion that’s entirely culinary. (Give me an example if I lie.) But what can I do if a post is peppered with extra-culinary matters? Be an obedient person and ignore them?
Let me go back to my original objection and ask if the OP had said
“[Jews] seem to me of the ethnic group that complains most bitterly about their own lack of quality dining options in the area.”
and, were I Jewish, how many of you (@Kennyz ?) would have asked me to “suck it up”?
I don’t think many of you would have accepted such a statement, yet you do when it’s about Indians. And as @Saregama says, it’s 2022.
Really, people, don’t condone the uncondonable.
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Couldn’t agree more !
Having worked in different organizations HR often had one good assessment if something what you write or say in an anonymous or small setting is inappropriate - if you wouldn’t say the same sentence at an all-hands meeting in front of everybody in the company don’t do it in any other setting.
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It’s not possible for any human anywhere to speak any language without an accent.
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Seriously? You think I would be offended by a statement that Jews complain bitterly about lack of quality Jewish dining options? THAT is offensive? It would not even occur to me to think so. But please - go eat something and post about it! The forum needs it! Have one of our area’s many poor excuses for a bagel, and join us discerning Jews in complaining bitterly about it. Please!
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Does this satisfy your desire?
This post was flagged. What’s so flaggable? Say so openly if you disagree.
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Absolutely.
(You and I are both great admirers of Oleana and, frankly, how the servers there speak isn’t an issue.}
Although, if I may alleviate the tension around this discussion with a story, twice when I was a new grad student at Stony Brook, NY (I’ve already confessed to this on the NY board, so no scoop here) I ordered a pepperoni pizza at our local place, and I got a naked slab of dough with minimal sauce loaded with green peppers. The first time, new to America and not willing to rock the boat I’d just come off (so to speak), I ingested without protest and then belched the night through in the dorm. The next time, more confident that nobody would throw me out of the country – such are the worries of the newly-here – I tentatively offered that this was not what I’d ordered. The waitress said firmly “You said peppers only.”
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I remember having dinner with 2 French classmates and a German classmate when I was taking a graduate course in NYC.
The German classmate lost his cool when the server brought him the pepperoni pizza he ordered.
He told the server he didn’t want it because of the sounded like Sauce. Of course pizza has sauce- this did not make sense. The French classmates and I couldn’t understand why he was so upset that there was sauce on the pizza he ordered.
Then he continued to fuss - and enunciated he didn’t want the Sauce H. The Sauce AGE.
The sausage. He didn’t want the sausage.
He then said he wanted pepperoni, not sausage, while pointing at the pepperoni on the pizza.
Which confused the other classmates. me and the server.
Turns out pepperoni is a word for bell peppers in German. He thought he was getting a vegetarian bell pepper pizza and refused to believe pepperoni could be the word for cured meat in English.
We’re wandering from the surrounding grimness of this thread, but pepperoncini vs pepperoni?
It’s actually the German word for hot chili. And a pepperoni pizza in Germany is know as Salami Pizza
(as a side note, one pizza which in Germany is very popular but I haven’t seen at all in the US is Thunfisch Pizza which is tuna pizza (with tuna from the can, not fresh one) often served with red onions and sometimes spinach.
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I have to make myself one of these one week. Good olive-oiled tuna from a can with red onion is a favorite combo around here, but I’ve not tried it on a pizza.
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Mod note:
I have said so privately to some of you, and I will say so publicly now. Please stay on topic on food. And please no sarcasm. If you disagree, disagree respectfully. Passive aggressiveness has NO place in this forum. This is the third time I repeat this request within the last month.
If this discussion strays any further, it will be locked.
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A little hard on Bedford, don’t you think?
Ice Cream from Whole Foods, when we have Bedfod farms churned on site? Pshaw!!
Nothing wrong with Home Goods, though it no longer exists.
Netflix? why is that a Bedford thing?
Panera is more Burlington than Bedford, IMO
