Khipi is an extraordinary food make&deliver service in the GBA whose Tuesday offerings I’ve been greedily devouring for the last several weeks. They’re also occasionally at the Belmont Farmers Market. I first encountered them on opening day there this summer, and one bite of one of their glorious empanadas, with their beautifully cooked, embedded hard boiled half-eggs had me hooked, much as Tim Maslow’s bluefish at Strip T’s had me hooked 15 years ago (or more) or Shangri-La’s homestyle egg drop soup made me captive much before that. High comparisons, I know, but they’re just that good.
Look at their Insta
to get a feeling of the range of what they’ve offered in the past. That very range might seem the ramblings of dilettantes, but pretty much everything is cooked with a sure hand, with precision and balance. I can’t speak to “authenticity” since I’m unfamiliar with most of the cuisines they’ve offered, but everything I’ve had from them has been splendid.
I’ve been putting off posting about Khipi because I wanted to do them justice by telling you in detail of how varied their offerings are, and why each was as delicious as it was. But I can no longer let the quest for the perfect post stand in the way of the so-so one, so let me elaborate with two specific observations:
Independent of cuisine, their meats, vegetables, etc., have been cooked beautifully in my experience. The meat/fowl – pork, beef, chicken – has been tender, never stringy, without being overly mushy. They cook with care and with obvious attention to cooking temperatures, and suchlike. This may seem a small matter, but how often can one say that? The vegetables, also, have always had the right texture, and their reheating instructions are clear and precise, and do not involve extra pots.
When they do veer into territory that I’m broadly familiar with, they’ve offered a pleasant twist. The curry with a South Indian shrimp dish, for example, was strikingly reminiscent of the white coconut chutney that accompanies dosas and suchlike, a pairing strikingly rammed home by the accompanying idlis – light, fluffy and delightfully tangy. By then I was beginning to expect great things from them so I asked for extra idlis. That was a good move, if I may say so.
Intriguing. Thanks for posting. I’ve used WECO a few times, neglecting to post because I keep forgetting. We’re out of town a lot this summer, but I’ll take a closer look at Khipi.
If you do get Khipi food, let us know what you think. I should give Weco another chance and taste their food, not just (as I have) their Sekali food, but I do have to say their relentless chirpiness continues to annoy. I keep telling myself “Fooddabbler-oh-pie, which is what I call myself in private, rise above these petty prejudices and go full Weco.” But my worse angels always win.
The food that we’ve gotten from WECO has ranged from pretty good to never-ordering that again (gummy mushroom lo mein). The cheerfulness doesn’t turn me off and I like their earnest business model but the amount of packaging (although some of it is compostable) has noticeably increased (lots of PPE containers), which is a bigger turn-off for me than the marketing language.
I got the Pandi Curry this week. Pork, bamboo shoots, and rice. The pork was cooked really well and was fall apart tender but still juicy. There was an ample amount of food, got two meals out of it. It was more like pork with sauce, I would have liked more sauce. It was tasty and I liked it. $21 with the delivery fee. Didn’t get texted the delivery window in the morning.
Thanks for the report. I was holding off on my own comments till you posted. Yes, their meats are always well cooked – with occasional small variation. The portions, as you observe, are a decent size. If you get just one dish then the $5 delivery fee is a hefty percentage of the cost. Our solution is to get 4 (typically two servings each of their two offerings), then if we are all at home (all three of us) we typically get dinner for two nights in a row as we did this week on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I agree with you that the pork curry could have used more sauce. If I had to fault them it would be on this issue – they are skimpy in their saucing, a shame because their sauces are scrumptious.
This Pandi curry was of great interest to me, a dish with which I was unfamiliar. According to Khipi (and then confirmed via the Internet), it’s a dish from a region of Karnataka, the state just south of Maharashtra (whose cuisine was recently featured on one of HOs boards). My mother was from Karnataka, although from a different region, and this dish never was on our table. The use of vinegar with pork in Pandi curry is so strikingly reminiscent of pork vindaloo from nearby Goa that I feel it can’t be a coincidence, but I haven’t had the time to investigate. One of the cookbooks in the Penguin series on regional Indian cooking is on Kodava (oddly anglicized as “Coorg”) cuisine , which is where this dish originates, but my set is in New York and I won’t be able to consult that book for another three weeks.
I went for the Hainanese Chicken Rice this week. The rice was cooked in chicken broth and was very tasty and perfectly cooked with every grain separated. The chicken was also very tasty and either marinated or cooked in broth. The dipping sauces were excellent, and the red spicy one was spicy. The white garlicky and the soy-based one were both very tasty. However, I found the portion size small, only got one meal out of it, and I’m not a big eater. On the other hand, it was a very pleasant meal.
Thanks for the as-always excellent report. I didn’t get their food this week, because I’m now transitioning to my hybrid NY-Cambridge life for the fall and have too much other stuff to juggle. Once I’m in NY I’ll not be in this neck of the woods on a Tuesday till December, so, sadly, no more Khipi food for me for a while.
I urge the rest of you to try them out. They’re a creative outfit and have serious ambition. They deserve support.
Found the pozole very tasty, if not overwhelmingly large. Still, for 15 bucks a good deal in these days of stratospheric food prices. The soup comes with very good tortilla chips and cunningly hidden at the bottom of that bag a separate ziplock of shredded cabbage, a couple of radish slices and so forth.
Let me add that the pork was, as with all their meats, cooked to perfect tenderness, and the hominy had achieved that perfect, Platonic balance between tenderness and texture.
