The best Indian Food

After a long week preparing for the intense summer sessions, we had a day off. But we couldn’t figure out what to do. In Korea, what seems like another planet, we couldn’t figure what to do? It was me and my co-workers from Canada. Well, one of them is from South Africa but he is Indian decent and grew up in Canada. He loves the African culture and we talk about it all the time and I show and tell him what I can about my people but I know almost nothing about the Indian culture other than what I read in my American History books about the “Trail of tears” (if you want to know more about the history of Indians in America, here is a good start)Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation and so forth.

So I asked him, what can you tell me about India and its culture other than what I read about in history books like The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century and other American history books. By the way, I highly recommend this books, it is by far one of the best books I have read. You can buy it for a very low price from Amazon.

Anyhow, like Andrew Zimmerman he said well, the best way to start experiencing a culture is to try its food. He decided to take us, me and another teacher at my school to an Indian restaurant downtown. He had been frequenting the restaurant and he told us the food was authentic. The restaurant even went as far as “importing” an Indian chef who makes all the meals.

While we waited for our food, he ordered these:

It was floured and fried chicken served with a slightly sour tomato based sauce. To me it didn’t taste like chicken though because the meat was a bit stronger than chicken to me. However, they were good.

The moment of truth came when the main dish came out. I was excited to taste Indian food in South Korea.

We each ordered the sampler because it combined a little bit of everything.

This was my plate:

It included shrimp curry, mutton curry (which is either goat meat or sheep and sometimes lamb depending on the restaurant), rice, vegetable (eat your veggies kids they are good for you), yogurt, baked chicken, a spicy sauce, and traditional Indian bread. The price was 16 thousand won, which is about $13. The bread was ginormous:

He even showed us how to eat the meal. You can dip the bread into the curry or dip it in the yogurt and eat. With the rice, you can put half your curry in the rice and eat. Either way you eat it, I have to say the food was marvelous. Like my Norwegian roommate Kim used to say, “it was legendary.” I will ask him to show me more about the wonderful Indian culture that is in our face in America but we know so little about. We finished off the meal with a nice and warm Indian chai tea.

Tagged as: bread, Food, great, indian, mutton