Skip to main content

Portland: Vindalho


My friends Payel and Arijit introduced me to a wonderful Indian fusion restaurant, Vindaloo.  It's in East  Portland, a part of town that is nice but not at all pretentious, full of well-loved homes and small neighborhood places.  It did take me a few minutes of wandering around to find the restaurant itself.  (Note to hip restaurants: a small sign doesn't make you hip, just hard to find.)  The decor is very modern and full of light.  The food is truly outstanding but nothing comes across as trying too hard.


I started with samosas made with yukon gold potatoes.  Quite frankly, I don't think the yukon golds didn't make a real difference but the samosas were great.  The crust was much more tender than the average samosa.  The samosa is the Indian version of that Southern favorite, the fried pie.


This is vegetable soup with tamarind, absolutely my favorite dish of the meal and one of the best things I've had in awhile.  The soup itself is very light.  I'm used to having tamarind in heavier foods and the contrast between the tamarind and the light broth was an eyeopener.   I have some chicken vegetable soup and I'm going to see if I can reproduce this effect.


My main dish was dal koutoo, which was a medley of fresh vegetables.  The sauce was quite savory but not in a heavy-handed way, just a great complement to the vegetables.


We also had the chutney assortment  My favorite was the pear chutney.  The red was a red pepper and the green was mint.

We finished off the meal with some masala tea.  The spice blend was very rich and complex, quite frankly better masala tea than I've had anywhere in Atlanta.

Vindalho on Urbanspoon

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Eating Around Georgia Tech: Ecco

Our Texas Instruments colleague Cathy Wicks was gracious enough to host several of us at Ecco tonight. This is one of those restaurants that has been on my list for a long time. Even though it is within easy walking distance of Georgia Tech, I hadn't made it there until tonight. The menu is a combination of Italian, Spanish, and French that make use of some local Georgia ingredients. The combination of those three countries is sometimes a little forced, although the georgia ingredients (fruit, cheese) were all great and perfectly appropriate. We started out with a meat and cheese board. This actually reverses the French tradition, where cheese usually follows the main course. Everything was excellent. The Georgia cheese was a big hit, as was the French cow/goat cheese. I thought the sauscisson was very subtle and very good. The waitress said that the roast pork pasta was their signature dish, so I had to try it. It had traditional broad pasta (fresh, of course)

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b

DCA: Cava Mezze Grill

Cava is a DC area chain with light Mediterranean food. Saibal encouraged me to try lunch at their airport location and I was very happy with the experience. I ordered falafel on SuperSalad with assorted other toppings. The falafel was tasty. The SuperSalad was light, flavorful, and very easy to eat. Overall, a healthy and enjoyable lunch, something you can't always say about airport eating.