Indian Accent V (Delhi, July 2025)

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Yes, you read that correctly: this is a report on a meal eaten in Delhi not this past July, but in July of 2025. That’s not even my record for a belated meal report/review; in fact, I have another Delhi report from 2025 in the wings that’s going to make this one look timely. More on that later.

This is my fifth report on a meal at Indian Accent in Delhi, and the fourth on lunch at their current location in the Lodhi Hotel (our first meal there was a dinner when they were still in the Manor Hotel in Friends Colony). At the two lunches before this one, I was with the missus and we ate the non-vegetarian Chef’s Tasting Menu (here and here); at the meal before those, a friend and I had eaten the Express tasting menu. On this occasion, however, we were accompanied by our boys and we ordered from the a la carte menu. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Tim Ho Wan, Yongsan-gu, Again (Seoul, May 2026)

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Back to Seoul, but not to Korean food. If Gwanghwamun Gukbap is a restaurant we’ve eaten at on all our trips to Seoul as a family in the last three years, Tim Ho Wan is another. Well, technically, we’ve not eaten at the same location on every visit. In 2024 we ate at the branch in Gangnam-gu; in 2025 we ate at the branch in the iPark mall in Yongsan-gu. In 2026, we returned to the Yongsan-gu branch. Why are we eating dim sum in Seoul? Well, because the quality of the dim sum at the Seoul locations of Tim Ho Wan so outstrips anything available in Minnesota that it would be foolish not to. If we lived in Los Angeles it might be a different story. As it happens, there’s a good chance we might not return to Tim Ho Wan on our next trip. But that’s not because this meal was bad; it’s because later we ate dim sum at another place much closer to where we usually put up that was even better. More on that later; here now is a quick look at this meal. Continue reading →

Tenant XV (Minneapolis)

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Only about two days late, here is this week’s Twin Cities dining report. It covers dinner at one of our favourite restaurants in the metro, Tenant. In the last iteration of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation I had them in the “Several Times a Year” tier along with Alma. However, this was only our first dinner there this year. This is partly because of all our/my travels in the spring and summer and partly because Tenant had gone into a different mode during the ICE siege of the Twin Cities, doing not their usual six-course menu surprise but functioning as a soup kitchen of sorts, feeding their community at whatever price people were able to pay. Since the summer they’ve retooled and returned to their normal format, but not exactly to what it was before. In place of the six-course menu they now do a four-course menu. You still won’t know what each course comprises till it reaches you at the counter or a table. In terms of the amount of food it appears to be the same as it was before. This menu costs $75/head and includes service. They also now have an optional set of supplements, served before, between and as add-ons to courses that adds on an additional $35/head. And there’s still an optional wine pairing as well at $45. Here’s how it all looked at our dinner just about two weeks ago. Continue reading →

Saayba Hotel (Bombay, April 2026)

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Here, just an hour or so before Tuesday comes to a close in southern Minnesota, is this week’s Bombay report. The delay, for a change, is not due to my usual unreliability. I received a new laptop from work today, which meant a period of a few hours when I had no laptop, while data was transferred from the old to the new. Then I had a bit of a nightmare of trying to remember and recover unsaved passwords for a plethora of sites, including this one. And I had to cook dinner. Fascinating, I know; especially as you don’t really care when I post these restaurant reports that are of no utility to you and describe meals in places you are not likely to ever visit. You are welcome. Anyway, we are back in Bombay in April, at a restaurant in Bandra West that most of my friends in the city have not only not eaten at in years, but which most of them were shocked to hear was still in business. Promising, I know, but it was a pretty good meal anyway. Continue reading →

Orkney Distillery 13, 2007 (Single malts of Scotland)

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Alright, after an unplanned three week hiatus—caused by my falling ill after coming back from Delhi earlier this month—let’s get the weekly booze reviews back on track. I’m still sticking to my plan of only reviewing my own bottles, which means no more than four reviews a month (as the goal of this plan is to drink down my collection and not to proliferate the number of open bottles on my shelf.

Most recently opened is this 13 yo from an undisclosed Orkney distillery, put together in 2020 from three sherry casks containing spirit distilled in 2007. Well, in reality everyone knows the distillery is Highland Park. The bottler is The Single Malts of Scotland, whose relationship to the Whisky Exchange is something I can never keep straight in my head. It’s possible that they’re now completely different entities. I purchased this bottle from Whiskybase in early 2021 for what was a reasonable price for a 13 yo sherry cask malt: €58. I’m sure anything similar would now cost quite a bit more. Ah well. I opened this bottle a week or so ago; time to finally take some notes. Continue reading →

Seabra’s Marisqueira (Newark, October 2025)

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Here, finally, is my last report from the missus and my brief visit to New York/New Jersey last October. From that trip, I’ve previously reported on pizza eaten at the Manhattan branch of L’Industrie, dinner at Theodora in Brooklyn, lunch at Laut near Union Square and dinner at the now-closed Foul Witch in the East Village. Our last day was spent entirely in New Jersey. We spent the day with old friends down near New Brunswick—and had fabulous home-made Hyderabadi biryani and kababs for lunch. After getting back to our hotel in Newark in the evening, we were too tired to countenance heading back to Manhattan for dinner. As our hotel was very close to Newark’s Portuguese Ironbound district, we looked around instead for a place we could walk to, and seized upon Seabra’s Marisqueira. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Chaitanya II (Bombay, April 2026)

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Here is this week’s Bombay restaurant report, only four days late. My last report from Bombay featured a return—to Highway Gomantak in Bandra—and so does this one. In this case I’m back to Chaitanya in Prabhadevi, the iconic Malvani restaurant that is at the top of many people’s lists of the best seafood restaurants in the city.

You may recall that a friend and I tried to eat dinner at Chaitanya on a Sunday night earlier on this trip. Rebuffed by a likely 90 minute wait, we’d ended eating a pretty good Malvani meal at Sarangaa, not too far away. But after my excellent lunch here in 2024, I knew I was going back for sure; it came to pass for an early lunch towards the end of the trip. I took a few of my students with me. We arrived just as they opened for lunch and had no trouble getting a table. It was another excellent meal; here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Chicken House (Seoul, May 2026)

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Given how identified Korean fried chicken (KFC) is these days with Korean food, it might surprise you to learn that its popularity, particularly in combination with chilled beer (chimaek, as the combo is known), is a relatively new thing—probably arising in the late-70s at the earliest and not really becoming hugely popular—as a combination—until a couple of decades later. That said, it is very much an iconic thing now and the country is dotted both with outlets of many, many popular chains (all seemingly excellent) as well as many stand-alone restaurants that serve up chilled beer, fried chicken, and other things to eat with chilled beer. Walking around the city, especially later in the evening, you can see a number of these smaller establishments with younger people eating and drinking outdoors. We passed one such place, Chicken House, a number of times while walking late in the evening near Anguk subway station and finally repaired there for dinner one weekend after taking in the lantern festival near the Jogyessa Temple. Here’s a quick look. Continue reading →

112 Eatery VI (Minneapolis, July 2026)

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If in recent years the missus and I have been ending up at Alma for dinner when in town for our anniversary at the end of June, we’ve also been ending up at 112 Eatery for dinner when in town on the younger boy’s birthday as well in mid-July. So it was in 2024. Last summer we were in Delhi in July (and I’m realizing now that I have not yet reported on that special lunch we ate there on that occasion). This July we were all in Minnesota (just barely—I left for Delhi by myself a few days later) and so it was to 112 Eatery we went for dinner to mark his 15th birthday (where does the time go?). Here’s a quick look at the meal. Continue reading →

Restaurant Alma XVIII (Minneapolis, June 2026)

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No booze review this week either—though I will have one next week for sure. Instead, this week’s booze review slot is taken by the Twin Cities restaurant report I failed to post last Wednesday. This is of the missus and my anniversary dinner, eaten at Alma in Minneapolis at the end of June. Between lunch at Grand Szechuan the weekend after our return from our travels and this dinner at the end of the month, you could say we were well and truly back in the Twin Cities dining scene. Of course, there’s been big news in the fine dining part of that world this year: the announcement that Minneapolis will be part of Michelin’s new Great Lakes regional grouping. I followed some of the local food discourse about all of that in the spring and early-summer—not without some amusement—and may have some thoughts to share about it in the next few weeks that will surely make me even more friends in the local scene. But that’s for later; here now is a quick account of what was a very nice dinner at Alma. Continue reading →

Ikseon Ododok (Seoul, May 2026)

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Just when it seemed like I was getting a good grip on my massive backlog of restaurant reports, this week ran away from me a little bit. I posted a report from Bombay on Tuesday but then completely failed to put up a Twin Cities report on Wednesday and a Seoul report on Friday—to say nothing of the report from Newark that I failed to put up last Sunday. But hey, it’s not a job and, let’s be frank, there are very few people out there reading these reports on anything approaching a regular basis. If you are one of these people, then I apologize for the delay. Somehow I think we all survive. Anyway, here is this week’s Seoul report. Continue reading →

Highway Gomantak III (Bombay, April 2026)

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I’m still alive. I’ve been exhausted and out of it and also more than a little bit under the weather since I got back from Delhi in the middle of last week. I didn’t end up having the energy to write up the promised weekend restaurant report from New Jersey; and, thanks to some major nasal congestion, did not have the wherewithal to take notes for the usual Monday booze review*. Now that I’m feeling better, here’s a desperate attempt to get the Tuesday report from Bombay out before the day comes to an end. I’ll try to catch up with the New Jersey report before the end of the week—the booze will have to wait till next week (having hit my liver with a lot of high-strength acetaminophen/paracetamol over the weekend, I’m still not drinking). Continue reading →

Choi Buja Bossam (Seoul, May 2026)

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Seoul, as you may know, has a number of so-called food alleys—streets or other concentrated areas that feature a large number of casual restaurants or counters right next to each other that specialize in the same major genre of food. The thinking presumably is that it is a safer bet to open a restaurant in a micro-area that is already attracting a large number of people to it to eat a particular dish than to risk opening a restaurant specializing in it elsewhere. In a specialized alley everyone benefits from spillover traffic. This may also explain why, in many cases, most of the establishments will have identical or near-identical menus (and prices): the goal being not to stand out as much as to be a reliable source of the thing people have already come to your alley to eat. One of our favourites of these alleys is Bossam Alley in Jongno-gu, where the restaurants have pork belly simmering outside for their signature dish and people inside eating it. We had a very pleasurable lunch here in 2024 at Obok. We went back to the alley again this May: this time we ate at Choi Buja Bossam. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Hot Grainz V (St. Paul, MN)

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I’d thought I’d post this Twin Cities report on Thursday after getting back to Minnesota; but, thanks to a two-hour flight delay, it’s coming to you instead from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam where I have run out of things to do.

This report on lunch at our current favourite Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities, Hot Grainz, represents the end of my Twin Cities winter backlog. It’s not quite a current report, though. We ate this meal a week after returning from our spring travels in mid-June. It’ll probably take till mid-September, at least, before I’m fully caught up. Fascinating, I know. Continue reading →

Swati Snacks 3 (Bombay, March 2026)

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After three first-time reports from Bombay restaurants (Pradeep’s Gomantak Bhojanalay, Sarangaa, and Maaslli) from my five-week sojourn in the city in March and April of this year, here is the first repeat. As I’ve mentioned before, I eat at Swati Snacks every time I am in Bombay (see my previous reports here and here) and, indeed, I ate at the Tardeo mothership on my second day in the city in March. Two of the students on my program had arrived a few days before the others and I took them along with me to introduce them to this great Bombay institution. I’m glad to report that they enjoyed it very much. Here are some details. Continue reading →

Ben Nevis 18, 1996 (Whiskybase)

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Another week, another Whiskybase release. Unlike last week’s Littlemill 25 or the previous week’s Caol Ila 30, however, this was not a release under their Archives label. Instead, it’s one of the regular Whiskybase labels used for releases that commemorate milestones reached on their invaluable database. This Ben Nevis 18 was bottled in February 2015 to mark the 60,000th entry in Whiskybase. That number is now much, much higher (though I can’t recall if I have any of the later commemorative releases—I’m away from my whisky lair right now). This was from a single sherry butt and the colour of the whisky suggests it might have been an oloroso butt (or at least an European oak cask). Ben Nevis, like Littlemill, has one of Scotland’s most idiosyncratic profiles. Like Littlemill, its spirit is usually quite fruity but, also like Littlemill, the fruit is often intermingled with other notes that are not to everyone’s taste. I’m generally a big fan and so am hoping for good things from this bottle. Let’s see how it goes. Continue reading →

Laut (New York, October 2025)

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Back to the missus and my trip to New York, last October. When last seen in the city, we were eating Italian dinner at the since-closed Foul Witch with a very old friend of mine. Lunch was with someone I’ve known for a much shorter time and, until this lunch, only online, Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at NYU and a renowned scholar of the culture and sociology of immigrant cuisines and restaurants in the United States. We’d interacted online for several years prior and had talked about getting together in person for a while—it finally happened on this trip, and a very nice encounter it was. He had asked us what kinds of foods we were most interested in eating and, keeping our other meal plans in mind, we had suggested South East Asian food of one kind or the other. He then furnished a list of possibilities, from which we chose Laut, a Malaysian restaurant located right off Union Square. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →