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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
Gwanghwamun Gukbap III (Seoul, May 2026)
This week’s Seoul report is a quick look at dinner at a Seoul restaurant I’ve reported on twice before: Gwanghwamun Gukbap. As with all the other Seoul restaurants I’ve reported on so far from this trip (here, here, and here), Gwanghwamun Gukbap is within walking distance of where we were staying, near Gwanghwamun Square. As the name suggests, the restaurant’s signature dish is gukbap (pork broth/soup with rice), but that’s not what we’ve been going back there for since we first ate there as a family in February 2024. That’s not because the gukbap is not very good; it is. It’s because we are soondae enthusiasts more than we are gukbap enthusiasts and Gwanghwamun Gukbap’s soondae is truly outstanding. We loved it when we ate it again in July 2025 and we loved it yet again on this visit. But soondae wasn’t the only thing we ate. Read on for more details. Continue reading
The Sunday Buffet at Homi (St. Paul, March 2026)
Here is the last of my Twin Cities backlog from the start of the year. The federal government’s siege of Minnesota—and particularly the Twin Cities—during the first two months of the year had transformed life in the state. Hispanics were among the groups most targeted by ICE and if this meant that restaurants and other businesses that rely on Hispanic labour were among those hit hardest by this assault, it meant that Mexican and other Hispanic restaurants were hit really, really hard. Most shut down for most of that period as both employees and diners stayed away for fear of being caught up in ICE’s terroristic raids. As February came to an end things began to ease up and the restaurants began to re-open. Among the first to start back up was Homi, in St. Paul, one of our favourite Mexican restaurants in the state. I saw their announcement on Facebook of their reopening on March 1 with the Sunday lunch buffet they’d started last year and sent the call out to our usual dining crew. A large group of us showed up that day to welcome them back to operation and also to eat some very good food. Here’s a belated look. Continue reading
Maaslli I & II (Bombay, March 2026)
The first thing I did after settling into my flat in Bombay in late March was fire up Google Maps to see if there were any interesting restaurants within easy walking range. It turned out there were very few. One, however, caught my eye: Maaslli. I looked it up and discovered that it is a seafood restaurant specializing in the food of the GSB (Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) community—yes, in India even restaurants have caste-specific identities. And all the reviews I read of it were raves. And what’s more, of the two locations the one within 15 minutes walk of me was the original. And so that is where I ate dinner on my first night in Bombay on this trip. And it was such a fantastic meal that I went back there for dinner again a couple of nights later. And then for two lunches later in the trip. Here first is an account of the first two meals—I’ll post a report on the two lunches in a few weeks. Continue reading