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A New Take on Indian Food

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Indian food has never been my preferred choice of ethnic food, but I decided to give it another try when we made our way to Taj Grocers/Taj Chaat House this past Tuesday. I expected to pull up to a little building that smelled strongly of weird Indian spices, was dimly lit with strange foods covering the shelves for people to buy and stuck in the back of a restaurant with a limited menu of Indian foods that I already knew I wouldn’t like. So, when we pulled into a strip mall and I saw this huge Indian grocery store, I knew my imagination was way off. WalkingIMG_3474 in, no strange aroma surrounded me and the place was surprisingly very clean, bright, and organized. There were huge stacks of Indian rices and spices to buy in bulk long with shelves of prepackaged foods, from dried fruit to authentic Indian rice chips and produce.

The Chaat House is in the back of the restaurant in a huge room with an open kitchen and a bunch of tables and chairs. Apparently these types of restaurants are very commonly attached to Indian grocery stores, although they are “a new type of place to appear in the United States” (Arijit Sen). The menu is very extensive, not in English and spanned the whole length of the kitchen. In India, the most common place to find these specific types of foods is actually on the street being sold in the street vendor carts. It’s not the Indian restaurant food an American would typically imagine with a long list of curries. This is more of a “fast food” if one were to compare it to an American meal (although the food here is definitely not frozen first).

After having my wonderful professor translate the menu for me at least two times, I settled on the Aloo Gobi, which is cauliflower and potatoes in this very spicy sIMG_3473auce. I also got rice and the mixed naan. The food was wonderful, although a little too spicy for my taste. The Chaat House was actually very crowded too, and it was quite evident that we were the only foreigners in the entire restaurant, which meant the food was truly authentic. After dinner, I purchased dried mango from the grocery and the ink to draw my own Henna tattoo. We then began our drive back to school, but for the first ti
me leaving an Indian restaurant, I actually enthusiastically talked about when I was going to come back to the Chaat House.

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