Flavor Boulevard

Hull and Surendranath examine the inscription on a spoon at Bombay Cuisine.

What do grad students do? Some of us write, some of us teach, most of us don’t sleep, all of us eat. For Astronomy PhD student Chat Hull and his friend Yogesh Surendranath, a Chemistry postdoctoral fellow, eating at every single Indian restaurant in Berkeley and writing about it is high on the priority list.

Berkeley has no shortage of Indian restaurants for the duo to review. “We stay within the city limit”, said Surendranath. Their blog, Masala Chaat, has been regularly updated for roughly a year. When I meet them in the office, they seem like the normal physicists: friendly, calm and full of physics. When I joined them in a trip to Bombay Cuisine, the restaurant-reviewing mode was turned on full-force. The inner comedians were revealed.

In their blog posts about each dining experience, they take notes from the smallest detail in the surroundings, such as the film of grease on the wall mirrors, to the viscosity of the mango lassi. They have a couple of “eigendishes”, items that they always order after reaching the conclusion that these dishes best reflect the skill of the chef. They tell stories of glass shards in their food and how the owner reacted “with little remorse”.

When asked “why Indian restaurants?”, Hull and Surendranath looked at each other, “Did we ever have anything non-Indian together?” The answer was “Maybe a coffee?”. They’ve been friends since college. During the lifetime of the blog Masala Chaat, some restaurants were closed down and others opened, and Hull made sure to update Google on those listings.

Now nearing the end of their quest, with fewer than 5 restaurants remain, Hull and Surendranath are considering expanding the scope to the East Coast, as Surendranath will soon start his professorship at MIT.

I can eat rice for every meal every day without getting tired of it (with perhaps an occasional craving for noodle soups or a burger). Why? Because rice is a solid starch base upon which you can mount anything and they’d go together just like that. Meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, other starchy stuff. The closest thing to rice that wheat can do is the pizza. I wouldn’t eat pizza everyday because it always makes me cry for water like a beached whale. But everything goes on pizzas, too. Even curry. Spot on, Zante.

I don’t know how Mudpie knew of this cozy kitchen on Mission Street, but we went there right after I got off the plane from Puerto Vallarta. The combination of “Indian” and “pizza” sounds like comfort on a drizzling January night. Besides, I have a thing for old brick buildings, and the number 86.

Though the printed menu is much easier to flip and read than the online menu, we still took a while looking for something new and appealing from the maze of flat breads and meaty dishes (and vegetarian dishes, but I won’t go there), mainly because we were looking for non-spicy food. The kabulinan (roti with raisins and nuts) was a sure bet, sweet, chewy, crusty at the edge, and filled with coconut shreds in and out. The chicken makanwala, though good, didn’t deliver much news. I couldn’t sense any difference between this thick orange sauce and the chicken tikka masala‘s thick orange sauce at Biryani House.

We also got the special pie of course. Tandoori chicken and cilantro make up a mosaic of red and green dots; though the prawns are included in the menu listing, I can’t see any curled up in the pictures here. Well who really sits down and checks every ingredient on a slice anyway. Point is, spinach curry sauce finds its rightful place on a bed of baked dough, and the Indian pizza at Zante is at least as good as any artistic assortment from the Cheese Board that Berkeleyans always chirp about. If you ask me, I think Zante‘s are better, cuz they got meat and no hype.

Address: Zante Pizza
3489 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110-5438
(415) 821-3949

Money matter: $32.55 a dinner for two.