Motor Pun'ire!

Indian restaurants in the US are strange in more ways than one. Though most of them do a good job in serving the food right, some simply don't. They rather specialize in screwing up things like professionals.

Outside India, most Indians know enough not to compare home food (or even food from restaurants in India) to food in US desi restaurants. Restaurants capitalize on this very idea. They effortlessly let the quality of food slide, but try in despair to infiltrate into other areas.

Maybe the hospitality matters.

Most restaurants make sure the guests half-way through their meal need to be asked 'how is everything'. I wonder what might happen if one says 'the food sucks!! '. Most waiters are uber-confident about the reply that they don't even wait to hear from the guest.

There have been times when I have asked for water and got looks as if I was asking for a good share in the thousand shares of Google the waiter owns.

To get a better feel of the (in)hospitality, one should enter a restaurant at 9.45pm, when the closing time is 10pm. The waiter might expect the guest to decide till the dessert, before even one is shown a menu card.

It eventually becomes a discovery that quality of food and hospitality are perhaps not the only reasons one goes to restaurants. Like most others, I have this habit of not eating the same variety of food in the same restaurant for the second time.

The other day, as I was browsing through the menu at this Indian restaurant, I found something called “Motor Pun'ire”. I almost thought it was a new dish, before I realized the intended name is actually “Mutter Paneer”. Whowould imagine mis-spelling to this extent?! Looking through the other items such as “Alu Motor”, “Chicken Mosolla” the laughter was more satiating than the food in the first place.

One infers the name of the food hardly matters either.

Despite all these, I for one consider going to an Indian restaurant a regular activity - as I believe "eating Indian food is the best thing to happen, especially when one does not have to cook them". I happily let go on a few other things.