Sidetrip: Mumbai, India

India is a country of contrasts, the most blatant of which is that between extreme wealth and poverty. There is no way that I can think about my recent trip to India without providing this as the background context under which a lot of my thoughts were being processed. At one end of Mumbai, a billionaire is ostentatiously building himself a 27 story mansion, yet not a mile away, tucked around in every direction are vast slums housing approximately 55% of the city’s population. From the window of the Four Seasons, I looked out in the distance at beautiful sunsets over the Arabian Sea but if I looked down at the hotel’s neighbors, it was slums. My mind still flips itself in circles trying to understand, overcome, empathize, move forward, step back, stand down...

It came down to embracing. Embracing my experience and hoping to learn more, embracing the wonderful people I met, and embracing the difficult idea that there was not a lot I could do but that I am a better, more informed global citizen for having seen this poverty and looked it in the eye in person on the streets of Mumbai for 9 days.

That being said, Mumbai was amazing. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the traffic, the laundry, the children, the religions, and, of course, the tastes.

Off exploring on my own on my first day in India (my willingness to wander solo created a stir with the hotel concierge but I felt incredibly safe the entire time!), I sat down for a quick lunch of Punjabi Samosas at Laxmi Villas, a small vegetarian restaurant behind the Taj Hotel. Two huge hot delicious samosas with mint chutney filled my tummy along with a cool soothing mango lassi for less than $1.00. Compare this to the rushed grab of food at the hotel the next day before I left the hotel with a guide to explore the Elephanta Caves. That breakfast cost me $26. As I said, the contrasts are intense and potentially offensive.

I explored the Hindu religion further at the Prince of Wales Museum and saw bits and pieces of Mumbai history by exploring on foot the Colaba and Fort areas. In this neighborhood is the Taj Palace Hotel, one of the standing reminders of the terrorist attacks that occurred in November 2008. Security was intense at all three hotels I stayed in over my time in Mumbai, the machine guns and bomb dogs a constant reminder of this past November. After two days of exploring tourist sites and meeting up with business school friends to see the nightlife of Mumbai, I moved north of the city for my business meetings.

I had a wonderful time with my India team feasting on numerous buffets at the Hyatt Regency. I had curries of all colors and varieties with eggplant, lentils, potatoes, vegetables and paneer. I also had dosas, naans, parathas, sweet desserts, fiery sauces, and typical breakfast dishes like idli and plenty of mango lassis. Overall the food at the hotel (blatantly excluding the Italian restaurant which was NOT good) was really, really wonderful. I also personally felt that much of it was similar to the food we eat in the Indian restaurants of Minneapolis, happily convincing me that Indian food hasn’t gone through the same Americanization as, say, Chinese or Thai.

I am now also a genuine lover of dal, or lentils, especially after eating the dhal Bukhara at Peshawri, a restaurant in the ITC Grand Maratha hotel. This rich black dahl was cooked for more than a day and probably contained its fair share of ghee (clarified butter) and cream, but, regardless, it was simply incredible. It was thick, deeply flavored and surpassed all other items on the table, a consensus agreed to by the meat-eating men in attendance. This is was one of the better restaurants in Mumbai and the fact that the dal was the clear winner of the meal simply highlights how phenomenal the vegetarian food is in India. I was in food heaven.

From North Mumbai, I moved to a hotel on Nariman Point to be closer to the city and the next round of work I had to do. Work thus completed, we had a day with a guide to visit the public laundries, a Jain temple, the Gateway to India, and Crawford Market. I was overwhelmed by the Alphonso Mangoes we tried at Crawford Market. I have never been so tempted to try to smuggle fruit out of a country. We walked into market and the scent of mangoes was overpowering and incredibly delicious. As it was the very beginning of mango season, I can only imagine the scene as more varieties and vaster quantities are put into play. The words I would use to describe this delicious fruit are lush, fruity, intense, and sinfully sweet. I will never think of mango the same way again.

And then my final meal in India. After the amazing dal at Peshawri, I couldn’t help but order the Masala Dal, also a black dal, at another top restaurant in town called Khyber. Here I also had an incredibly bright red kebab of paneer smothered in the house special red curry. Both dishes were unique and filled with abundant flavor. The restaurant itself was cavernous and huge, filled with both tourists and families. While the food was not the overall best food I had on the trip I would highly recommend the restaurant for the combination of both food and atmosphere.

I left India with a heavy heart as I had seen so little of the country and desperately wanted to keep traveling to Delhi and Rajasthan and beyond, but I brought home with me some amazing and delicious memories… and some cookbooks since the mangoes were blatantly illegal.

Sidetrip: Paris

So, you are probably a but tired of me talking about nothing except books or just simply missing me and wondering if I fell off the side of the earth. There is a reason: a three week business trip. And I find it difficult to write about where I actually am while I am there. I need time to sit back and reflect on the experience, the food and the adventure in order to make sure that I capture it well. I started my adventure in Paris. And then went back to Paris midway through the trip again.

I love Paris.

But what I don’t really love are business trips to Paris. As much as I would like to spend my time exploring the city, finding adorable bistros to eat in, and smirking at cute French boys, instead I need to remember that work is the priority and act accordingly. Thus, there was a lot of work and I didn’t really see much of Paris outside of the Radisson SAS in Boulogne. Rather than depressing myself about it, I will simply grasp on to what I was able to experience and look forward to a time in Paris when I will be able to explore and eat to my heart’s content.

So, what I was able to experience:

For one team dinner, we boarded a minibus and headed along the Seine, passing the twinkling Eiffel Tower, to the restaurant Chai 33 in Bercy Village. Bercy Village is a really neat little shopping village in the 12th that was created from old wine warehouses from the 19th century. Chai 33 is a restaurant in one of the converted warehouses, or caves. Walking around the outdoor area of Bercy Village and seeing all the brave Parisians sitting outside dining in the late February cold as well as seeing the conversion of the warehouse into a restaurant was more entertaining than the food itself. Dare I say it wasn’t very good? Sacre bleu but the group menu we were served was a letdown. I would go back to further explore Bercy Village but not make a return to Chai 33.

I escaped my hotel for one evening and made it down the street on a mission towards a restaurant I had found online highlighting a vegetarian menu option. Instead, I was sidetracked by a crowd of people eating inside a Neapolitan pizza restaurant. In so many ways, while traveling, a full restaurant of locals is a sign of a good thing. So I cut my walk short and headed into Le Belvedere. And I have to say, I had a mighty fine Neapolitan pizza – good sauce, crispy crust, fresh vegetables. It was great. I have a niggling guilt for eating Italian food while in Paris, but then again, it was really good pizza. Even better was when a colleague the next day asked if I had eaten at Le Belvedere yet and highly recommended it!

Beyond these two restaurants, I definitely indulged in small ways at my hotel, which had a very nice breakfast buffet. I ate yogurt (so much better in Europe especially when the nutrition information isn’t labeled!) and buttery croissants every morning. The coffee is also served darker and bolder across the pond, just the way I like it! Although I had to relearn my coffee limits to keep the jitters down. A key learning was also that I definitely do not like Evian water. It tastes soft and somehow wrong. And with that, that’s Paris!

Food Lit: Judgment of Paris

George M. Taber, author of Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Tasting that Revolutionized Wine, was the only journalist present in 1976 when Californian and French wines faced off at a small event in Paris. The blind tasting could have very well have fallen into obscurity except for Taber’s presence and Time Magazine’s decision to pick up the story of French wine experts surprisingly selecting Californian wines to win over those of their own nation. The consequences have become part of history, a tipping point: the event foretold the remarkable rise of New World wine in the past 30 years.

Taber gracefully creates a 300 page book from a two hour event by delving into the California and French wine industries and their developments in the past fifty years. His journalistic voice is clear, strong and easy to read, making me feel like not only did I enjoy the book, I also learned a lot, especially about the development of the wine industry in Napa Valley and its key players.

Part of what makes this book so easy is that it doesn’t dwell too deeply in any one area or on any one person, adequately flitting around to fill the pages with both biographical sketches and fundamentals of the wine industry. If you have even an inkling of an interest in wine (even Two Buck Chuck makes an appearance) and a desire to gain a little bit more knowledge, then I encourage Judgment of Paris as a read, especially if you are planning a trip to Napa or France.

A pleasant addition, and a bit unexpected, was the easy to comprehend education on French wines, particularly as I was reading this book while in France. My personal history with French wines is fraught with nothing but confusion. It has more than once annoyed me how difficult it is to decipher the French wines on a shop shelf or a restaurant wine list. And one of the reasons it frustrates me is because, realistically, I should demographically and psychographically be someone that the French intensely want to buy their wines. Not only as a regular wine drinker do my dollars go elsewhere, when I make the wine choices at dinners (which I do enjoy doing) I directly influence others in their future decisions as well. As a business person who spends her days attempting to grow a business rather shun potential customers, the lack of appropriate consumer friendly measures from the French wine industry drives me crazy.

Phew, glad I got that off my back. And, I will say, that when the flight attendant on Air France asked me if I preferred the Burgundy or Bordeaux, I actually was able to make an educated choice, the book resting on my lap. A little off topic, I suppose, but it really does prove one of the points that Taber is trying to make in this book – the French wine industry has desperately fallen behind, with marketing being only one of the issues.

Food Lit: The Billionaire's Vinegar

High end theft is fascinating. I even count the Thomas Crown Affair amongst one of my favorite action movies (although Pierce Brosnan may have something to do with that as well). My fascination is sparked by a need to understand why someone would so desire items worth millions of dollars just so that they could hide them behind closed doors for personal viewing. This psyche is frightening and enthralling. Falling into a similar vein is counterfeiting. I am not talking simple pirated DVDs or fake IDs, now we are talking about my passion, food products, and specifically wine. And then we throw in to the story interesting characters such as a shady former rock manager, an acclaimed wine expert from a top auction house, and Malcolm Forbes. Mix that all up and have we got the start of something intriguing. And that story is The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is a story of power, obsession and intrigue. Through the story of bottles of wine that allegedly once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, Wallace weaves together a narrative on the wine industry, its powerful players and fans, and even a bit of an ode to Jefferson himself. The “bad guy” of the story is the man who potentially conned a generation of rare wine lovers with his well done reproductions, Hardy Rodenstock. As the portrait of him is developed and we learn of his career coming from rock band manager to cult wine securer, we see the characteristics of a con artist come to light, namely secrecy. Much like the grand Ponzi schemes recently uncovered in the financial world, readers of this book shake their heads and ask themselves, “How can so many smart people have been so deceived?”

The man to pity in the book is Michael Broadbent, the once head of the wine auction department of Christie’s, and a one time proponent and fan of Rodenstock. He appears to have been caught up in the swirl, gradually growing suspicious but unable to completely disentangle himself from the situation because, in all reality, my impression is that he wanted all of these bottles to be real so very badly both from a love of wine and because his reputation was on theline. I would imagine that now that reputation is in shambles.

What really got me ticking on this book was not even the book itself as much as the other press that exists around this apparently controversial topic. Controversial perhaps because of all of the legal action and the high profile of those that fell for Rodenstock’s fakes. In an example of the sensitivity, Lettie Teague wrote an article in Food & Wine magazine In October 2008 about counterfeiting wines. In the article she mentions Harvey Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent in association with this topic. The next month, an apology in the Editorial section of the magazine. An apology? Really? Either Food & Wine is trying to avoid a lawsuit or else Rodenstock still has believers out there that Teague offended greatly. Teague is my favorite columnist (dry, witty, creative) in Food & Wine so the situation unsettled me. Fascinating.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is a fast-reading, interesting book. If you have any interest in wine, international intrigue or even Thomas Jefferson then I highly suggest you pick it up. However, don’t expect the ending to leave you satisfied. In reality, the lawsuits are ongoing and there is no official finality to the situation. If you are patient, wait a few years and pick up the next edition, where the epilogue will surely tell all. Or wait for the movie to come out; the rights have been purchased.