Dinner for Two: Setting the Table
This blog is a bit eclectic. It covers a lot of different topics, mostly about random things I happen to be interested in. Individual articles slot into broad collections — Simple DL, Founder's Guide, On Towards the Stars, Ilya's Papers. Mostly the articles are pedagogical, attempting to distill some amount of knowledge into something that can be consumed (though not for any audience in particular). So far, it's been about me, and about clarifying thoughts for myself.
In this series, we're going to do something a bit different.
For a long time I've wanted to start a review series of restaurants. I love food, and I have strong opinions about it. But I couldn't possibly write about food without bringing in the one thing I love more than food: my amazing and super talented wife, Mia. It's a bit trite to say that we are both foodies — in some sense, everyone is a foodie, you have to eat to survive, saying that you like food is a bit like saying you like breathing. So instead of that particular label, I'll say that the two of us spend way more time than we should thinking about where and what we're going to eat, and it's incredibly fun, and I want to share that here too.
Hmm, so despite all the Civ, Tech Things, and startup content, Amol says he needs more to write about so we’re starting a food blog! More seriously, one of the things I love most about our relationship is discussing what I consider to be “fun” topics: the qualities of good food, what constitutes a good life, what can movies say about who we are and how we think about the world? I’m excited to share a little bit of that with ya’ll today 🙂.
So like I said, we're going to do something a bit different. Each article in this series will be a restaurant review, written in two parts. One part will be my take, the other Mia's. And both of us will leave comments in the footnotes on each other's review. That way we each get an unadulterated opinion, and we each get a chance to respond and have a bit of a conversation. We'll also list what we ate at each place and each of our overall ratings on a 5 point scale, normally distributed. A 3 is an average restaurant, which in NYC is pretty good. 4 and 5 are one and two standard deviations above — if a restaurant gets a 5, we really like it.
We're both pretty strong believers that the role of the critic is consistency — that the reader should be able to get a sense of what the critic resonates with, so they can understand how to orient around the review. So we want to use this article as an opportunity to both try out the format and to introduce ourselves as food critics.
Mia as a Food Critic
I grew up in a household smelling of great food: mushroom sauce simmering with meat fats, hands stained green from picking fresh herbs (mint, shiso, dill, etc.), garlicky soy creations sauteed in chicken fat, parmesan and mustard encrusting a tender rack of lamb.
In the living room, cookbooks lined the shelves of not one but two huge bookcases: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Barefoot Contessa’s The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, Elizabeth Andoh’s At Home with Japanese Cooking, David Thomson’s Thai Food, no-named spiral binders with 5-ingredient recipes from my grandmothers. But these were never familiar to me until much later in my life. As a kid, cooking only registered as some magic my dad would do in the kitchen. I’d be pulled in to “chop this, peel that” but remained oblivious to the complex orchestration going on behind me.
Food was so much to us: flavor, new experience, a sign of love from our father, family time, something we could actually all agree upon1. It makes so much sense for it to be a huge part of my life now, even though I’ve long been out of that family house.
A couple of notes:
Though it’s not everyone’s taste, I’m a fan of more acidic dishes: I love the tamarind in sinigang or putting vinegar in my congee. I’ll try to note this in dishes that I discuss.
I care less about the overall “experience” of the meal than the memorability of a dish. I’m okay with leaving a little hungry or with “worse” service/ambiance2. What I gravitate toward are dishes so unique and flavorful that they have a lasting impact in my memory. That being said I’ll usually gravitate toward places with smaller dishes, where the density of complex flavor is higher
Some of my favorite dishes that still stick with me: banana cream topped with caviar and finger lime from l’abeille3; a squash dish with a really pungent cheese and a cured eggplant with a really interesting tahini sauce at Fulgurances; a seared fish skewer atop of a vinegary beet sauce at Kochi; trout cured in juniper, apple, radish from Oxalis
Amol as a Food Critic
Likes and Dislikes:
I think a lot about 'value per dollar' — that is, how good is a meal vs. how much it costs. I have basically no appreciation or interest in 'aesthetics' or 'presentation'. Some of my favorite restaurants are tiny counter serves that probably have a rat infestation.
I love comfort food. Tandoori chicken, Katsu curry, halal carts, empanadas.4 Insanely high value per dollar. If it's fried and carb heavy I'm probably in.
I tend to like spicy food, probably just a side effect of my upbringing. I think a lot of European food in the US is a bit bland and way overpriced.5
I don't drink, so places that have a fantastic drinks menu do very little for me.
I grew up in an Indian immigrant family, where for the most part food was fuel and not much else. My family was not very experimental. Even though we weren't vegetarian, Mom and Dad didn't eat that much meat. No one in the family really liked fish. Most days we'd be eating home cooked meals — typically roti, some sabji, yogurt, and aachar/raw onion/cucumber. But we always ate together.6 And we made it a point to go out every Friday night as a family. I have a deep nostalgia for the Friday night haunts of my childhood. There was a Pizza Hut in Berkeley Heights, that was a staple. Every Indian kid loves Taco Bell, it's part of the immigrant experience. We'd go to TGIF in Somerville pretty regularly, back when they still had fajitas on the menu and you could get a dinner for 4 for about $40. When the California Pizza Kitchen opened up in the Bridgewater Mall, that became a go-to. And we still go to Thai Kitchen right off Prince Rogers Ave, it's just fantastic Thai food that can really hold its own against the best NYC has to offer.7
Growing up, food was definitely a social activity. I didn't really consider the possibility that food on its own could be much of anything important until late highschool. Around sophomore year, some of my friends started talking about these amazing experiences at expensive "michelin starred" restaurants. I didn't know what that meant, but the way they talked about it! It was like a new kind of hedonism that I'd never experienced! And it wasn't just the high end stuff — one of my really close friends who really influenced how I thought about food would go on and on about how the Big Mac was really one of the perfect meals out there. It was just a totally different perspective. What do you mean 'balance of flavor', 'perfect bite'? It's a Big Mac! You eat because you're hungry! Still, I started feeling like I was missing something.
I went to college in NYC. I think it's hard not to be a bit of a snob about food after living in New York for a while. There's just so much fantastic food and so much incredible variety. At first, I focused on those rare Michelin restaurants. I distinctly remember the first time I went to one — Boulud Sud up by Columbus Circle. I went with some friends for restaurant week and it was so…disappointing. Especially for the price. I spent a fair bit of time chasing the Michelin thing, I figured that everyone else was talking up the experience so much that maybe there was something I was missing. And I did have some really objectively good meals, including a few at 3-michelin star restaurants (in order, Alinea, Daniel8, and Osteria Francescana). But in each case, I came away feeling like the meal just wasn't worth the insanely high price tag, and didn't feel significantly more valuable than the fantastic $10 plate dinner at my local Indian joint.
At the tail of 2024, almost 2025, I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what I resonate with — largely thanks to conversations that I've had with Mia over the last three years. I'm hoping that by writing some of those conversations down, the memories of the meals will stick around longer. And when I'm recommending a place to a friend, I can just point to this substack instead of sitting them down for an hour while I dissect the minutiae of eating in NYC.
Table of Contents
Amol: Lol this explains a lot about your family. Even now I feel like you guys all are chaotically doing your own thing EXCEPT for meals when everyone falls in line.
Amol: See I totally agree on the service/ambiance thing, but I care a lot about being full at the end of a meal, if I leave a restaurant hungry I'm going to be mad about it. That doesn't mean stuffed or anything, but I've been to tasting menu places where I leave thinking "was that it?"
Amol: I swear to God you really do talk about this dish constantly 😂
Mia: I'm surprised you didn't add waffle house in here
Mia: I'm still so sad that you don't like French food. It haunts me.
Mia: same for us :) mostly home cooked meals eaten together at the dinner table.
Mia: funny story, my family used to also go to Thai Kitchen as it was really close to my grandparents' place; one time we brought some family friends there who'd actually lived in Thailand and they said it was comparable to what they ate there 👌
Mia: to be fair, you definitely enjoyed the first time we went to Daniel; just the second visit didn't quite live up to expectations.