CROSS THE STREET: Hi Bombay + Portland Pie. |
Given our size, Portland is an incredibly rich city in food terms. I swear that if there were a spot in Manhattan where you could walk to the variety of great restaurants that are within a ten-minute stroll of my place in the Old Port, people would call it the best neighborhood for food in New York. We have interesting and dedicated chefs, great restaurants, and terrific local farms that allow those chefs to get the best ingredients into their kitchens.Once a critical mass of interesting food places develop, new ventures start popping up all the time. The next year will certainly bring some. I think, and hope, that Bandol will reopen in a new spot with a new a la carte menu, and that Scales’s incomparable lobster-shack cuisine will be available again somewhere downtown. Bar owner Tom Manning says he’ll open a destination-dessert spot in the old Industry (which was briefly Right Proper Charlie’s), square in the middle of Wharf Street. A new Italian place called Bresca will open next to the police station on Middle, and that the chef there ran several restaurants at Caesar's in Vegas. Whole Foods will open and give the sort of handsome/scrappy teenagers who didn’t get jobs at Wild Oats a place to earn seven dollars an hour. Rumor has it Whole Foods is building relationships with local farms so we can eat what’s grown nearby. That would be nice.
But what does Portland need? It’s hard to make wishes when we have been so lucky, but here it is: Indian pizza. Currently Indian pizza is only available in one place — San Francisco’s Zante’s Indian in the lower Mission. Here is how Bay area food writer Jonathan Kaufmann described it: “Those of you who have never had Indian pizza can’t imagine how good it is. Instead of tomato sauce, a thick layer of spicy spinach curry, gingery and slightly tangy, covers the pie. Vegetarians get cauliflower and scallions on top, and meat eaters get vegetables plus tandoori chicken, lamb, or prawns. Add a sprinkle of mozzarella, and you’ve got a cross-cultural chef d’oeuvre.” If anything, Kaufmann understates things.
Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach reminds us that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” So it is with food writers. To wish for Indian pizza is cheap talk. So here is my promise to Portland for 2007: I will bring you Indian pizza. The idea came to mind when Portland Pie Company, which makes a lovely pizza, moved to a location just across from Hi Bombay, which makes a lovely curry. My hope is to bring them together. They will parent this child that I will merely midwife — together they will give birth to east-coast Indian pizza.
I want everyone involved to know what we are getting ourselves into. I have meddled before with the powers of pizza and curry — mingled them in an attempt to achieve transcendence. It is a dangerous alchemy. Years ago, in Oakland, an obscure place called Raj Indian Cuisine began to offer an Indian pizza. I ordered it religiously. One day Mrs. Raj told me, “no more pizza, sir.” “You ran out today?” I asked. “No sir, no more pizza forever. You are the only one who orders pizza, sir.”
