The Best Thai Food....in India!

Here is another dining adventure from my last trip to India - Thai food! After a long day at the office, some colleagues and I went to The Park hotel for some Thai food at Lotus. The Park is a 5-star hotel located in downtown Chennai with three restaurants and two night clubs. The hotel is built on land previously occupied by the Gemini Film Studios, one of the first studios in Chennai that sparked the film industry in Tamil Nadu.

Anyway, the food at Lotus was outstanding. We had a few appetizers, of which the most noteworthy was the shrimp spring rolls pictures below. It was a whole shrimp wrapped inside of a spring roll wrapper with some green onions and cabbage. Five different sauces accompanied the plate of spring rolls and can be seen presented on my plate below with one spring roll. Each sauce was a perfect accompaniment for the sweet and savory, crispy shrimp spring roll.


For my main course, I decided to try the chicken pad thai. In my opinion a Thai restaurant is only as good as it's Tom Yum Soup and it's Pad Thai. This Pad Thai at Lotus was excellent! The rice noodles were cooked perfectly, the chicken was tender, and the spicy seasonings left me feeling very satisfied with my choice. We actually ate at Lotus the night before as well, and I had the green curry which was also excellent.


Finally, a note about the service at Lotus and in India in general. At each of the fine restaurants we ate at, both this recent trip in March and my trip last September, the service is generally good. It was often hard to find a waiter when we needed a drink, however when our food is brought to the table, the server will plate the food as seen in the picture below. When returning to the table to check on us, if he sees any empty plates, he will serve up some more from the dishes. This level of service is appreciated to a certain extent, but the service was not perfect.

On a side note, my colleague Nick, being served in the photo, made a snarky comment about me taking pictures of the food. I justified my picture taking by mentioning my blog, and blurred out his face in the picture to protect him from the abuse he would otherwise certainly receive from fellow bloggers for his ignorance.

And remember when your traveling, whether for business or pleasure, follow your nose...and your stomach. Be adventurous in life and at the dinner table.

Author's note: I'm raising money for the The Jimmy Fund and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to support my recent ride in the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge bike ride. Will you make a donation to support the advancement of cancer research and administration of life-saving cancer treatments?

Eating Indian at 35,000 Feet

Hi, I'm here. It's time to clear the backlog and share some of my recent travels. After departing Edinburgh in February I headed to Chennai, India for a week and a half. I have a lot to share about my Indian experience but I first want to share my British Airways experience. This was my second trip to India in six months, both times flying British Airways. I remember from my trip in September that the food on the plane was actually good, making the 11 hours from London to Chennai a little more bearable.

Shortly after spotting the London Bridge on my way up and out of London, lunch was served: Saag Paneer with lime pickle, a garden salad, and Rachel's Organic Divine Rice. Saag is a spinach and mustard leaves based curry and paneer is unaged, acid-set, non-melting farmer's cheese, it's like cottage cheese that has had all the water squeezed out and pressed into a form. The salad was a nice mix of red, orange and yellow peppers with some tomato, cucumber, red onion and iceberg lettuce. Pickles are common with every meal in India. My lunch was served with lime pickle but other varieties like mango pickle, garlic pickle and mixed pickle are also very common. On my first trip to India, I came home with a few jars of garlic pickle. It's very much like chili paste, very spicy, very tart, only manageable in small doses, but very good. I mix a little with rice or eggs, but I digress. Rachel's Organic Divine Rice is a traditional Indian rice pudding; it's delicious.



Later on in the flight, an hour or so we landed in Chennai, "breakfast" was served. Breakfast was pakora and paneer with a piece of lemon cake, some grapes, and some lemonade. The pakora in this meal was cauliflower, dipped in gram flour and deep fried. It was served with cubes of paneer and this tasty morsel, seen on the left of the dish, made from spinach. I'm not sure what it was, but it was very good.


We landed in Chennai less than an hour after breakfast, it was around 1am local time. After cruising through security - I had to go through a metal detector after passing through immigration and just before getting into the baggage claim area. I'm really not sure what the point was, my carry-on went through the x-ray machine with no one watching the monitor, and the metal detector lit up as I passed through it. No one sitting there even noticed. So I walked on, grabbed my luggage, and headed out into the warm, humid night of Chennai. My driver was there waiting to take me to the hotel. I was in Chennai, again.

Stay tuned for some delicious tidbits from South India.