Kebab

Hi, My name is Fred, and I eat too much.  To enable my addiction, I find places that let me eat as much as I want, and don't charge too much.  The only other thing I ask is that the food, which I want plentiful and relatively cheap, be good.  That's not too much to ask, is it?

I already told you about Kebab ("Eats").  It's an Indian restaurant at the corner of 167th and NE 6th (just west of the southwest corner), and it's been there, in one incarnation or another, for decades.  (Get it?  Indian restaurant, incarnation?  Never mind.)  And the reason I know it's been there for decades is that I have been eating there for decades.  When I used to live on Miami Beach, when I was home visiting during the time I lived in Massachusetts, and since I came back in 2005.  I used to eat dinner there, and I almost always got the vegetarian dinner in "thali."  (A round metal tray with compartments, and it contained the whole dinner.)  It wasn't easy to finish, and it was exceptionally good.  Now, I go there for lunch.  They're open Tuesday through Sunday, and they serve the all-you-can-eat (ah, my specialty) buffet lunch on weekdays: Tuesday through Friday.

I'm a little ashamed to tell you how much it costs, but not much more ashamed than to think about how much I eat.  Let's just say that their charge, and my appetite, are a crime.  It costs just under $10.

So that's requirement #1 and requirement #2.  The satisfaction of requirement #3 is something like this.  The range of dishes is about standard for Indian restaurants, especially for lunch buffets.  The soup is usually either mulligatawny or lentil.  Occasionally, it's vegetable.  I suppose it depends on the chef's mood, or who knows what else, but the quality is not the same every time.  It ranges anywhere from very good to spectacular.  Today, the soup happened to be lentil, and it was spectacular.  For me, a detectable amount of heat (spiciness) pushes it up to spectacular.

Then, there's the main event.  They have many different veggie dishes, including simple basmati rice, cabbage with peas, mixed vegetables, okra today (excellent; one of my all time favorites), and a couple of others I can't remember off hand.  Oh, spinach sometimes.  There's also regular salad, of the lettuce, tomato, and cucumber variety.  They don't have conventional salad dressing, but they do have tamarind sauce and mint sauce, which make great salad dressing.  They always have appetizers, which are either samosas or pakoras.  Either one is good, but the samosas are better.  There's excellent onion chutney for those.

The special veggie dish is pumpkin.  It's served only Tuesdays and Fridays, and it is not to be missed.  It is why I typically aim myself preferentially to be there on a Tuesday or a Friday.

Then, they have meat dishes.  There's chicken curry and sometimes tilapia with vegetables.  The latter is magnificent.  Of course they have tandoori chicken, which is as good as can be.  The killer meat dish, though, and worth the price of admission all by itself, is the goat curry.  I don't know if they do this for the West Indians in the neighborhood, or they just like it, but it's wonderful.

I didn't tell you about the nan (essentially pita bread), but you figured that out for yourself.  They don't have the specialty breads on the lunch buffet.

Finally, there's dessert.  You're stuffed already, and I'm still eating.  Sorry.  They have two desserts.  It's either rice pudding or gulab jamun.  I can never figure out which day is which one, or maybe it's just whatever they feel like.  Anyway, you can't miss.  The gulab jamun is as good as gulab jamun ever is (and nice and soft, not gritty, on the inside), and the rice pudding is better than most anywhere else.

I hope I have a few more decades, because I've become somewhat reliant on Kebab.  I'm addicted to them.