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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2797 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Just a fun anecdote about petty perfectionism.

I have a completely insignificant personal instagram where I only post photos of food I cook. I post my high-effort food as posts, and low-effort food as stories.

I am on my 98th post now, and have decided to have a post with my face in it for the 100th. I am not anonymous or faceless or anything. Just that I'd gotten used to not having my face in my posts and 100 seemed like a nice landmark.

But that makes my 99th post kinda significant. The last of an old era. So for a good 2 months, I have been cooking like a madman, and everything goes into a story, because it isn't good enough.

So here I am, agonizing about something completely stupid.

Have a good laugh at my expense.

What is compelling you to post all your food on instagram? Are you hoping to turn it into a career or do you just like doing it?

I don't have instagram, but sometimes I cook something and I just send my parents the picture. I get the urge to share what you've just cooked up. Discord at a gaming group I'm in has a 'food' pics channel too.

No one ever expected me to learn to cook or be good at it, but it did happen. I'm just too cheap to buy takeout and too fussy to do the typical male thing and just eat like a bachelor.

It is my primary hobby and I genuinely love it.

The restaurant business is horrible and I have a flourishing career I love. So, not swapping careers anytime soon.

I have been the type of person who loves anything and everything, so half commits to 10 different things at once at all times.

Cooking & food in general have been remarkably stable within this chaos and my Instagram is a sort of proof for myself. It is immensely gratifying to have portfolio of food you've cooked, while scrolling through the posts narrates your entire journey.

I kind of know what I am waiting for. I move to a new city (one where all my friends live) in 2 months, and am planning a huge house warming potluck. So I am sort of waiting for it happen.

If my present career bet pays off, I should reach FIRE comfortably.

At that point, I'd like to try a few food business ideas:

  • Granny cafe. Street food pop-up where a granny serves as head-chef 1 season at a time. Granny only need to work the first couple of month or so, the line cooks take over for the rest of the year. Once you reach sustenance, flip it over to some catering service. The goal is make hyper-authentic food and sell it to elite white people in hipster towns. Hard part is establishing supply chains for sourcing hyper authentic ingredients.

  • Write a food science book about regional Indian cuisines. Honestly, the entire area of non-punjabi Indian cuisines is not well understood. Think an Indian Fuchsia Dunlop. If the book sells, launch an associated Indian fine-dining restaurant. I recently visited a bunch of Indian fine dining restaurants when I was back home. The quality is terrible and the demand is there. It should not be that hard to displace them. (assuming the quality doesn't change for a decade or so). Think Indian Nathan Myhrvold

  • I have an idea around mixing education and the trades, with the restaurant business being one such trade. It involves finding loopholes for getting around labor laws and exploiting those to underpay teenagers to be economically sustainable. Teens learn the entire process, not just being line cooks, but their reduced productivity is made up for with the exploitative wages. I am strongly of the opinion that an altruistic setup for such a thing can be found, but the optics sound so bad, that I'll probably want to keep it under wraps until the first few teens come out visibly benefiting from it.

so too is Indian food best from middle-tier establishments where the money is there to acquire quality ingredients without recipe pretension, at least in my opinion.

Frankly, I would rate a good mom and pop shop ahead of some Michelin-star restaurant any day of the week. My observation of the high end food world is that it's basically people who are bored trying to keep it interesting for themselves, while losing sight of the fact that for anyone who isn't immersed in the culinary world all this going to be unbearably pretentious.

I don't even necessarily get mad at the chefs who do this stuff or the critics who eat it up. I would probably be bored with classic dishes too if I was in that line of work. But for me personally, I don't want creativity or "elevating" a dish. I just want normal dishes that are prepared with skill and care.

It is not just that. The food is creatively bankrupt too.

It is not surprising, because India has only ever had "professionally meticulous" culinary cultures in 2 places : Royal Mughal chefs and mothers who care a lot.

The former has leveraged this to the point where Mughal food is defacto fancy Indian food. It spurred the invention of dishes like Butter Chicken, Tandoori & Dal Makhni in the 20th century, but the entire cuisine has had a lazy 21st century. Nothing about the invention of the aforementioned dishes needed validation from French techniques. It as entirely grounded in innovating within the Indian landscape.

The latter is the underexplored bit. There are incredible painstaking home dishes cooked by women of the family that were never sold for money, but took the same amount of effort as any crowning jewel in a fine restaurant. Many of these are already 'farm to table' sort of recipes and need specific regional mixes to work. (eg: our village red chilli powder has 28 ingredients. Just the base chilli powder)

All Indian fine dining I've seen boils down to:

  • Mughlai / Punjabi / well-executed-classics : Atul Kocchar, Junoon,

  • British colonizer food / Mumbai Irani Cafe food - Dishoom

  • Expensive western seafood done in Indian coconutty curries. (The one bugs me the most. Get your head out of your asses and stop cooking mild Lobster & King crabs. You are bastardizing the entire cuisine by using the wrong fish. People struggle with Saba Miso too, but the Japanese don't swap out the Mackarel !)

  • Straight up just French restaurants with Indian ingredients.

None of these are bad per-se. At their best (top 5 in the world), the well-executed classics are worth the money spent. But, it's what I would feel like if all European fine-dining was Pasta & Pizza. After some point, it wears on you.

Now for the positives.

  1. I am liking what I am hearing from Roni Mazumdar and his restaurants. His NYC restaurants are all excellent executions of classics. If what he is saying is to be believed, then I am hoping he funds a restaurant that caters for less common Indian cuisines.

  2. On the french restaurant with Indian ingredients side, Gaggan comes close to practically turning that whole thing on its head by asserting his own strong personality as a chef. It has a "It is French, it is Indian, it is my food, fuck you" attitude, that I adore. He has been AWOL for a few years, I am really looking forward to what he comes out with.

  3. Regional cuisines are sneaking into $$ sign restaurants. Kathakali in Seattle does a marvellous job of executing malabar cuisine and sticking to it's guns with what's a tiny menu by Indian standards. I haven't been to Annapurna Marathi cusine in the bay area, but it is just nice to see a spot focusing on a narrow regional cuisine.

  4. There is a model to follow : East Asians. Japanese chefs have managed to carve out space for very narrow and deep explorations of Japanese ideas, implement them uncompromisingly in a manner that is aesthetically Japanese & win fine-dining accolades for it. From Shinto Omakase, to Soba shops to Niku Udon spots. The key is to give up the obsession with a French aesthetic. Modern reviewers only care about obsession & care in general, and not so much whose standards they live up to.

Yo, Thanks so much for this reco.

The food looks amazing. I love the inclusion of actual home-style Indian ingredients like okra & sabudana. The presentation is in touch with Indian nostalgia, esp with the dessert on a stick. And I can see some underappreciated regional favorites like Dhokla, Galoti kebab & roomali roti on there.

They make paneer out of buffalo milk ! It warms my heart to see that.

Totally visiting it next time I'm in London. (why did you lot have to #brexit. I really don't want get a new visa. I might still swing by to see my favorite club play football, but maybe next year when we're actually doing well XD )

What does Instagram specifically add to it? I also like to have pictures of what I do for my hobbies, but they are saved offline, and I would add them to my website if I wanted to share them. By the way I'm genuinely curious and this is not a snark, it's obvious that when something that millions of people do baffles me there is a problem with my mental model of it.

I used to be of this opinion, until my community got spread across multiple continents. Instagram to me, is the least toxic social media platform that all my friends also use. A lot of us busy people who get forced into an 'out of sight, out of mind' sort of situation with friends. Instagram keeps you 'in sight' and 'on their minds'. A small exchange every few months keeps ties for times when you want to crash at their places when you visit, need help with something specific or just plain want to share in their happiness. Community is the most important thing for me and Instagram with least-bad solution to the logistical difficulties of keeping that community intact.

As for why food, it is a few fold.

  1. I don't like playing into the insecurity enhancing parts of social media. I worry that putting my face, body, career or experiences on there will pull out insecurities that force me to engage in activities that I don't enjoy, but still do for the optics. Even if brag-worthy, me projecting how well I am doing with my body / dating / career would just make others insecure. The 3 things I put on Instagram : food, music, hikes are places where I find peer pressure to be healthy, and I don't think it injects any insecurity into my community.

  2. Food is also the easiest way to make conversation. My mom and I bond on food. My friends message me for recipes all the time. Some just comment with heart emojis. It is an insanely effective social lubricant

  3. In big social groups, it is important to have an 'elevator pitch / have a thing'. It just makes your dynamic with the rest of the group easier. On trips, I get restaurant finding duty. In house parties, I am the chef. Your "thing" also conveys stereotypes that come with it. "The food guy" conveys warmth, giving, altruism which are values that I both espouse and want to convey.

  4. I love it and my monkey brain wants everyone to know I love it.

The "normie" spends an inordinate amount of time on social media. Especially young, urban, and {pattern} ones. In the socio/cultural/psychological space, one's social media account is an extension of part of that person. It's "just how things are done".

Within those circles, people will infer a lot from your social media. Not having one can be a signal of something (usually insidious), etc.

It's very strange to think about if you aren't accustomed to it, but that's how it is.

I would buy your Indian cookbook in a second. Hell, I'd appreciate any blogging or instagramming you do on the topic.

I'll probably start doing it properly once I move to my new place. My new roomates are also more camera savvy, so I might get their help to setup a mini studio.

My 2023 food targets are:

  1. Complete experimentation on tres leches shahi tukda. I am almost there with this one. When complete it will be hand crafted to be my favorite dessert. (Some places already do a similar dish....but all the variants i have seen so far are kinda lazy)

  2. Start experimentation on the grand veg biryani project. The goal is to throw every trick in book at creating something worthy lf the veg biryani moniker. I am presently playing with ideas around trumoet mushrooms, persian tadik, hainanese chicken rice & paella. But my main goal here is to finish identifying a worthy protein replacement.

  3. Find a bombil / snakefish equivalent in western markets. Bombil is a very unique fish & the pride of my family, but impossible to source in the US. I want to find the closest fish replacement.

  4. Make khawa poli & kaladi cheese. Both are some of my favorite hidden gems from back home. Impossible to find outside a few villages. Will be very hard to find the right recipe. Thankfully I'll know when its right, because the flavors are deeply embedded in me.

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