Posted by Wan Yan Ling, February 4, 2008 at 8:30 AM
In the bustling North Indian city of Kolkata, it seems ironic that the two things I’m most excited about (besides the mind boggling variety of street food) are probably also the most generic items to be found: leaf bowls and terracotta cups used by wallas (street hawkers) to contain yummy goodness.
These bowls and cups are disposable, biodegradable, ecofriendly, and—best of all—take the place of the nasty paper, plastic, foam, and foil stuff ubiquitous everywhere else.
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Posted by Wan Yan Ling, January 28, 2008 at 7:30 AM
I don't know about you, but my group of makan khakis (food buddies) and I have been plenty guilty of "reverse snobbery": "Oh, no more posh restaurants bedecked in stainless steel and frosted glass," we would snivel, "Give us originality. Give us boldness. Give us fiery character and soul!"
We were eager to pour scorn on cookie-cutter establishments and desperate to discover little-known, "hole in the wall" eateries. How smugly we would initiate others into the joys of roadside dining and other secret squirrel hideaways. And what a bunch of obnoxious twits we were.
For my pride's sake, I wish I could claim we were on a quest for good food, nothing more. Unfortunately, we were also drunk on the notion of us as gastronomic Indiana Jones. Like I said, twits.
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Posted by Raphael, January 14, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack…
Watch the video after the jump. [via Neatorama]
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Posted by Robyn Lee, January 11, 2008 at 2:45 PM
Sara Rosso, also known as Ms. Adventures in Italy, recently came back from her trip to India with beautiful photos and commentary about Indian street food and Indian Chinese cuisine. Sliced ice cream, atomically spicy vegetables, mini potato burgers, fried potato balls—I crave them all. Time to get my butt to India.
Posted by Adam Kuban, May 29, 2007 at 5:01 PM
In Mumbai, India, couriers called dabbawallas are the FedEx of food delivery. But instead of jets, they deliver by train, bicycle, and foot. And forget computerized routing and tracking: They use only a simple system of color codes and numbers to shuttle an estimated 175,000 or so lunches in stackable containers called dabbas:
The service is at once simple and complex. A network of wallas picks up the boxes from customers’ homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railway station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different stations in central Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After lunch, the service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.
It's not an altogether new story (Forbes mentioned it as far back as '98) but the fact that some Mumbai dabbawallas are starting to sign up customers via the web gives the story new legs for the New York Times.
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