Spice Symphony NYT top pick The Marriage of Indian and Chinese Cuisines Hungry City: Spice Symphony in Midtown East By LIGAYA MISHAN The scarlet sauce on a hillock of crispy, half-broken noodles is, ostensibly, Chinese sweet-and-sour. It is easy to pinpoint the familiar notes of soy, sugar and vinegar, but how to explain the steady, rippling bass line of chile heat? Squeeze of lime, whiff of cilantro, streaks of sour mango powder and black, sulfur-tinged salt: the balance tips toward tanginess and betrays the dish’s true roots, in India. Called Chinese bhel, the noodles are a variant of the traditional Indian street snack bhel puri, and part of a subset of Indian cooking (traceable back to Kolkata’s Chinatown and hugely popular across the subcontinent) that gleefully appropriates Chinese flavors to strange and often wondrous ends. Where American Chinese food tends to the sweet and vapid, with all the interesting bits buffed out, Indian Chinese is hotter and more motley, playing up the cuisines’ differences rather than seeking common ground. This culinary hyphenation is the specialty of Spice Symphony, which opened last September just north of the Lexington Avenue strip known as Curry Hill. The menu name-checks Sichuan and Manchuria, but these references are best understood as darts thrown at a map, not founts of origin. Blocks of paneer come submerged in a soup bowl’s worth of rust-colored sauce, identified as Sichuan. It is nothing of the kind. Instead, it is a magnificent standoff in which paneer, an earthy Indian cheese reminiscent in texture to firm tofu but more resistant to soaking up flavor, holds its own against sweet hot ginger and chile pepper. Equally, implausibly good is the ghost of takeout boxes past: knobs of chicken and broccoli florets in a vaguely brown, verging-on-viscous sauce. I kept eating it, in disbelief. That vaguely brown sauce shows up in a number of noteworthy dishes — bathing tender lamb, say, or enveloping deep-fried garlicky orbs of carrot, celery, leek and cabbage that somehow retain crunch despite total immersion — each time tasting completely different. Sometimes soy dominates, sometimes chile. The battle is never less than compelling. Indian Chinese is a shift in style for the chef, Walter D’Rozario, who took a more elevated approach in his previous post as chef de cuisine at Junoon. There, Mr. D’Rozario might have bundled spices into a bouquet garni, to be neatly disposed of before plating; at Spice Symphony, he throws in whole spices for a more rustic texture. (“This is grandmotherly cooking,” he explained.) He offers elegant renditions of classic Indian dishes as well: baby eggplants stuffed with fresh grated coconut and a fistful of spicy seeds, with coconut milk and yogurt poured over for a sweet-sour finish; tilapia in a curry of revivingly bitter fenugreek leaves; and goat on the bone, braised at low temperature until tender but still in character. Neither Indian nor Chinese is Mr. D’Rozario’s calamari and shrimp “bruschetta,” better defined as a salad in which mesclun greens are tucked under breaded loops of calamari, large triangles of garlic paratha (described on the menu as “crispy” but floppy in the version I received) and shrimp in an inchoate demi-curry. It doesn’t work. Spice Symphony has aspirations. Dinner begins with an amuse-bouche, which might be apricot chutney on papdi, a crisp wafer freckled with nigella and caraway seeds. Prices are kept low, Mr. D’Rozario said, to encourage sampling from the thoughtful selection of wines by the glass, put together by Prem Chouhan, an owner and former sommelier at Amma. But the front of the house falls to pieces in the face of crowds. Tables languish. One night, after a protracted wait, crags of house-made mango kulfi (a dense ice-cream-like concoction of caramelized condensed milk) arrived half-melted. The waiter let out a helpless laugh. “It sat too long in the kitchen,” he said, and vanished. We consoled ourselves with delicate alle belle, Goan crepes rolled around grated coconut and jaggery. And there, as inevitable as a fortune cookie, was gulab jamun, two perfect balls of fried dough, here turned suddenly glamorous, in a cocktail glass filled with saffron syrup and pistachio dust. It almost glittered. Spice Symphony 182 Lexington Avenue (East 31st Street), (212) 545-7742, spicesymphony. RECOMMENDED Paneer Sichuan; salt and pepper prawns; baingan bharwan; methi fish; ginger chicken with broccoli. PRICES $2 to $22. OPEN Daily for lunch and dinner. RESERVATIONS Accepted. WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance is a few steps down from the sidewalk, and restroom has a handrail.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 04:10:04 +0000
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