Sandwich Eater’s Chronicles: The Food Must Be Good

Posted: August 27th, 2012 | Filed under: Sandwich Eater Chronicle | 1 Comment »

I found myself at my favorite home furnishings store Sunday afternoon. Contemporary Galleries. Locally owned. Nice folks. Great moderne furniture and accoutrements.

It’s located in a shopping center on north Hurstbourne, the plaza doing its best Detroit impression. Vacant. Very very vacant.

But next to CG and its fellow store, Home Today, is Bombay Grill, an Indian restaurant about which I am now going to observe.

There’s an old saw, usually heard about Chinese eateries. “There were a lot of Asians dining there. The food must be good.” Sometimes the word “good” can be heard instead of “authentic.” Anyway, you catch the drift, right?

Okay, actually the way it used to be said, in the days before political correctitude, was “There were a lot of Orientals there. The food must be good.”

But the use of that word “Oriental” has gone the way of Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan in a series of detective mysteries from the 1930s. Oland was a Swede by birth, truth be told, born John Verner Olund in the village of Nyby in Bjurholm parish in the county of Vasterbotten, Sweden. (Thank you, IMDb.com.)

Which locale, I surmise, is more than walking distance from Shanghai.

Only in the Hollywoodland of yesteryear would such casting seem appropriate. Yes, I digress.

Back to Bombay Grill for the Sunday buffet.

The place was jammin’. Even at 2:30 in the afternoon. Line waiting for tables. The only other non Indian Americans in the joint were one couple in the corner and a portly fellow with a loaded plate. He surely was driving by on his way to Golden Corral, saw the sign declaring “Lunch Buffet” and said to himself, “What the hey, I’ll give it a shot.”

What I said to myself upon first viewing the scene was, “Hmmm, look at all these Indians. The food must be really good.”

My next thought was not quite as politically correct, “Hmmm, looks like a computer company’s tech support convention.”

The food was good. Zesty. And to underscore my belief that it “must have been authentic,” there were a lot of dishes I’d never seen nor tasted before with names I don’t recall. Even at a way funky Indian restaurant where some friends and I supped in Grenada, Spain. No Americanization nor Spainization here.

Despite the alien spices and a healthy portion of Goat Biryani, I made it through the day and evening without any undue gastrointestinal distress. And felt that I’d discovered a weekly gathering spot for one of Louisville’s  burgeoning foreign communities.

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