Masala Cafe Provides the Dishes of Chennai to Jersey Town

Barbara F. Watson 4 years ago

In some cases it seems like the restaurateurs of Jersey City’s India Square are enjoying an elaborate video game of musical chairs. The 30 or so restaurant storefronts on the two-block strip shutter and then reopen with distinct names, but typically presenting similar menus of dosas or biryanis. Occasionally a newcomer appears with a distinctive culinary technique, and Masala Cafe is these types of a location.

A pinkish room with brown wainscoting with tables along one wall and a big screen TV at the end.

Masala Cafe’s inside

It was spawned previous October by a restaurant with a related title in downtown Newark devoted to South Indian foodstuff, but with tons of northern, Indo-Chinese, and citified street eats thrown into the combine, making for a menu with one thing for everybody. But a lot of of the eating institutions in Jersey Town by now include those people bases clearly a thing different was essential. So, owner and chef P. Chelladurai decided to aim additional intently on the delicacies of Chennai, a city in the Tamil Nadu state on India’s southeast coast. Formerly known as Madras, the town was historically popular for its textile business. Chelladurai grew up in Periyapalayam, a town on the Arani river northwest of the metropolis.

Via just one of my company who served as translator, the chef advised us 1 evening in Tamil, “I was in IT right before, and thought it would be enjoyment to open a cafe. I looked around and understood there was no reliable put devoted exclusively to the cooking of Madras.” He also advisable quite a few dishes, and I managed to consider most of them on 3 visits. The restaurant occupies a deep space culminating in a kitchen area, with two parallel dining rooms, just one adorned with vibrant plates, the other with supergraphic image photographs of spices.

The cafe labels itself Chettinad, referring to one of Tamil Nadu’s cultural groups, the Chettiars, who are dependable for a person of the state’s dominant cuisines. Its recipes are popular for their subtlety and elaborate ground-spice aromas, with flavors explained to mirror the dry weather. Appetizers are a strong issue on Masala Cafe’s menu, even though most could also functionality as major courses when rice is ordered.

Two hands hold a metal vessel by the handles filled with chicken parts strewn with purple onions and green cilantro.

Kozhi milagu varuval, also acknowledged as black pepper rooster

A flatbread held up and falling apart.

Flaky southern Indian parotta

Kozhi milagu varuval ($13.99) is a basic: bone-in hen elements coated with a dark-beige gravy, with loads of ginger and black pepper — a spice indigenous to India that predated the appearance of chiles from South The united states in the late 15th century. In fact, the cuisine’s oldest recipes can be normally be determined by way of their use of black pepper alternatively than chiles. The dish arrives strewn with cilantro and raw purple onions, and is most effective eaten with parotta, a flaky round flatbread that falls apart in layers. “It’s buttery like a croissant, only flakier,” a close friend pointed out one particular afternoon.

An additional exceptional appetizer, and potentially good brunch dish, is egg murtaba ($10.99). It is composed of a whole-wheat crust folded in excess of a spicy egg filling, stacked on the plate like shirts in a drawer, and accompanied by an onion raita and a masala gravy. Dip the slices in possibly and appreciate. For a slight more charge, you can have your murtaba stuffed with rooster or mutton, but I choose the mellowing result of eggs. The recipe evidently originated in the Center East, and was carried by the tides of Islam all the way to Singapore and Malaysia, halting in much southern India along the way for the country’s very own unique spin.

Folded stuffed flatbreads with yogurt sauce and brown gravy.

Egg murtaba, initially from the Center East

A blue bowl of red sauce with green leaves bobbing in it.

Spicy poondu kuzhambu

A yellow bowl filled with rice and chicken, with a couple of sauces on the side.

Thalappakatt hen biryani

Surprises linger about just about every corner on Masala Cafe’s menu, with loads of dishes that have been unfamiliar to me. Like Oaxacan delicacies, in which moles functionality as most important courses, regardless of whether you toss in meat or not, Chettinad delicacies has stand-by itself sauces in good shape for a meal. “Spicy poondu kuzhambu” ($11.99) is 1: a garlicky and wonderfully oily tomato sauce that may well be mistaken for something you ate in Sicily, besides for its panoply of flavors, which includes lots and plenty of kari — the little, shiny, dark inexperienced, astringent herb also recognised as curry leaf. Poured in excess of basmati rice, the thick sauce helps make a great vegetarian repast.

But the rice you get at the cafe is not always the very long and crooked-grained basmati. Thalappakatti hen biryani ($14.99) utilizes a exclusive short-grain rice at times discovered in biryanis of southern India. This distinct planning name-checks a hotel restaurant in the city of Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, the place in the late 1950s the recipe was invented and accomplished regional fame. Served with raita and a tomato-dependent sauce, and topped with a boiled egg, the biryani is distinct, even among this biryani-hefty strip of Indian eating places. Even now I can keep in mind its refined flavors and fragrance, without staying fairly ready to describe them, other than furnishing a video to attest to its complexity.

The food items at Masala Cafe is frequently spicy, but you can provide your very own beer from a bodega all around the corner on Tonnelle Avenue. Somehow, beer stanches the burn up in a way even the creamy rosewater lassi ($4.50) simply cannot.

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