Quick Review of Pushpita Indian Restaurant

Summary: an adequate Indian restaurant that is best served as a quick fix to your Indian craving

After having spent a couple of days in the metropolis of Northern Alberta known as Peace River, I was ready to come back to good ol’ Calgary and savour the sights and sounds of a big city once again. I was super-hungry getting off the flight, so the first thing I did after dropping my bags off was to head out to Pushpita, which is only a few blocks from my place. I have been eyeing this restaurant for a while now, but hadn’t had a chance to patronize it. Today was going to be the day…

I didn’t want to hang around and have the full restaurant experience, so I decided to get a couple of items to go: paneer masala ($10.99), dal ($9.99), and garlic naan ($2.50). The items weren’t over-priced, but considering Pushpita isn’t in downtown central, I was expecting the prices to be a bit lower. Their take-out lunch buffet is also $10.99, so ordering items a la carte, unfortunately, is not going to be a an everyday occurrence.

Anyways, onto the food.  The paneer masala was the first item I wanted to try as paneer (Indian cottage cheese) in anything is one of my most favourite things. In this case, it was paneer cooked in a (watery) broth of bell peppers, onions, carrots, and Indian spices.

I like to taste the broth first as it’s the part that’s exploding with flavour. I was a bit surprised and disappointed with the broth: surprised ‘cause the broth was spicier than I was expecting; disappointed ‘cause it tasted like the chef threw in a much of chilli powder just to spice things up. The paneer was also a bit uneven as there were some pieces that were soft and chewy whereas other pieces were harder – odd as both varieties tasted the same. Overall, I enjoyed the dish, but I have had better.

Next up was the daal, which was a perfect dish for a cloudy day. Daal is a simple dish that consists of lentils in a simple broth mix of mustard seeds, cumin, and red chillies. It’s one of the most basic of Indian dishes that you shouldn’t, nay, can’t screw up. In retrospect, I should have had it after the paneer masala as the more complex spice mix simply overwhelmed the simpler daal. It tasted alright, but I have nothing really to add apart from that.

Where the naan in all this, you might ask? The naan served as the sponge to soak up all the spicy goodness in both dishes. Once again, the naan was nothing to write home about: although it was soft, it was also weirdly chewy. The end effect was that it felt like I was chewing on doughy naan. It was edible no doubt, but it’s nothing compared to buttery, flaky, soft naan served at more well-heeled establishments.

So, all-in-all, I wasn’t blown away by this little restaurant. I was really hoping to discover a hidden jewel, perhaps much like Canada Dosa Corner, but found instead, a mediocre restaurant that will serve as a temporary fix for my Indian craving from time to time.

The final saving grace is that they have a pretty extensive menu consisting of meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetarian dishes (that’s probably part of the reason for the mediocre food – spread too thin), so I just might get some other vegetarian options to taste. Stay tuned!

Review of Bookers BBQ Grill and Crab Shack (Big Taste Calgary)

NOTE: Due to technical difficulties (i.e., shitty iPhone pictures), this post doesn’t have any awesome photos. You will have to use your imaginations!

Bookers BBQ Grill and Crab Shack, in case you are not familiar with it, attempts to capture the old charm of New Orleans cuisine.  Slow-cooked barbeque meats and buckets full of succulent seafood – sounds like my kind of place!  Kent and I checked it out with a few friends during the Big Taste (formerly Calgary Dine-Out week), figuring that we couldn’t go wrong with what appeared to be a Calgary institution.

The exterior has all the indie cred that you could ask for – rustic brick exterior, hand-drawn signage and across the road from the Cecil to boot.  Inside, however, it takes on a trendier look with shiny benches, stools, and attractive glassware coupled together with equally attractive waitresses.  Bookers’ website suggested that crab races used to be held during Mardi Gras but I saw no evidence that would suggest that it is anything but propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, this place is pretty unaccommodating to vegetarians, so it was just as well that we checked this out while Kiran was out of town.  The menu is fairly extensive, with a variety of BBQ and seafood based appetizers, entrees, and platters.  It also happened to be All-You-Can-Eat snow crab night, but at north of $40, it was a tad expensive and we wanted to try a larger variety of foods anyway.

A cursory glance at the menu suggested that the Big Taste special – consisting of chowder, jambalaya and chocolate cake – was a good deal, until we found out that it actually consisted of half-sized portions of chowder and jambalaya.  Blasphemy!  At that rate, it ended up being $21 worth of food for the cost of $25 – clearly, arithmetic is not a strong suit at Bookers.  Given that our dinner-table discussions were revolving around how “pasta in restaurants is way too expensive because it is so cheap to cook at home,” such a scam left some of our friends quite affronted.  We ultimately settled on sharing a BBQ platter (brisket, ribs, wings, fries and biscuits), a crab platter (snow crab, king crab, crab-artichoke dip and crab cakes) and an order of jambalaya.  Sides of beans and coleslaw came standard with the platters.

Our anticipation began to build as they brought out our dipping butter and crab-eating tools, some of which I had never seen before.  Just as my appetite began to peak, the platters arrived. And what epic platters they were! While everything looked terrific (except the wings, which were amongst the smallest I’d ever seen, though there were tons of them), the food varied in quality from terrific to average.  The highlights to me were the jambalaya (the perfect mix of ingredients with just the right amount of liquid – on the edge of soupiness), brisket (smoky and tender, if somewhat unevenly sauced) king crab (succulent and almost lobster-like in its meatiness) and biscuits (dip them in butter for the ultimate artery-clogging experience!).  One casualty of the “huge-ass-pile-of-food” method of plating was the set of crostinis used for scooping up the crab dip – half of them were too soggy to use.  The wings were rather disappointing, being both small and dry, and were the only meat product that we weren’t able to finish.

One thing that there was no shortage of was butter – not only was there additional whipped butter on the side, but there was bottomless dipping butter for your crab (and biscuits, and fries…), which they refilled using coffee-pots full of liquid butter!  F*cking ingenious.

The final bill came to around $40 per person including drinks – certainly not cheap by any means, but reasonable for the level of gluttony that we partook that evening.  All-in-all, it was a good venue that I’d recommend to anyone looking for a taste of the South.  I don’t have the credentials to comment on the authenticity of the food, but I can say that if that’s how people from Louisiana eat on a regular basis, I totally understand why so many of them are morbidly obese.

Bottom line

BBQ Brisket, Biscuits, Butter, Buckets of crab – Brilliant.

-Richard

Ranking

Ambiance	5/6
Service	4/6
Taste	5/6
Plating	4.5/6
Originality	5/6
Value	4/6
Total	27.5/36 = 76.3%