Hindu-Muslim carnage at an Indo-Pak restaurant
We checked out Austin's newest South Asian restaurant the other night, Shalimar Restaurant at 9310 N. Lamar. It's a halal (i.e., "Muslim kosher") place with "Indian, Pakistani and Banglasdeshi cuisine", meaning lots of beef and chicken, including (yum!) seekh kabab. My wife had an excellent aloo palak (spinach and potatoes) so they do okay by vegetarians, too.
On the plus side, I'd have to say that Shalimar is the cleanest, best-lit budget South Asian restaurant I've ever been in. On the minus side, it has a pair of hi-res big-screen TVs positioned so they're visible to every seat in the place. That might be a plus except they're tuned to a satellite channel showing Bollywood hits in all their violent glory.
We got there in time to see the very pretty and somewhat daring love scene (real kissing!) from the beginning of Hey Ram, which had us pleasantly glued to the TVs over each others' heads; but after a commercial break it was followed in short order by the gang-rape of the young wife from the love scene, mercifully off camera but with plenty of screaming, followed by a bloody reenactment of the partition riots of 1947 Calcutta. Not exactly the right ambience by which to enjoy one's roti-kabab, and nothing we'll bring the kids to see, either. Nor could I quite get over the cognitive dissonance of crossing communal lines (quasi-Hindus that we are) to watch Hindu-Muslim atrocities in a Muslim restaurant. When the proprietor came out with a remote control I thought he was going to change the channel, but he just raised the volume. Fortunately he left the meat cleaver in the kitchen.
I guess when all is said and done, the famous South Asian tolerance wins out, at least this far from the front lines. Still I don't think I'd want to try doing the same thing in Ahmedabad.
By the way, according to the online Vocabulary of Indian Food, "seekh kabab" has nothing to do with Sikhs; a seekh is a skewer. Silly me, and I had been wondering why the characteristically Muslim dish was named for the Sikhs!
/ Usenet thread