A new East Village restaurant is serving galouti kebab, a stable of Lucknow, the hometown of Jaya Saxena’s father. In this lovely essay, Saxena explores the delight of finding this cultural experience in her hometown, while recognizing it as a different experience to eating the kebab in India. I enjoyed that rather than being disappointed, she found joy in this difference: “The hometowns are not the same, but now a piece of one is available in the other.”
We sat in a lofted seating area, looking down on the man forming kebabs with one hand, lining the patties on the edge of a plate for another cook to fry. Eating them, I felt a tingling heat I’d never experienced. The chile mellowed beneath the other spices, all of them building and building until I felt my consciousness lift three inches past my brow, like the last time I’d successfully smoked a joint. My cousin and I were giddy, sweeping up the kebab with roomali roti and washing it down with Limca, barely able to form sentences but in complete agreement this was a meal we’d remember forever. My grandfather beamed, I’m not sure whether for himself or for us.
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