When Bad Service Trumps Good Food: A Conundrum with Ali Baba in Troy

A take-home dessert from Ali Baba

I want it to be all about the food.

I'll work hard to make it that way.  I'll make excuses for lousy service, pretend the wait for the food only seemed that long.  I am aware that such behavior on my part can be annoying.  But I can't help it--usually.

Ali Baba, a Turkish restaurant in Troy that serves some very good food, pushed me over that edge the last time I dined there.  This was our second visit; the first was shortly after moving here, when K and I drove her mother down that row of dilapidated housing on 15th Street.  Our expectations were modest considering the neighborhood and that I got myself flashed at and hollered at by a Troy cop while parking (for not signaling early enough; I assume the officer noticed my North Carolina plates).  Yet the lavash bread and the phenomenal ajuka to go with it all made the trip more than worthwhile.  My future mother-in-law, who knows her food, was still talking about it weeks after returning to Las Vegas.

So when K's Turkish friend, F, visited from Boston a few weeks ago, of course we had to take her to Ali Baba.  But while the food still mostly stood up to the tastes of our first visit, the service was so off-putting that K and I aren't likely to return anytime soon.

Korean in the Capital Region: Kinnaree in Albany and Kabuki in Latham

There's something inherently fun about the dining experience at a proper Korean restaurant.  Proper, at least in my mind, starts with a generous serving of banchan, which are basically a variety of side dishes/appetizers served prior to your entree and included in the price of your meal.

An example of banchan

It's a safe bet that there will be some kimchi--the item most associated with Korean cuisine--as part of your banchan.  And that's a good thing; I'll often forget just how much I love that fermented cabbage until I have some put right in front of me.  But there are a lot (trust me: click on that link) of different dishes that can be part of banchan, which is part of the fun.  Sharing them, you can basically have a complete meal--from the mung beans to the always-delicious sweet soy-braised potatoes--if the restaurant dishes out eight or more small plates of banchan. The best we ever had was in Springfield, MO, of all places, at a restaurant named Soo's, where the banchan was plentiful and delicious and the servers would come by and ask if you wanted seconds.

So when trying out a pair of Korean restaurants (or, I suppose, to put it properly, Asian-fusion restaurants serving Korean food) in the Albany area, Kabuki Korean Restaurant in the Peter Harris Plaza in Latham, and Kinnaree Asian Restaurant on Lark Street in downtown Albany, it's hard not to start rating the experience based on the quantity and quality of the banchan.

But in this case, the banchan wasn't so special at either restaurant; it was the entrees that allowed one to stand clearly above the other.

Weekend Drink Pick: Smuttynose "Finestkind" IPA (with a bit on the Montague Bookmill)

The IPA is a beer style for all seasons, really, but sometimes I wonder what season it's best suited for.  Some of the heavier, higher-ABV versions can be nice and warming on a chilly spring or fall night.  But maybe just because I drank more IPAs this summer than ever before, I think the IPA is a brilliant alternative to some of the lighter beers associated with steamy afternoons and stuffy nights: the wheat beers, the Belgian whites.

This especially goes for a pleasantly, but not overly-hoppy, IPA with some citrusy overtones, like the Smuttynose "Finestkind" IPA, which I tried for the first time in early August on tap at the Montague Bookmill's Lady Killigrew Cafe, and for the second time by bottle earlier this week (where it still fit nicely against the backdrop of cooler temperatures).

Home and Away: The Splendid Table's Yam Tamarind Curry vs. Shanghai Grill's Thai Red Curry

I've mentioned previously how I was kind of sheltered as an eater for the first, oh, two-thirds of my life.  Stuffed cabbage was exotic.  Enchiladas were super-exciting.  This was small-town life in the '80s and '90s, and I didn't know anything different.

Just like my first bite of legit pastrami was a come-to-Jesus moment, so too was my first taste of Thai curry.  I remember it pretty clearly.  This was eight years ago to the month: I was in Pittsburgh, my first couple weeks of grad school, wandering through Oakland with a few of my new "colleagues," if you will, before attending a reading.  It started raining, and I, the foolish boy from California, was woefully unprepared.  I ended up sloshing my way into Lulu's Noodles, a cheap and decent Asian fusion place in between the Pitt and Carnegie Mellon campuses.

It was the perfect time to try a bowl of curry for the first time, and I seriously remembered thinking this was the best thing I'd ever eaten.  You know how some websites have "What's your favorite food?" as a security question?  Yeah, I had a new answer.  I assumed back then, and a long time after, that curry was impossibly complicated and difficult to make.

I was wrong.  Whether you're making the curry paste yourself or getting a good one out of a jar, it's not really that hard.  Which is why it feels particularly egregious when you get a lousy one out at a restaurant.

A Cheese Tour Addendum, or The Orange Ball

I mentioned this briefly in my first Cheese Tour post, but K and I weren't the only ones to come away with something splendid from our visits to the farms last weekend.  Mr. P (aka Peanut Aloysius J---) may not have partaken in our cheese eating (he prefers the low-fat cheddar sticks or string cheese from Trader Joe's), but he did get a new toy from the fine folks at 3-Corner Field Farm. 

And oh, what a toy it is.  Made from the wool from their lovely sheep on the farm, I knew this would have the smell, the taste, the texture that would drive Peanut wild.

Weekend Drink Pick: Woodchuck Private Reserve Belgian White Hard Cider

One of the best things about moving to a new place--and actually staying in that place a while--is having the little eccentricities of the area unfold gradually before you.  Now, I don't know that I'll ever spend enough time in Vermont to learn what it's really like up there, but I get the sense that it's a place with some real character.

The most recent example of that for me?  Reading on the website for Woodchuck Hard Cider that the name of the brand came about because "the Vermontiest of Vermonters are sometimes called 'woodchucks,'" and that seemed a fitting name for their small-batch, Vermont-based cider.  Two things: 1) I kind of like the idea of being called a woodchuck, and 2) What does it mean to be Vermonty?

We'll see if I ever learn the answer to that question, but for now I'm enjoying some of the fine products Vermont has to offer: to go with some of the Vermont-based cheese I picked up from the Washington County Cheese Tour, I drank a bottle of the Woodchuck cider.  And not just any cider of theirs, but a bottle of their "ultra-limited edition" Private Reserve Belgian White.  Sounds awfully special, eh?