Rasoi

This is a quick review, because I waited way too long to write it. I love Rasoi, and actually prefer it to other Indian places in the City. Other places are too Americanized (Not Just Spices might be my all time favorite, but really, it is quite different than Rasoi and India (in the best way possible) so it is almost in a class of its own).

We hadn’t had Rasoi in awhile, and wanted to use this opportunity to order something out of our comfort zone. We also wanted to make sure we’d have a fantastic dinner, so we had to order some of our favorites as well. Here’s what we got:

The Order:

• Cauliflower 65 appetizer
• Garlic Nan and an order of Paneer Nan
• Tandoori Chicken dinner with masala potatoes and lentils
• Bengali Seafood Stew with basmati rice and vegetable

(the total, under $50)

The lovely and tasty Cauliflower 65

First, the favorite… Cauliflower 65. If you haven’t had it, do yourself a favor and order it as soon as possible. Fried florets dipped in a breading of 65 spices – its not hot spicy, but instead full of flavor and fried goodness. It takes cauliflower and does to it what french frying does to potatoes. Its like they added bacon… Its hard to describe, its just really good. Get some.

Nan, for the uninitiated, is simply fluffy rounds of bread baked in a tandoori oven. Simple enough, and topped with a variety of savories.

Now, the rest of the order was outside of our comfort zone. I mean, not really, since I don’t think you can actually order something terrible at Rasoi. We usually get the mango curry or saag paneer, but this time, we wanted to try different dishes. In short, we were glad we did.

Bengali Stew and Tandoori Chicken

The Bengali Seafood Stew was great, with all sorts of seafood in a lovely, creamy sauce. The Tandoori chicken was fantastic, with a great bit of char on the outside of the chicken (bone in) but not so much to make it dry or overcooked. The pictures don’t do it much justice, but are the best I could.

In short, thumbs up for Rasoi. You can’t go wrong, and if you eat at the restaurant instead of ordering take out, its a lovely experience with great service and ambiance.

Faial Restaurant, Smithfield

I guess I’m just bad with gift certificates. Don’t get me wrong, I love eating for cheap (or free!) but it seems to take me awhile to get to a place if I haven’t been before and know that I will like it. I think we had gift certificate’s for Faial’s for at least six months, maybe nine, before we tried it the other night.

A few years ago, too, I had been there for a Mother’s Day brunch with about a dozen of us, but I don’t remember much of the experience. Since I didn’t remember much about the menu, I looked online. Faial’s is a mix of Portuguese favorites, but the menu consists mainly of various seafood and pasta options, with some cuts of beef as well. The food is mostly Mediterranean in style, meaning it has Spanish, Portuguese and Italian influences. The restaurant’s name comes from the island of Faial in the Azores, and is not, such as I thought, someone’s last name.

The other prelude I had that set my expectations a bit was the fact that the gift certificates came from my 80-some odd year old aunt. This told me that the restaurant might just be the family friendly type of place that it turned out to be. The decor, once we arrived, was described by my wife as “mid-range hotel”. I don’t think she meant this in a terribly bad way. Simply, that while the name and prices may suggest a high-end affair, the location (Smithfield) and the decor indicated that it was a down-home kind of place, without pretension. Sure, there wasn’t style or panache, either… but we weren’t there for that.

The bread for the meal comes up with a warm ramekin of their signature red sauce (available for carry out in jars). Faial sauce – widespread throughout the menu – is not really describes anywhere on the menu, so I’ll do my best to get it’s ingredients right: a tomato-base with butter, garlic, paprika, wine? and spices. Unstirred, the top layer of the sauce is oily with butter, while the bottom was thick and chunky with garlic. It was also surprisingly spicy – surprising mostly when I think of my family enjoying it, a group not known for a love of spicy food.

The plates being passed around us looked large, so we opted to go right for an entree. My wife got the Paehla ($26), which is usually a bouillabaisse of seafood and rice. In this case, though, it was a 1/2 lobster, shrimp, scallops, mussels & littlenecks, served over our seafood rice, topped with  Faial sauce. It was huge, and it looked really, really good. It seems to be a favorite, too, as we started to notice many other people at other tables with this giant dish in front of them.

Carne de Porco

I got the Carne de Porco Alendejana since I felt like I should get something Portuguese at a Portuguese restaurant. The dish was meatier than I anticipated, but I should have known, as Portuguese main dishes are usually very meaty. This was slow stewed pork pieces with littlenecks and roasted potatoes drenched in a thinned-out Faial sauce ($18). The meat was very tender and basically broke apart with the fork. The sauce was a great compliment to all the elements on the plate. I think I tackled maybe about a third of what was on the plate, and had plenty to take home. (It was great over rice the next day.)

Since we had just gorged ourselves but tried to exercise some version of restraint, we treated ourselves to coffee (decaf for her, espresso for me) and a flan dessert. The coffee was good, but the flan was, well, it had dollops of canned whip cream and rainbow sprinkles. It was strange… flan should not come with sprinkles in my mind, but maybe I was being uncultured and close-minded. Flan doesn’t always mean elegant, I know – there are flan-flavored jello puddings, after all, and it really just means caramel custard – but I felt like in this setting it should have been treated with a little more respect.

The very strange flan

The service was pretty solid, I have to say. You get the impression that the staff see quite a few families and parties large and small come through there on any given night. When we had tried to go on a Saturday, the place was already booked up with reservations. The only thing that annoyed me was that my empty beer bottle seemed to linger on the table after all the dishes had been cleared and we were enjoying coffee and dessert. I know, it’s such a small thing…  I guess if that’s all I have to complain about, than it was really almost nothing.

Overall, a thumbs up. I can’t say I will be “in the mood” for Faial very often, but if we think about it, we’ll go back and try something else off their very extensive menu.