the basu trail..

I thought i had to immortalize this ...

A and I have been chinese food ethusiasts for for as long as I can remmember. Our association with chinese food started in Kolkata . In Kolkata everyone likes chinese food..the city has restaurants all over the place and not to mention Tangra or old china town.
A ghetto of chinese residents in the north eastern part of the city. But the chinese here are far from economically challenged. Most chinese families here live in huge mansions and run fairly various business : tanneries, chinese sauce production units, successful beauty parlours and almost all of them run chinese restaurants on the ground floor of their mansions. The community is very close knit and it is not unusual to come across a big mama in one these restaurants who understands little or no english. These restaurants are always run by members of the family.. you would more often not find the daughter or daughter in law of the family handling the till and ushering in guests. The food is what I would call Indian Chinese or Calcutta Chinese as it is known in other parts of the world.
Also this is the only place in Kolkata where one could get alcohol even on dry days ..if you can get past the long line of cars and cabs that is.
At one point A would have his lunch everday in a restaurant in Tangra called 'lily's kitchen'' which served the best panfried noodles I have ever had .
When we moved to Pune, chinese food options were limited, so we decided to start cooking at home. thanks to A's travels availability of ingredients was never an issue.
And our cooking at home evolved over a period of time. As far as chinese is concerned A is strictly a recipe book chef. We started with books like easy to cook chinese to land of plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop.Fuchsia Dunlop is a hot favourite with us.. She has studied Sichuan Cuisine in Chengdu from the Sichuan institute of higher cuisine.
She consults with a restaurant called 'bar shu'' in chine town near SoHo in London.
We celebrated A's 49th birthday in Bar Shu this year. A discovered the restaurant on one of his trips to London about a year ago. He frequented Bar Shu so often that the staff did'nt realize he did'nt live in London. He had a pattern. he would go for a drink to this pub across the street from barshu called the 'the dog and duck'' and then have dinner in bar shu before calling it a night. He did this trail with clients, colleagues and friends who then coined the term 'the basu trails'' for these evenings .In my one week in London, I had dinner there 3 times.
Bar Shu serves exquisite Sichuan food. We do almost all the dishes on the menu at barshu and to quote some of over zealous admirers of A's culinary skills 'you do them better''.. dan dan noodle,mouth numbing chicken, boiled beef, preserved eggs and the like.