The Silent Spice.

blankYou know that feeling when something is not quite right and you cannot throw a dart at what it is? I have had that feeling for a few days now, ironically just as things are finally settling in with my food tour start-up. It’s a feeling that hits you like an invisible but sinister spice, making you sweat and twitch anxiously, masking itself behind other more obviously visible ingredients on the plate, driving you over the edge. One antagonizingly minuscule bite at a time.

There might even be tears. Tears that flow without singular reason, but rather, a murky muffled wail of reasons that you dare not disentangle.

I was wiping my eyes with the back of my hand like a kindergartener who had tumbled off of the school slide and was embarrassed, in pain and in desperate need of a blanket to cover herself up from rude pointing fingers and sniggering faces. One of the Goan dishes at Treat in Karama had dealt me a lethally spiced hand. But I didn’t know which one. It was a deliberate torturous play that went first for my tongue, then my facial taps, then my throat, and finally my upper abdomen. But in my brash attempt to taste everything that was on the table, all of it cooked with true Goan-style love and care, I continued gambling through the dishes until there was nothing left to lose—except the faint hope of consuming anything other than yoghurt and bananas for dinner.

But how I wept! I wept into the crunchy Chicken Potato Chop dusted with crackly semolina. The impossibly crisp fritter hatched into a bundle of squishy potatoes and chicken coated with fresh coriander paste and masalas—peppery masalas that might have been guilty of turning my flood taps on?

Chicken Potato Chop - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

I wept over the Pomfret Racheido that appeared looking like a bloody crime scene.

Pomfret Reicheado - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant KaramaThe skin was smeared with a pasty Racheido masala that had the deadly hue of Tabasco but turned out to be as meek as ketchup. Soft mild flakes of Pomfret soaked up the different layers of Racheido flavour—the sour astringency of vinegar, the sweetness of sugar, and the bitterness of Kashmiri chillis whose ferocious red appearance often barks louder than it bites. The harmless dish was all flavour but no heat worthy of tears. It tasted of innocence.

I wept as I reached out for the Prawn Caldin, repeatedly seeking refuge in the sweet, coconut-infused curry and its resident pink prawns. Soaked up with triangles of blistered tandoori roti (though fluffy buns on the neighbouring table might have served as more absorbent dipping companions), this curry was my favourite of the lot. It was sweet, creamy and delicate with the fleshy bite of prawns curled around their papery tails. S.O.S. Caldin.

Prawn Caldin - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

The glistening red Kingfish Curry stared back at my glistening red face. I had pushed it away after a bite or two, the kingfish somewhat too fishy for my taste. But I resented those two bites of the violently-coloured dish—they might not have been my cup of curry, but had they maliciously buried flecks of red pepper somewhere in my mouth? Somewhere where they weren’t being washed away? Somewhere where they could unleash an uncontrollable stream of facial fluids into a swathe of unappetizing tissue papers across the table?

Kingfish Curry - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

It was all really quite inconvenient. I love Goan flavours with its medley of Portuguese and Indian influences, and Treat had this simple home-style take on the dishes that I’d like to have savoured without feeling like I was self-combusting internally through the meal. This inconvenience was no reflection on the food but on my spice threshold—a threshold that is humiliatingly low.

The Chicken Cafreal looked venomously green right from first glance at the tiny menu thumbnail.

Chicken Cafreal - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

Fat bone-in cuts of chicken and caramelized potato slices were caked with the same herby coriander paste resident in the Chicken Potato Chop. There was heat in that green masala. It was heat that could definitely raise the ambient temperature in my chest by a few notches, but I doubt it could be held responsible for the repercussions of global warming across the entirety of my facial glands.

Who dun it?

I irrationally continued consuming the food and being consumed by it. Life does that to you more often than you’d like to believe. It gives you the impression that you love doing what you do so much that you turn a blind eye to everything else, health, reason, family, common sense—only to wake up one morning realizing that you’ve overdone it all to such a wild stupid extent that you can’t bear the sight of anything more adventurous than a bowl of yoghurt and bananas.

Being a young hot-blooded woman of passion, I’ve spent many a morning with yoghurt and bananas.

I looked over at comparatively calm and spice-resilient Varshik and urged him to swap out the red curry he had rained down over his plate of rice with the milky Prawn Caldin. His dislike for coconut milk had repulsed him from the one dish that had played the white knight to my sniffling state of affairs. He reluctantly dipped his spoon into the curry for a quick cursory taste, barely sipped, and then quickly put his spoon down with apathetic disregard. As I reached back out to snatch the dish back into more grateful and deserving territory, his eyes widened: That dish—the aftertaste—that’s SPICY!

Bullocks. The mild sweet white looking thing couldn’t hurt a fly.

Prawn Caldin - Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

I peered into the Caldin as Varshik vehemently declared the angelic curry guilty. It was then, through foggy eyes, that I saw them. Specks of red scattered all across the glistening surface. Specks of red washed up along the rim where the curry line had receded. Specks of red everywhere. It suddenly made total sense. The initial taste was ‘sweet, creamy and delicate’—and then just as you went for a bite of something else like the now-acquitted red curry or the coriander chicken or the innocent pomfret, the aftertaste surged back in a covert pincer-like operation and sliced through your mouth with red chilli flames.

The Caldin, the one dish I’d used to extinguish the fire, was nothing short of highly flammable starter fuel.

Even though lunch was over, my stomach charred, and a tree had been sacrificed to wipe my tears away, I’m relieved that the Goan spice mystery was resolved. As for the ‘other’ niggling feeling in my life, I don’t know. It might take more than peering deep into a curry bowl to suss out the cause. But one thing is for sure, I’ve stocked up on enough yoghurt and bananas until I figure it all out.

Goan Restaurant - Treat Restaurant Karama

Treat Restaurant
Karama
Phone: 04-3358112
Directions: Check out my approximate bubble on Google maps, which admittedly, isn’t going to be great since I lost my way to the restaurant and went to Timbuktu and back before I found it (with Varshik having to jump in the car and guide my lost soul in the right direction.)

Author: InaFryingPan

With a family legacy of ingenious cooks, a nutritionist and chef-extraordinaire mother, and a father who introduced me to steak and caviar when I could barely reach the table, I had no choice but to acquire a keen awareness of food during my childhood years in Dubai. But it was only after I found myself on a college campus in Philadelphia – far away from home, too cheap as a student to spend on anything other than pizza, and with dorm rooms that had little rat-holes of kitchens if they even had them at all – when I developed a heightened appreciation of food. An appreciation of food that I once ate every night at the dinner table in Dubai, but that was now an entire ocean away. I lusted for the culinary treasures that lay outside the stale walls of my college dining hall, hijacked friends’ kitchens to try my hand at something, anything , remotely edible, and greedily raided different websites in search of highly-rated restaurants. With my move to New York to work for a consulting firm that secretly harbored self-professed foodies, my appreciation transformed into a passion, an addicition. I felt like everyone around me in New York was talking about food: where to get the best cupcakes, pizza slices, banh mi, kati rolls, pho, fried chicken, and every other food item out there that is just a plain old dish in some part of the world, but that’s become hyped to unforeseen proportions in New York. What fuelled my addiction over time was travel to different cities, both for work and play, which gave me unfettered access to the culinary havens of not only New York, but also of DC, Virginia, Chicago, Houston, Vegas, Austin, Seattle and even a little city called Bentonville (Arkansas!). After 9 years away from home, I’ve finally taken the leap to come back to Dubai – with not just an awareness, but genuine appreciation and passionate addiction for what I’d taken for granted as a child. Mom, I’m back to reclaim my seat at your dinner table, and to rediscover this city with its ever-expanding menu of international flavors.

7 thoughts on “The Silent Spice.

  1. Sayana says:

    I’m sure you are super busy with yout food tours but it feels great to be reading your writing again.I do feel sadisitic knowing descriptions of what you ate through your discomfort were making my mouth water. I like to think my spice threshold is quite high and I’m tempted to test it soon.
    Meanwhile I hope you’ll be able to find ease in your heart soon. We all go through to in at various stages in life and sometimes thinking about all the blessings (read AWESOME FOOD TOURS) might be able to make you see the light at the end of the tunnel.
    Much love.

    Reply
    1. inafryingpan says:

      @5c58fbbbc706cbb1bf5cff57328b59c9:disqus – not sadistic at all, one man’s poison can be another man’s feast! If fiery food is your thing, you must give it a shot (who knows, it might not even be that spicy for you, the wimp that I am!)
      And thank you for the kind message, very well-said. There are indeed many blessings to be grateful for, and you can’t forget all the little things to be thankful for when the occasional gloomy day sneaks in through the window. My restless heart is guilty of doing that far too often!

  2. saleem says:

    Spice and Arva will never get along – well written article makes you feel trying – will for sure try the chicken. I guess we have been to this Goan joint. Keep it coming and explore more now places for us to eat.

    Reply
    1. inafryingpan says:

      hahahaha…true that dad. I SERIOUSLY wonder what went wrong in my genes that I didn’t acquire the family’s uber-love for spice.
      (PS. This was a different place, still have to take you there. The other one was Erics)

  3. MyCustardPie says:

    So you weren’t joining in with the pani puris when KP and M asked for spicy, more spicy, and extra spicy. It makes me laugh when people assume that Europeans aren’t into spice. I know that my family, as a focus group of one, can easily out last many, many friends from countries who have spice in their food culture. Another stellar post :) Wipe those tears away now you “young hot-blooded woman of passion” – oo-er!

    Reply

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