By E. Alex Jung
“I don’t expect you to love this,” Padma Lakshmi warns as she slides a red, plastic tray onto the Formica tabletop. “It’s fermented lemon pickles, so it’s a little bitter. It’s a really funky thing.”
We’re at stop №3 of Padma Lakshmi’s Very Excellent Food Tour: the Hindu Temple Society of North America in Flushing, Queens, which boasts the best flattop-griddled dosas this side of the Atlantic. If this were an episode of Top Chef, the category would be South Indian dish: There’s a mountain of dosas, including a dramatically cone-shaped one crisped in ghee, a green chili-studded rava dosa that looks like folded lace, puffy white jumbo idli, doughnut-shaped vada, and three different rice dishes — pulihora (tamarind rice), bisi bele bath (lentils and rice), and thayir sadam (yogurt rice). The last one, which she would eat as a kid in Chennai, isn’t like her grandmother’s — could it ever be? — but it’s “actually not bad!” Lakshmi nods approvingly as I scoop the yogurt rice up with the lemon pickle. A sharp fermented bolt spikes the back of my tongue. I feel like a fat, happy baby.
The temple started serving food over 20 years ago, but Lakshmi has been coming for puja ever since it first opened in…
