Last Friday evening I found myself, due to a confluence of circumstances, in the company of my dear friends Sabrina and Ted at nine o'clock and none of us had had the chance to eat supper. The fates may have conspired to keep us hungry late into the evening, but Sabrina had the perfect solution—half price Indian food at the India Garden on Atwood Street.

The India Garden on Atwood

While Sabrina and Ted are regulars at India Garden for the half price special (see her blog), I had never been before and I was anxious to give it a try. I'm also fairly new to Indian, as ethnicities of food go, in part because few people in my life have been great connoisseurs of Indian and because I developed a phobia of curry as a result of the overly-pungent, neon-yellow dishes purchased from the lunch trunks by my college chums. Everyone at my department in grad school was mad for Indian, though, and I quickly developed a taste for it at departmental lunches. After picking up Roger—Sabrina's and Ted's roommate-to-be, and our fourth party for the evening—we headed to Atwood Street, grabbed a fortuitous parking space and arrived at the India Garden shortly after ten. It was bustling, but not packed to the gills, and we easily got a table for four—though, as a space-making measure they have the tables pushed together in such a way that, if the music weren't turned up to create a certain din, you'd feel like you were sitting at a table for eight with strangers. Booze-wise, Sabrina, Ted and Roger ordered drafts of I.C. Light despite Sabrina's and Ted's resolution "to break up with beer." As far as I know, Roger has no compunctions with beer, but Sabrina explained that it was an exceptional circumstance for her and Ted because the sweet undertone and overall bouquet of the I.C. Light provides the perfect complement to the spiciness of the food. I was determined to stick to my low-carb resolution and was pleased to find that house wines were $4 a glass. Drinking low-carb, I've found, can be a perilous endeavor. On the one hand, red wine is perhaps my favorite beverage, but it is so often really expensive, even at cheap bars. Why do most house wines have to be $5, $6 and $7 a glass? You can get a cheap 1.5 L bottle of wine for $7 to $9, that's ten glasses if we're talking 5 oz. pour, and that comes to less than $1 a glass. $3 or $4 really should be enough to cover cost plus overhead, right? And at the really cheap bars, I don't mind drinking Almaden or Franzia boxed wine if it means I only have to pay $2 a glass. Anyway... I digress. Suffice to say, buying wine at a bar is expensive. On the flipside, I could drink plain booze as a low-carb option, but while it is almost as cheap as beer in many places, it can potentially get you very drunk very quickly. There's just no inexpensive, slow-drinking alternative to beer. Alas. But hooray for the Indian Garden offering wine at a semi-reasonable price.

Sabrina, having just descended from the India Garden

For supper I also endeavored to stick to low carb, and while I did not know precisely how many carbs might be in each dish, I figured I was on okay ground eating just my meat and sauce with no rice. That's the important and tasty thing, after all. To make up for my lack of carb-y extras, I decided to order something on the regular and not the half-price menu. Half-price covers only vegetable and chicken dishes, but God help me, I'm a sucker for any restaurant that offers lamb dishes, so I went for the lamb korma. While it didn't qualify for the half price deal, nearly every item on the menu is under $12, and so the splurge was not too painful. Roger and Ted got the chicken korma, and Sabrina got something with chickpeas, but the music din, mentioned earlier, was too loud for me to hear what it was when she ordered. The waiter who delivered our food, who was not our original waiter, got confused by the three kormas, giving Roger my lamb, giving Ted Roger's 7th-level spicy chicken and giving me Ted's 5th-level spicy chicken. I figured out I had chicken right away and naturally switched with Roger, but Ted was well into his korma before he figured it to be spicier than ordered. In terms of spiciness, I was quite happy with my level 8. It was perfect and reminded me of how absurdly satisfying I find very spicy food. The lamb was also good. While I would have, of course, preferred it to be at least a little bit rare, I didn't expect it would be anything less than well-done (we are talking lamb cubes in what is fundamentally a stew, after all), and it was still delicious and sufficiently tender.

After India Garden, we headed up the street to Gene's Place, a bar on Lousia Street, just off Atwood, where Sabrina, Ted and Roger have been frequent patrons for many years. So many years, in fact, that they recall the days before the management shift that changed its name from Denny's to Gene's. As a result, they still call it Denny's, which often leaves me confused and summoning visions of the family restaurant chain. I ran into my low-carb drinking dilemma yet again at Gene's Place, and resolved it by ordering a vodka rocks while Sabrina, Ted and Roger split a pitcher of beer. Sabrina had advised me that I might want to try getting a nicer vodka since the booze is all-around so cheap at Gene's. But I've never been afraid of well-vodka, no matter how cheap, and so when the bartender asked what type of vodka I'd like, I replied, "The cheapest."

The petunia growing out of the sidewalk at Gene's Place

On the upside, my drink turned out to be $1.50; on the downside, the bartender gave me vodka on ice without the lime. Now, back when I was in bartending school (er, well, when I took that weekend course), during the unit on garnishes, they taught us that every drink that does not otherwise have a prescribed or drinker-specified garnish should be garnished with a lime (whisky or scotch rocks being a notable exception). This is why you will most often get a lime when you order a rum & Coke even though it's technically supposed to come un-garnished so as to distinguish between it and a Cuba Libra. Turns out that for drinks like vodka rocks with well-vodka, the lime carries the necessary function of covering up the underlying turpentine-y flavor. In sum, Gene's is great for drinking cheaply, but remember to order a lime with your well vodka. On the whimsical side, on the way out the door at Gene's, we spotted a white petunia growing out of the sidewalk against Gene's concrete foundation. Theories abounded from Roger and Ted, but Sabrina and I preferred to count it a nebulous urban mystery.