Necessity is the mother of Invention

Necessity is the mother of Invention

After dining at home alone for a week, Arti & Craig decided to put me out of my misery and took me out for dinner at Priya/Basant Lok (a place I naively called Vasant Vihar market until someone told me it had another name).

Arti & Craig live in Gurgaon near our office & were kind enough to pay me a visit in Delhi. Priya is only a short 15 minute drive from my house & Craig has been telling me about a great international food store in the market. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to visit as it was closed when we arrived.

We settled on Italian and hit up a place Arti had received a received a recommendation on called Sartoria. Honestly, the food was pretty good. We started with bread served with tapenade & oil/vinegar. Craig spotted Spinach Artichoke dip which we devoured & then I settled on my main course.

Now, I'm not a "beef" fan - I certainly don't eat it at every meal. But with Italian, it is sometimes hard to create dishes properly without a bit of beef. In India, the menu is always full of odd substitutions. For instance, at the Trident Gurgaon, I had a merlot sauce w/ lamb served on a bed of fresh pasta. Today, my Spaghetti Bolognese, a dish normally full of Beef & Pancetta, was instead full of ground chicken. These slight changes are present in all continental food options. In fact, instead of a Chicago Steak, TGIF is serving Chicago Style Braised Lamb.

I don't intend this to be a complaint, my pasta dishes were both quite tasty - but certainly not the Italian I'm used to. I guess as they say, Necessity is the Mother of Invention.