March | 2014 | Travels in India

Ever since viewing a YouTube video on the Savage Garden last year, I’ve wanted to go there. It’s a restaurant run by a German guy serving Mediterranean influenced cuisine in an alley in the Chandpole area near the Bagore Ki Haveli. No need to worry about the address. Any rickshaw driver worth his chai knows where it is.

Rafiq and Pushker had tours that day, so only Nirmal and I went there for lunch. Within seconds of being seated, the owner came to our table and went over the menu with us. There were pasta dishes, Greek dishes and some that may have been Lebanese. With a German owner overseeing the kitchen, I knew there wouldn’t be fireballs of pepper in the food.

I ordered chicken wajid ali, a crunchy skinned breast of chicken stuffed with egg and cashews with a creamy, slightly sweet sauce with currants. It came with rice embedded with shredded carrots. Unfortunately, I was pretty hungry when it arrived, and I set upon the plate like a pack of starving dogs, completely forgetting to take a picture of it until there was nothing left. It was so delicious, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

A few days later, everyone was busy except Pushker, so I brought him there. He wasn’t hungry, but I was ravenous. I ordered the chicken wajid ali again. And you know what? The exact same thing happened. I don’t care if I have to go back there a hundred times before I remember to take a picture of the chicken wajid ali before laying waste to it. I swear, I’ll do it.

I’ve been back for several weeks from visiting Udaipur in February. (And the loathesome Washington DC winter was waiting for me when I got back.)

This time around, I was having some physical problems I thought could be treated by massage. Because it limited my ability to get around, I had to ask Nirmal to cancel the road trip he had planned for Gujarat so I could have massages several times a week. We went nowhere, and we didn’t do much of anything most days.

Even so, doing nothing in Udaipur is preferable to doing it elsewhere. It’s extremely hard to get tired of looking at it.

Before I arrived, Pushker and Rafiq had mentioned many times on Skype that this had been a terrible tourist season. There were fewer visitors than usual, and they hardly got any work. Wouldn’t you know it, from the day I arrived until the day I left, they had clients! Good for them, but it meant I had to wait until the end of most days to see them.