So Sari Chandler

When I was a kid, my dad would drive us to grandma's house and I'd stare out the car window at the neat little homes occupied by Polocks, Lugans, Micks...... oops I mean Polish, Lithuanians, and Irish. Just a year later my dad would take the exact same route to grandma's, and all the faces of the neighborhood would be changed. They'd all be black, the result of the most nefarious scheme in real-estate, blockbusting.

I thought about that when Mark took me to an Indian restaurant in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. The place was on West Devon Avenue on the north side, and the last time I was in that neighborhood, thirty years ago, it was all Jewish. In thirty years the place had gone from delis and 'wholesale' stores, to a little slice of India, albeit without the smell. There was not one Jewish business left, it was all saris, phone card stores, and travel agencies that only seemed to book tours of India or Pakistan.

Mark has taken me to an Indian restaurant before, in Fort Lauderdale. It wasn't very good. I couldn't be sure if I was eating cat or goat, even though the meat was listed as chicken on the menu. That and the overwhelming smell of the curry made it not a very satisfying experience. The place Mark had picked out for us this evening, however, was not that bad, and the fact that we could bring our own bottle of wine helped immensely.

One of the best things about going out to eat with Mark is that he is always confident that he can make what we just ate better, and on the way home he promised that he'd be trying to cook Indian food when we returned to Florida. Well he did, and it was. Mark made some Indian fish that was spectacularly good, followed the next day by something called tandoori chicken. The chicken was orgasmic. In fact it was so damn good I asked him to make it again, and it was just as good the second time. He blew that Indian restaurant out of the water. The only problem with eating all this Indian food is the gas. Poor Chandler, he likes to sleep on the bed snuggled right up against me, and I pretty much kept him up all night long doing the tandoori toot.