S1dd - My Other Blog..

You all know what I think of Indian Restaurants in Charlottesville but since Milan has a new chef from when we last visited, we thought we’d give the place another try and to summarize the experience - nothing has changed.

We went for the lunch buffet on a saturday. Only one dish amongst all the vegetarian food stood out - an eggplant dish, which too I would call good - nothing exceptional. The rest were mediocre curries. Even Chana (chick peas), which is really hard to get wrong was just ok. I can’t say about the chicken, but Parchayi definitely is not visiting the place again for a long time.

All in all, I’d say stick with Just Curry, which now has two locations, in place of Mesob at the Corner and on The Downtown mall.

I heard a few days back that Casella’s at Barracks Rd is being replaced by a new Thai place. Will report on that when it opens. My favorites still are Lemongrass and Thai 99. I’ve tried several times to try to get the chef at Lemongrass to tell us what goes in his Spicy Lemongrass Tofu, but he is tight lipped about it and the only clues he will give us is that it is a Thai-Vietnamese combination dish which has an Indian influence. I’m willing to offer a free 20$ gift certificate or 20$ by paypal if you can reverse engineer that dish for us.

Indian restaurant owners in cville, if you are not prepared for some embarrassment, stop reading.

Just to be fair, All this applies only to the buffet’s at Indian restaurants. I’ve not tried ordering off the menu at any and don’t plan to unless I get some nice coupons.

Let me start with some history. Of the Indian restaurants that existed when I moved to cville, only Maharaja is still standing and the food at Maharaja was mediocre at best. After a while, Milan opened and the food there was also mediocre but most liked it more probably because it was slightly different from Maharaja. Later Maharaja’s chef took over Maharaja but I’ve not been to it after then because I wasn’t too pleased with the food anyway. Milan’s chef left Milan and started a new place called Royal Indian just north of Target and I tried the buffet there. All the food was mostly tasteless pasty creamy goo so I will not recommend it at all. I’ve not tried Milan’s new chef but I’ve heard reports the the food has not changed at all.

So considering this, where do you get the best Indian food in Charlottesville? The answer is Just Curry at the corner. They are Carribean style curries but that’s just nice Indian food. There are not many options to select from but the food is really tasty, unlike the bland pastes at lunch buffets at the Indian restaurants.

I actually asked the chef at Royal Indian why the food was so bland and his reply was that it is for the American palette. If that’s the case, I wonder, why is it that Just Curry is full of Americans and Royal Indian is always empty? Indian restaurants, please give us some decent spicy food! Give us some Indian Chinese and stop making us drive to DC for the good stuff.

Saturday, we drove down 29S to Colleen to eat at Thai-Siam (the much praised Thai takeout place south of Lovingston) and the food was good - similar to Thai 99 but with some dishes not available at Thai 99. The place is mostly a takeout joint and the food is probably like Thai home cooking.

Yesterday, we ate at Mamma-Mia! - the Italian place at the corner of Preston and Grady. We eaten there often and I can say that they have amongst the best Italian food in Charlottesville. It’s a great quiet place to eat because it is genrally never crowded (a shame since the food is so good).

We switched from Dish+DSL to Cable in June because of their irresistible offer - 29.99 for Cable (Digital Basic + HBO + Max) for a whole year and 19.99 for Internet for six months. However since the day we switched we have had nothing but trouble.

On the day of installation, our signal was terrible. It turned out that the wire leading to our house was bad. So they replaced that quickly in a week and voila, everything was clear and we were happy for a day. After which it was all downhill again. We get serious noise on analog channels starting from the 50s. All the digital channels face serious pixellation and sound skipping atleast once a minute. Somebody was supposed to show up yesterday to fix the problem and that never happened. I called them several times after their two hour interval was over and was assured several times that the person is running late and will give me a call with his ETA. No such luck. No person and no call to even inform us or reschedule.

To top all this trouble, as soon as I setup automatic payments the promotion disappeared (?) and my bill went up from 54 including tax to 89.85 including tax and a 25$ credit that they gave me for the trouble, which makes a grand total of 114.85!!!!

I called comcast to fix this and the person had no clue why the bill was what it was. She could not figure any of the charges on the bill and wasted half an hour of mine until I just hung up in frustration (I couldn’t shout while I was at work). I was given bogus stories such as “Sir you got cable in Jun but High speed Internet in August”. What the hell have I been paying for from Jun until August then? I have since sent out an email to customer service and hopefully someone will fix things soon. If not, bye bye Cable.

Update: Comcast had automatically changed the time the tech visited to today without informing me! I got a reply from the email I sent comcast and it told me to chat with Customer Service. It turns out that the person I talked to on the phone had atleast reduced my bill some and the chat person reduced my bill back to what it should be. Now if only their tech can fix our channels. P.S. None of this affects the bill shown on the website and on the website there is no way to tell how much you owe!

Update: As usual, nobody showed up again and after a lot of screaming and complaining, I got another 25$ credit and somebody is scheduled to come in another week from now!!! If you are considering switching to Comcast in Charlottesville, think again. I wish the city would allow some competition for Comcast. When we had Dish, we could get no local channels thanks to trees blocking the view of their satellite.

A few weeks back, I tried out Pad Thai at 156 Carlton Rd and was totally disappinted. I’m always excited when new Thai places open up but I will not be eating at Pad Thai again.

We picked up dinner just after work and the taste was less than average for a Thai place (every other Thai place I have eaten in Cville and otherwise has had better food). Also the dinner portion still left me hungry after finishing everything. The amount of food in the take out box looked like the amount of leftovers I normally have after a meal at Thai 99. Not that Pad Thai was cheaper than the other Thai places either! So bad food + not enough food! I say stick wiht Lemongrass or Thai 99 at JPA for great Thai Food.

Ate at Lemongrass at the Corner on Friday and can’t get enough of their Spicy Lemongrass Tofu, which the chef says is a dish he invented. Since the restaurant opened, Parchayi and me have been there atleast twice a month. I would highly recommend trying Lemongrass out. Students get a buck off the lunch specials.

My only complaint with Lemongrass is their tiny dinner portions - they are about the same as the lunch portions.

Ate at Thai 99 (at JPA) yesterday, which has long been my favorite Thai place to eat in Charlottesville and one of the best places for Thai food that I have ever eaten in. Eat there during lunch and try out their excellent Thai desert.

Even though many people prefer the Thai 99 on 29N (in the picture on their website), I find the spice level of their food very inconsistent, their drunken noodles (one of my favorite Thai dishes) not as good as the one on JPA and of course the rats. I have seen one myself and have heard from others too about the rat problem.

This year Charlottesville is no. 19 in Forbes’ annual list of Best Small Places For Business And Careers up from no. 32 last year.

Charlottesville has always been decently ranked in Forbes’ list every year and also makes it to many other Top lists and often takes the crown.