Soam

Dinner at Soam, a hip, contemporary Gujarati restaurant, w/ Ritesh, his boss, and a bunch of their colleagues from different institutions. Our reservation was for eight people but there ended up being 24 of us, which caused a bit of a problem as there was already a line out the door. We did all get seated (I'm sure it helped that Ritesh's cousin's husband, the chef, made a couple of calls to the owner of the restaurant, who's a friend of his), but to make things easier, we didn't place individual orders but just asked them to just bring us whatever they had cooking - the result being that we got served a ton of fabulous food without knowing what it was...

Ritesh managed to squeeze in a couple of extra orders for our table, including this paanki that was recommended by the locals at the table next to ours. It's a spicy pancake steamed in a banana leaf.

and some dahi puri

Gujarati Pizza. There is a name for it but neither Ritesh nor I can remember it right now...

And this dessert was the revelation of the evening: jalebi and shrikand. Jalebi is basically deep-fried sugardough - we've had this before and never liked it as generally it is way too oily, heavy and sweet. Shrikand is a strained yogurt w/ sugar, saffron and cardamom, also generally too thick and sweet. We would never have ordered either item from the menu, but when they brought it out, we were amazed. Soam's jalebi was fantastic, light and airy - loved it. Same for the shrikand - light and tart, just fantastic. I want to go back to Soam just for this...