Spice Of Life Tours Turns Up The Heat On Devon Avenue
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Apr 16, 2014 4:00PM
Taking a turn along Devon Avenue with Mohammed Ali, “spice of life” becomes more than a catchphrase. What Ali speculates is the most culturally diverse street in North America colonizes your senses and shows you what you’ve been missing. An American and world history teacher, Ali has more than enough facts under his belt to make your afternoon an informative one. But more relevant for a Saturday or Sunday you could well while away for less than the $75 ticket price with a good book and some cold pizza, he’s a gifted storyteller who makes this culinary tour into a rousting dialogue. Even better, he’s just as eager to eat as you are and doesn’t stint on serving size.
Food is any culture’s primary artifact. Even so, why would you opt for a gustatory tour of an enclave featuring cuisine familiar to you as it is? Easy answer: It’s likely not as familiar as you may think. The ubiquitous Indian buffets we’ve all had south of Devon showcase exclusively north Indian cuisine. And satisfying as that may be, east, south and west Indian—as well as some wicked Pakistani barbecue—deserve your attention too.
There’s also something very personal at stake here for Ali, a Pakistani raised in this community’s heart while his parents fled persecution back home. Businesses here survive on foot traffic, which has atrophied enough in recent years to endanger many shopkeepers’ livelihood. So as much fun as sampling the chickpea curry may be, Ali also imbues it with palpable immediacy.
The tour opens in India Book House, where Ali awaits you with a table of appetizers including samosas and aloo tikki—a zesty pancake so creamy I had to buy two more at the neighboring grocery store at tour’s end—in addition to fresh sugarcane juice to wash it all down. The book store’s proprietors, Ali is quick to acknowledge, number among his extended family, a body of people you soon realize grows with each new point of interest.
As good an idea as food tours are and as hungry as you may come, however, there is always one problem: You can only eat so much at a time. But traipsing farther down Devon, this slight hiccup becomes opportunity to visit a local sari shop and a nearby salon, where you’re wrapped in vibrant silks and adorned with a henna tattoo, respectively. Meanwhile, letting the henna dry into an arabesque of looped peacock feathers on the back your hand, Ali escorts you to a Sikh temple squeezed between a carpet supplier and a currency exchange, where you’re poured hot chai tea while Ali explains the Sikhs’ challenge of the Indian caste system. Which is all by way of reminder that this world is a thorny one but possibly nowhere more so than the Indian subcontinent, where Sikhism, Hinduism and other religions find common ground in a cuisine of near endless complexity.
In addition to giving your stomach time to breathe before your visit to Tiffin for a lavish midday spread including lentils, spinach and cheese, and what may well be the best butter chicken this side of Mumbai paired with Sufi wine, the non-culinary aspects of the tour also afford Ali occasion to extemporize on further facets of the culture informing the food you’re easily enjoying a little too much of. Appraising the mannequins’ habiliment, for instance, Ali decodes where the woman buying it hails from as well as the extent to which she embraces Westernization, which waters down more than the textiles' color.
Finally, more lasting than the henna tattoo at tour’s end is your personal investment in preserving this neighborhood’s texture, where local bakeries process their own sugarcane to sweeten coconut water served inside a whole coconut shell. So even if you’ve eaten enough Indian food by the end of the day to last you a good long while, you leave wanting the spice of life to stay spicy. However much you may like your mac and cheese at home, Ali peels back just enough layers of a heritage you might have thought you understood before to realize you need to eat out here more often.