URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1193 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 13, 2008 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
A Passage to India
BYLINE: By MATTHEW FISHBANE
SECTION: Section 14CY; Column 0; The City Weekly Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2211 words
STANDING at the beginning of the buffet line at Jackson Diner in Queens, Krishnendu Ray took a plate from the heated stack of dishes, plopped on spoonfuls of several offerings and headed to table No. 22. There, a waiter tucked the bill into a wire stand and set down a pink plastic jug of water.

As Indian pop music played in the background and images of an India-Pakistan cricket match flickered on a television screen, Mr. Ray dug in.

''Tandoori chicken always tends to be too dry,'' he said, chewing a reddish strip of meat from a chicken leg. But the goat bones in the spicy stew known as makhani earned his approval. ''Bones,'' he declared, ''give a completely different taste to the meat.''

Mr. Ray, who emigrated from the Bengal state of Orissa in 1989 and lives in Peter Cooper Village, is not a restaurant critic. He is a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of ''The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households,'' and one of his professorial missions is to analyze the city's Indian restaurants from a sociological perspective.

A gracious, voluble 45-year-old, Mr. Ray found himself drawn to food studies because of what the subject revealed about his own migration. He and other food scholars find New York fertile ground in which to examine ethnic restaurants, especially the ways they negotiate the many forces that bear on immigrant cultures, from the yearning for home to the pressures of finding a place in a new society.

''There's a lot of anecdotal evidence,'' Mr. Ray said, ''but no systematic study of restaurants at all. We want to study the ethnic entrepreneurs. Who are they appealing to? How do they raise capital? How do they decide on their decor? And then we want to get into the kitchen.''

Within his specialty, which includes Indian, Pakistani and other South Asian cuisines, Mr. Ray also has plenty of questions. Although nearly 30,000 New Yorkers identify themselves as Bangladeshi, why does it seem impossible to find a restaurant exclusively offering Bangladeshi cuisine? How can bhel poori, a crispy snack that has become the popcorn of Bollywood film fans, be so expensive at some places and so cheap at others? How do moderately priced chains like Cafe Spice and Baluchi's turn ethnicity into a commodity?

A growing number of New Yorkers, Indian and non-Indian, are mulling these questions. The city is home to at least 200 Indian restaurants, according to The Yellow Pages, and with the number of Indian New Yorkers expected to have doubled by 2010 from 206,000 in 2000, many more are doubtless on the way.

In addition, these are especially convivial days for Indians. The Tamil harvest festival, celebrated by Tamils worldwide, will be observed on Jan. 17; Republic Day, a major Indian holiday, is Jan. 26; and through August, India is celebrating its 60th year of independence.

At the request of The New York Times, Mr. Ray visited the Jackson Diner and several other Indian restaurants over the past few months to scrutinize their menus and motifs, their staffs and their clientele, and their relationship to India and to New York. For him, this journey reveals much about the immigrant world, and about society at large.

''The immigrant body is a displaced body -- it reveals its habits much more than a body at home, because you can see the social friction,'' Mr. Ray said. ''The ethnic restaurant is one of the few places where the native and the immigrant interact substantively in our society.''

ANGON ON THE SIXTH

320 East Sixth Street, near Second Avenue

East Village

From a corner table of Angon on the Sixth, Mr. Ray scooped up gobs of daal, or lentil stew, with a piece of roti bread and pointed to the slender lamps hanging from the beams of the low ceiling. ''These lamps are Ikea,'' he said between mouthfuls, ''but meant to resemble terra cotta horse figurines.'' In India, he explained, horse sculptures are traditional offerings to the deities.

In Little India, a strip of about a dozen Indian restaurants on East Sixth Street between First and Second Avenues, Angon stands out for its lack of trinkets, flashing lights and live music. The low-key decor is meant to appeal to the non-Indian, somewhat upscale clientele that Begum Mina Azad, the owner and chef, has courted since the restaurant opened in 2004. So are the decorative robes that the waiters wear, traditional garb of Indian's upper middle class, even though, Mr. Ray pointed out, such robes would be inappropriate for service in India.

When the fried fish and kichuri rice arrived, the plate was adorned with tomato slices. Tomatoes, which wouldn't be found on a dish served in India, represent another bid for crossover appeal, a concession to Americans' desire for color and vitamins. ''Otherwise, it's brown, yellow, brown, brown,'' Mr. Ray said. ''Peasant food doesn't stand up.''

If he were to open a restaurant he said, ''to upscale it, I would downgrade it -- give them the authentic experience true cosmopolitan New Yorkers are ready for: seating on mats, no silverware.''

After all, he explained, ''restaurants are complex plays on expectations.''

DEVI

8 East 18th Street

Union Square

''You know it's haute cuisine when the plate is big and the food is small,'' Mr. Ray said at this elegant, warmly lighted restaurant. A modest, pyramid-shaped mound of bhel poori had just arrived on the table.

But is there such a thing as ethnic haute? ''If my dad came here or to Tabla,'' Mr. Ray said, ''he'd say, 'How much did they charge for that bhel poori? Six dollars? Two hundred forty rupees? I can get this for five rupees! It's good food, but it's not made out of gold.'

''We like this very clever insider joke,'' Mr. Ray continued. ''We are taking something cheap and from the street, and reducing the quantity, turning it into a pyramid, putting it on a big plate, and all these white guys are paying 20 bucks for it.''

Ordering the daal, Mr. Ray pronounced it ''perfect.'' The ''masala'' schnitzel, however, failed to please. With that dish, Mr. Ray said, the chef is saying: '''I'm not just an ethnic cook. I can do schnitzel. I'm a chef.'''

Devi pays a price in authenticity for such range. A large cut of meat such as the schnitzel is ''unimaginable in the Indian idiom,'' Mr. Ray said, adding: ''The daal is 500 years old. The Indian schnitzel is two weeks old.''

He also found the presence of veal dishes especially startling ''in a place named after the goddess Devi, and decorated with temple doors.'' Not only are Hindus vegetarian, he pointed out, but cows are deeply sacred to them. ''Who is supposed to eat here?'' Mr. Ray asked.

SARAVANAAS

81 Lexington Avenue, at 26th Street

Murray Hill

''There are two approaches to ethnic food,'' Mr. Ray said as he sat to lunch at Saravanaas, a spartan space with a row of wooden tables and minimalist pink silk hangings on the walls. ''One is the pleasure of familiarity: memory, associations. The other is newness.''

Saravanaas, on the stretch of Lexington Avenue known as Curry Hill, takes the first approach. On this weekday in the fall, the place was filled with Indian patrons, most of them men, and only a smattering of non-Indians.

Mr. Ray ordered a pan-Indian sampler listed on the menu as a '' 'Business meal' Thali'' (a thali is a food tray used in Indian homes). Perhaps not surprising for a place geared to an Indian clientele, the food struck Mr. Ray as very authentic, perhaps the most authentic Bengali-Indian food in the city. The poori was properly puffed, he said, and when it comes to details about various dishes, ''waiters won't go out of their way to explain.''

But authenticity has its limits. The unspoken rules governing New York immigrants encourage them to avoid exposing too many ''native qualities in the foreign space of non-Indian presence,'' Mr. Ray said. And so even in a place like Saravanaas, the presence of just a few outsiders means that dishes are served with spoons so customers don't have to eat with their fingers, as is traditional in India.

''When I look for familiarity,'' Mr. Ray said, ''I want to replicate the memory of my past. But here I won't eat with my hands.''

INDOWOK

106 Lexington Avenue, near 27th Street

Murray Hill

Like other immigrants, many Indian restaurateurs do not offer only their own cuisines. Some offer their interpretations of other ethnic food, as is the case with Indowok, a Curry Hill restaurant that serves what it calls Indian-style Chinese cuisine.

''In the Indian imagination, Chinese food is not Chinese,'' said Mr. Ray, who first ate Indian Chinese food as a child in Bengal. ''It's cosmopolitan. It's the only place you went to use the fork, never chopsticks. You can have a Chinese restaurant in India with no stereotypical Chinese food at all -- just Indian food with four Chinese ingredients on top of it.''

So it is at Indowok, a dark, wood-paneled space trimmed in Chinese red. ''If you look at the clientele, you'll see mostly young professional South Asian men,'' Mr. Ray said. ''Why don't they just go to Chinatown? For one, it's not sure to be vegetarian. For another, it's just too Chinese.''

JACKSON DINER

37-47 74th Street, near Roosevelt Avenue

Jackson Heights, Queens

How did Jackson Diner, an unpretentious, cavernous restaurant that opened in 1980 in the heart of Indian New York, become the city's most celebrated destination for Indian food? What kept Sheereen Mahal, a restaurant just across the street that offers essentially the same buffet of dosas (crepes), daals and meats, from attracting a steady stream of non-Indian and Indian customers, and regular praise from Zagat?

''It could be coincidence,'' Mr. Ray said as he settled in after his trip to the buffet and placed a half-eaten samosa that he dismissed as ''generic'' back onto his plate. ''Somebody important ate here one time, wrote about it, and it became famous.''

But Jackson Diner's fame could also have something to do with the marketing of the restaurant. On its menu, Mr. Ray pointed out the image of a cooking pot used in Hindu weddings and the restaurant's motto, ''A Culinary Passage to India,'' and he asked, ''Does that matter?''

Even the owner of an ethnic restaurant might be unable to pinpoint why a place becomes popular, or even why certain items are on the menu. ''He may just be serving what he knows,'' Mr. Ray said.

Restaurant critics may struggle to analyze the quality of ethnic cuisine, because these cuisines do not exist in isolation but are part of a larger culture. But if such evaluations are hard for professional critics, they are relatively easy for the average diner. ''With ethnic food, like with clothes, we are much more willing to say, 'I like it, I don't like it, this is me,''' Mr. Ray said. ''It's more democratic.''

GANESH TEMPLE CANTEEN

45-57 Bowne Street, near 45th Avenue

Flushing, Queens

The Ganesh Temple Canteen sits in the basement of a Hindu temple, a sprawling concrete complex decorated with elephant friezes and a stepped dome. As the location suggests, the canteen is intended to offer more than sustenance.

''Here you can imagine and watch other people doing what you think Indians should be doing,'' Mr. Ray said. ''This canteen caters to Indians the memory of a food, of a place.''

He found the vada, or spicy doughnuts, a little greasy, and the dosas nicely crunchy and only $3.50. But whether or not these items were well prepared, they offered strong echoes of home, because they were served within a temple that functions as a community center.

''Food is the memory of a community,'' Mr. Ray said as he watched templegoers settle down at a table with their orange trays. ''Immigrants often lose the rest of their cultural apparatus -- language, the way the body moves -- especially with the second generation.''

The canteen, a no-frills spot reminiscent of a school cafeteria, also links its diners with their faith by its location within a temple, where worshipers literally feed the icons upstairs, pressing apples and other items in their mouths. ''In this case,'' Mr. Ray said, ''food is the mortar of the ritual sites of community.''

PAKIZA

1032 Coney Island Avenue, near Newkirk Avenue

Parkville, Brooklyn

''The man who eats here is missing home-cooked meals, which were generally cooked by his mother, his aunt, his sister,'' Mr. Ray said of Pakiza, an unprepossessing restaurant and nearby banquet hall. The restaurant has 10 tables, no menu and no decor, and its clientele is largely working-class Muslim men, many of whom live in the neighborhood.

Nasar Khan, the owner, knows that his business involves the basics. ''We serve chicken and good curry to construction people and students,'' he told Mr. Ray.

But customers' needs are often more complicated.

''This is the site of a double craving,'' Mr. Ray said of Pakiza. ''The craving of back home, and the craving of home, which is a craving for women in the home, cooking.''

Items like roast chicken and the deep-fried appetizers known as pakoras can satisfy the desire for the home country, but the second, domestic need ''is never fulfilled in a place like this,'' he said. ''And that's its peculiar magic. It draws you, and it fails to satisfy you.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RESTAURANTS (90%); SOCIOLOGY (72%); CRICKET (71%); ETHNICITY (69%); IMMIGRATION (67%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (62%); POP & ROCK (56%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (72%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (92%) NEW YORK, USA (94%); TAMIL NADU, INDIA (56%); ORISSA, INDIA (56%) INDIA (94%); UNITED STATES (94%); BANGLADESH (92%); ASIA (72%); PAKISTAN (92%)
LOAD-DATE: January 13, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION-DATE: January 20, 2008

CORRECTION: An article last Sunday about an analysis by a New York University food studies professor of seven Indian restaurants in the city inaccurately described the Indian state from where the professor, Krishnendu Ray, emigrated in 1989. The state, Orissa, is a neighbor to the Indian state of West Bengal; it is not part of Bengal, which is a region that comprises West Bengal and Bangladesh. The article also misidentified the cuisine of Saravanaas, a restaurant on Lexington Avenue at 26th Street. Saravanaas serves southern Indian food -- not Bengali-Indian.

The article also misstated the eating habits of Hindus. Many Hindus eat meat; they are not all vegetarians. And the article described incompletely the timing of the annual Tamil harvest festival. The festival, known as Pongal, lasts four days, having taken place this year from Jan. 14 through Jan. 17; it was not observed solely on Jan. 17.

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: TOUCHES OF HOME Devi, far left, on Union Square, is named for an Indian goddess and favors templelike decor. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.CY1)

CURRY AND CULTURE: ''We want to study the ethnic entrepreneurs,'' said Krishnendu Ray, an N.Y.U. food scholar. ''Who are they appealing to?'' (PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.CY8)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1194 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 13, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

From 10 Hours A Week, $10 Million A Year
BYLINE: By RANDALL STROSS.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section 3; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; BRIGHT IDEAS DIGITAL DOMAIN; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1117 words
MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller ''The 4-Hour Workweek''-- in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week -- but his face could go on the book's cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site's profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.

There's much to be admired in Mr. Frind's entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.

Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site first became popular among English-speaking Canadians. Popularity among online daters in many United States cities followed more recently, and with minimal spending on advertising the site. According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.

Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members' photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a ''trivial'' issue that did not bother users.

A blase attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive. Somehow, the site instantly replenishes the lost customers and attracts many more to boot.

No one heads to Plenty of Fish for the customer service, which is all but nonexistent. The company does not need a support structure to handle members' subscription and billing issues because the service is entirely advertising-based. Its tagline is: ''100 percent free. Put away your credit card.'' For hand-holding, users must rely on fellow members, whose advice is found in online forums. The Dating & Love Advice category lists more than 320,000 posts, making up in sheer quantity what it lacks in a soothing live presence available by phone.

The principal customer service that Plenty of Fish provides is responses to complaints about possibly fraudulent identities and to subpoenas and search-warrant requests. Last year, Mr. Frind hired his first, and still only, employee to handle these requests, freeing him to attend to adding new servers when required and tweaking code. ''Most of the time, I don't need to do anything,'' he said.

To keep his site's forums free of spam, Mr. Frind has refined a formula for analyzing customer feedback and arriving at a determination of whether a given forum post is spam and should automatically be deleted. He has also devised some new software twists that enable him to offload work to his customers, letting users review the photos that are uploaded to the site.

Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.

Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish's volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers' enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: ''Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it's free.''

Plenty of Fish displays banner ads, Google-supplied ads and, most profitable of all, ''affiliate'' marketing links that send users to other dating sites. For example, Mr. Frind said, when one of his customers clicks on an advertisement for a book titled ''Double Your Dating'' and, after being sent to the publisher's Web site, ends up buying it for $40, the publisher pays Plenty of Fish a commission -- of $40 -- for the sale, glad to have landed a customer that past experience shows is a good prospect for ''upselling'' other goods and services related to dating.

For all that Mr. Frind has accomplished, his site looks puny when compared with Craigslist, which has built a mighty automation engine tended by only a handful of people. Craigslist's personals draw about six million unique visitors a month, more than any other dating site, and its listings for all categories generate 10 billion page views a month. It covers 450 localities in 50 countries around the world -- with only 25 employees. It is among the top 10 busiest English-language sites, but the customers who enjoy its free listings, like Plenty of Fish's, must serve themselves or seek assistance from others. ''Anything that represents customer hand-holding represents a failure of site design,'' said Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's chief executive. ''We try to make changes to the site to make the problem go away.''

BOTH Plenty of Fish and Craigslist have created sites that run almost completely on their own, but in different ways. Craigslist has no commercial messages other than listings, and it collects fees only for a minuscule slice of its posts. It charges employers for jobs listings in 10 of its 450 cities, and brokers for apartment listings in New York City. All other listings are free. ''To most of our users,'' Mr. Buckmaster said, ''it's a mystery how we make money.''

At Plenty of Fish, there is no mystery: a large square of advertising sits in the middle of most profile pages. Its success demonstrates that many consumers will tolerate, and even embrace, advertising when a site offers a free service for which others charge membership fees.

Mr. Frind has found that rare business in which the profits gush in, whether or not he leaves his hammock.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: WORK WEEK (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); ONLINE DATING SERVICES (78%); INTERNET & WWW (78%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING EXPENDITURE (73%); CUSTOMER SERVICE (70%); COMPANY PROFITS (69%); COMPUTER PROGRAMMING (65%); LANGUAGE & LANGUAGES (65%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (89%)
GEOGRAPHIC: VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (71%) BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA (71%) CANADA (90%); UNITED STATES (86%)

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