Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Vikram eggplant eater

Vikram is a fussy eater. There are very few cuisines he will eat:
  • Thai Food: A particular favorite, but only if he gets to eat Eggplant green curry. (Preferably from Amarin Thai).
  • Indian Food: But only channa batura (even at Chevron Bevron)
  • Pizza: But only cheese, with huge and liberal helpings of crushed peppers on top
  • Subway sandwich: But just toasted with cheese and jalapenos
It was quite the shock to David White's and my system when he started here 4 years ago, and when we asked him to go get lunch with us, he assured us that he would rather go to the Pizza Hut in the Target store across the street and get himself a cheese pizza. David White and I of course pride ourselves on our discriminating culinary taste, and it was surprising to us that somebody would enjoy eating just cheese pizzas from Pizza Hut. But here he was in flesh and blood.

Back in the day, we used to get dinner at the office every day and around 6pm, David would make the rounds, "taking a census," as I called it, to find out what people wanted for dinner. With Vikram the answer was always simple, "Thai Food," and "eggplant green curry." Of course, we couldn't possibly have Thai food everyday, so we would have to get other cuisines, and Vikram would rather starve than eat a non-approved cuisine.

Vikram could of course eat eggplant green curry 3 meals a day if he wanted, so strong was his commitment to the food. This one time when we were at the Castro Office, he decided to go out and get some for lunch. He asked Nick Hristov if he would like some, and Nick said, "sure." So Vikram goes out and gets some extra spicy curry and gives Nick his little box of food. Five minutes later, there's an explosion in Nick's cube, smoke coming out of Nick's ears, Nick rolling around the floor in pain and trying to put out the fire in his mouth. That was the last time ever that Nick had Thai food.

Needless to say, this was unfortunate for us. If both of them were having dinner with us, there was nothing we could get, one guy would only have Thai food, the other would definitely not.