How the f*!% do they make pasta spicy?

Undoubtedly, the quote of the week was, “How the f*!% do they make pasta spicy?” (I know, I’m censoring myself here, but for some reason it’s more enjoyable than the F bomb).   

Little did Lindsay know that the room service pasta on a weeknight was the least of her worries.  For dinner on Saturday we selected a restaurant that we were familiar with that has since opened an additional location in Gurgaon called Turquoise Cottage.  It specializes primarily in Chinese and Thai cuisine and turns itself into quite the night spot around 10pm.  Like most places in Gurgaon, it’s located in a mall.

At any rate, I ordered the Tom Yam soup and allowed the waiter to up-sell me on some sort of Singapore chili crab dish (what can I say, I was tired of chicken) while Lindsay ordered some sort of dish with prawns.  Mid-way through our second mojito, Lindsay asked to try the soup.  As she described it on Facebook, she bit down into something twice and her brain registered a bit late that she had bitten directly into some sort of hot chili.

For those of you familiar with Lindsay, you can probably imagine what happened next.  For those of you not so fortunate, there were tears, orders to multiple wait staff to bring some combination of ice, water, napkins (for some reason, patting napkins on the tongue seemed a logical response), additional ice, some sort of dairy product (we somehow found the one restaurant in India that didn’t have any yoghurt in house), and finally more water.  In addition to the water, there were multiple attempts to relieve the pain in the mint and crushed ice filled mojito.

After what seemed like a long, long time to me (I can only imagine what it seemed like to her), she stabilized.  At that point, the panic restarted as the realization set in that she had had a LOT of ice in a restaurant not associated with a five-star hotel, which isn’t necessarily the most hygienic of decisions.  Thankfully, either the Xifaxin we’ve started taking is doing its job or we just got lucky as there were no further issues.

Through all of this, she still hadn’t received her main dish (apparently, her reaction had scared our waiter, who made himself scarce the rest of the evening, leaving others to tend to us) and the kitchen was busy remaking her dish.  A dish, which turned out to be perhaps the most bland, flavorless Chinese food I’ve tasted since I was in Ireland.