It’s pretty common for vegetarians to be asked by non-vegetarians, “What do you miss most about eating meat?”  Usually my glib response to such questions is, “Murdering and torturing innocent animals?”  I think this is why I don’t have many friends.  But the actual answer to such a question is I miss meat sauces (such as BBQ sauce and chicken wing sauce).  I enjoyed having meat slathered in a deliciously tasty sauce, which was one of the main reasons I ate meat for as long as I did.  It wasn’t until I realized that I actually liked the sauce and not the meat that I became vegetarian.  There is a restaurant in Carrboro that first opened when I was here last year called Ba Da Wings. It was one of few restaurants in the area that was open late, so I went with some friends to try it out.

I should point out that this was back when I was using my phone as a camera.  The image quality on the food was so bad that I decided not to actually post the review (sometimes that happens folks)!  But on this first trip there were not a lot of items on the menu.  Ba Da Wings had mostly chicken wings and a few sandwiches.  The only one back then was a portobello wrap.  It was pretty good, but nothing to sing the praises of, which was another reason I did not publish this review last year.

The cajun fries were heavily seasoned fries, and despite being krinkle cut (which I hate!), they were actually pretty good.  The best part about ordering fries in a wings restaurant?  Having an unlimited supply of dipping sauces!  Did I mention that I love dipping sauce?

This year I returned to Ba Da Wings to discover that they added a veggie wing option (which is supposed to be vegan, according to the waiter).  While this picture might suggest that I ordered bloody turds (as they look like bloody turds), the veggie wings in the Carolina sauce was pretty tasty.  They tasted like slivers of a home-made veggie patty, so they were a little mushier than I would’ve preferred for a veggie wing.  I would suggest that they try switching to seitan or another more meat alternative with tougher texture to simulate the wing eating atmosphere.  Nevertheless, I do respect the fact that they’ve added veggie wings as an option for vegetarians, despite them being more expensive than the actual meat.

Altogether, Ba Da Wings is a pretty good option for late nite dining post partying in Chapel Hill.  There are a few other vegetarian options (including a portobello burger), and they are all pretty cheap.  I’d recommend going to Ba Da Wings if you’re out late at night in Carrboro, so I’ll give it four cheese sandwiches.

Ba Da Wings
302 E Main St
Carrboro, NC 27510

Hey, Franchisee!  Are you interested in catching on the next hot trend in fast food?  Well, let me tell you about Noodles and Company!  Noodles you say?  That sounds too ethnic for middle America!  Well, let me tell you about the Noodles and Co that I went to in Chapel Hill, North Carolina!

Ok, that’s enough exclamation marks for this review.  I was getting tired of eating down home southern food, and I was actually craving something that would be quasi-healthy.  I was walking down Franklin Street and was immediately drawn to Noodles and Co (probably because I needed to use a public restroom).  After leaving the bathroom and catching the eye of the annoyed cashiers, I decided to order something.  The premise of  Noodles and Co is the modularization of Noodles.  You pick a noodle type, then do it in a certain style and wait 10 min as they make you a fresh plate of noodles.

While I waited, I was given this hilarious marker that I could laugh while I waited for my noodles (which didn’t take very long).

I decided to get the noodles with peanut sauce, vegetables and tofu.  This is probably my finest photographic work (I think I got lucky with the lighting), but the picture is quite fitting for the noodles, as they were really tasty.  Admittedly, they were not as cheap as the marker suggested (about $7 for a plate of noodles), but they were very fresh tasting and I would definitely recommend returning here.

I feel strange highly rating franchise restaurants, but Noodles and Co seems to have a pretty good business model.  They make reasonably priced tasty noodles (ranging from Italian to Asian style) fairly quickly.  There are a fair number of combinations that are vegan, and since it’s modular, you can definitely get something different each time you come.  And it has public bathrooms (sort of).  So, I’ll give Noodles and Co four cheese sandwiches.

Noodles and Company
214 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 
(919) 967-7320

North Carolina is fairly well known for having good barbecue.  It’s not as good as Memphis (in my opinion), and it is unique with its mustard-based barbecue (instead of ketchup-based).  As a result, my friends wanted to go try out Jim’s Famous BBQ in Chapel Hill.  According to Yelp!, Jim’s is very highly rated for having good BBQ.  On the outset, I was concerned as Jim’s has obviously filled in a former Applebee’s/TGI Friday’s/Other Casual Dining franchise location, as the interior had the sterile atmosphere of a chain restaurant.  That is never a good sign for a BBQ restaurant, though I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. 

For me, I can’t eat BBQ outside of the side dishes, which for the most part are the same, but I try to rate BBQ restaurants from the perspective of how good the sauce is (and if the sauce is vegetarian).  Fortunately, Jim’s provides its BBQ sauce tableside, and has all the ingredients listed on the back.  In case you can’t read, the first ingredient of the BBQ sauce is barbecue sauce.  Barbecue sauce cannot be an ingredient of barbecue sauce!  Sauce is not a fundamental element, so basically Jim’s BBQ sauce is just watered down barbecue sauce.  Not a good start.

What makes Jim’s worse is that they would not even let me get a combination plate of sides (despite the fact that you could get multiple sides with any main dish).  So, I ended up having to order 4 separate side dishes at full price just so I could properly review this place.  Jim’s obviously did not want to make my job easy.  The macaroni and cheese was pretty standard fare from what I would expect to get in a grocery store hot food section (and not a nice grocery store like Whole Foods that has GREAT mac and cheese).  It was pretty dry and flavorless, though was made edible with the watered down barbecue sauce.

The barbecue baked beans was pretty tasty, though were a little to sweet for my liking.  Also, I didn’t need to eat so much barbecue baked beans (this would be an instance where having a veggie combo plate would have been useful).

The coleslaw was very mayonnaise-y, but I liked it.  It too didn’t taste very flavorful, and tasted like it came from a grocery store.  I’m willing to bet that most of the sides are not made in-house.

The only dish that was decent (but nothing to write home about) would be the fried okra.  I think they were frozen okra, but the breading wasn’t too dry or hard (as is the case with many other fried okras that I’ve had). 

Overall, Jim’s is a pretty awful place if you’re a vegetarian.  I don’t even know if it’s a great place if you eat meat.  If you want the true southern dining experience, I think Mama Dips is a better place to go.  So save your time and money and don’t bother with Jim’s.  One cheese sandwich.

Jim’s Famous BBQ
115 South Elliot Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 
(919) 942-7427

There’s nothing like a good home-cooked meal, and when it comes to Indian food, I can’t help but compare any food I eat to what I would get at home cooked by my mother or previously my grandmother.  One problem with most Indian restaurants is that they try too hard to maximize profits at the expense of putting out good food (which is part of the reason most Indian restaurants serve buffets).  In North Carolina, I was informed that there was a good Indian restaurant that I should check out, called Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe.

First of all, I will say I was initially pleased with the naming of the restaurant.  So few Indian restaurants name it after the owner or chef, which creates a level of detachment from the food.  If I were to put my name on a restaurant, I create a level of responsibility on the quality of meal that you will get.  Calling an Indian restaurant Taj Mahal or Bombay Palace is not only cliche, it doesn’t identify who’s responsible for this crap.  With Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, I know if I have a problem with the meal, I go straight to Vimala.  Which is great because when I went there, I saw Vimala.  She’s responsible for running the kitchen and making sure all the food is great.  So before I even got the food, I knew it would be good.  Thus ends the educational portion of this blog.

I wanted to sample the full spectrum of fare that Vimala had on store, so I ordered the Vegetarian thali, which was a little pricey by North Carolina standards (~$14), but a bargain by Boston standards.  For the thali, I get two curries, rice, yoghurt, chutney, daal, papadam, and chapati (an Indian bread, thinner than naan).  I saw that there was idly and vada sambar available as well, which I wanted to try, so I asked the cashier who was Indian where he was from.  Which in hindsight is the kind of racist questions that I usually get annoyed about, but the reason I asked was I wanted to know if the sambar was going to be any good.  North Indians have about as much clue on how to make a good sambar as Chinese people know how to make Mexican food (I’ve had Chinese-Mexican food, it’s terrible).  But I assumed because he’s Indian that he was related to Vimala (which he wasn’t), though out of a strange coincidence, they were both from Kerala (a state in southern India).  He also offered me a sample of the sambar to try out.

Every item on the thali was as good as my grandmother’s cooking, so I will have to credit Vimala for that.  In fact it is much better than my mother’s cooking, though my mother is limited by having ulcers and high blood pressure, so she never cooks salty, sour, or spicy.  The rice and daal were delicious enough to eat on their own, just enough spice and flavor.

The beans curry and raita were both very fresh and tasty (you could tell that if they were batch-made, they were batch made recently).

The sambar was a home run!  Probably the best sambar I’ve had since I left India (sorry mom).  As they were Keralan, everything was chock full of coconut, which is bad if you eat it a lot, but deliciously amazing if you go out to eat it every once in a while.  And the sambar had legit vegetables in it like squash and okra in it, unlike even Indian sambars (which are usually just onions and maybe a rare carrot).

I’m not a fan of chapati or papadams, so I won’t make a comment about them, outside of the fact that they too were tasty.

Spicy chutney was offered in case you don’t find the food spicy enough.  I thought the food was just spicy enough, so I just ate it with the papadam.

Finally, my friend ordered a thali as well, but did not opt for the sambar (mistake).  He got aloo mattar as well, and even that was amazing!

I was thoroughly impressed with Vimala’s on multiple levels.  First, the food was all uniformly amazing, and vegetarian/vegan options are clearly delineated from non-vegetarian options.  It would be nice if she could make a pure vegetarian restaurant (just in case there is any meat contamination, though I don’t think there is), but I don’t think that’s sustainable in North Carolina.  What is even more impressive is her versatility to make delicious North Indian as well as South Indian dishes.  Also, the restaurant is very casual and friendly and not as ostentatious as most Indian restaurants attempt to be.  It is delicious fare somewhere of unparallel quality with an atmosphere somewhere between a roadside hotel and fancy restaurant.  Finally, I must give some credit for being very involved in the local community, including sourcing most ingredients locally (I presume the tamarind, fenugreek, asafoetida and other spices aren’t grown in North Carolina).  It’s rare to find an Indian restaurant that makes that kind of effort to make delicious food and ingratiate itself with the community.  Because of these reasons, I have to give Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe five cheese sandwiches.

Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe
431 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 
(919) 929-3833

My last excursion to North Carolina was so great that I decided to return another year later to see how much has changed (not much) and see if I can try out the other great restaurants in the Chapel Hill area.  One place that looked really interesting that I didn’t have a chance to try was Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe (think Waffle House, if Waffle House was founded in 1832).  Ye Olde Waffle House is not that old, but it definitely acts as if it is.

How do you know you’re in a Southern Diner?  Look for folksy puns on the menu.  Only the pun on this menu is confusing as I think they mean “good food, no yolk”, replacing “joke” with “yolk” as they serve a lot of egg-based foods here.  But I guess they thought they weren’t going far enough with their pun, so they punned “yolk” and “yoke”, which is strange, as a yoke has more to do with oxen, and has a slight connotation of the slave-holding history of the South.  Or they could just not know how to spell yolk.  I tend to overthink these things.

I was so hungry I didn’t realize I should be taking pictures before eating (a rare feat for me), so you’ll have to forgive me for not getting the missing piece of waffle in this picture.  But, I’ll promise you that the missing piece tasted exactly like the rest of the waffle… delicious.  Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe waffles have a slightly “doughnut” batter taste to them, which is pretty awesome.  It’s almost like eating a funnel cake with butter and syrup (ooh! idea!).

No Waffle House/Shoppe meal is complete without some hash browns.  I got them with onions, peppers, mushrooms and cheese (the works).  They were a little overcooked in my opinion, but were fine with some hot sauce.  It’s pretty hard to ruin potatoes and cheese without completely burning them.

Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe is a quaint folksy place to come grab breakfast or lunch if you’re in the Chapel Hill area.  It’s popular among the local students, so expect to fight for a table, or you can just sit up front.  There are not a lot of vegetarian friendly choices (as per usual), but otherwise it is pretty good.  The prices are reasonable by Boston standards, but may be a little steep for a Waffle House clone (or progenitor?).  So, I’ll give it three and a half cheese sandwiches.

Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe
173 East Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 
(919) 929-9192