andrew mellman wrote:At one point Bloomington used to be the home of one of the few Tibetan restaurants in the country . . . do you know if it's still there? (sorry for the partially out-of-thread post) If so, by chance have you eaten there?
At one point in the late '80s, early '90s, there were only two Tibetan restaurants in the US: Snow Lion in Bloomington and Tibetan Kitchen on Third Avenue in the low 40s in Manhattan. I made it my business to eat at both, just for the hell of it.
IU apparently has a major Institute of Tibetan Studies, an organization in which the Dalai Lama's brother is or was involved in some way, and the restaurant was said to be a spinoff of the steady stream of Tibetans that this brought to Bloomington, plus the relative ease of selling offbeat ethnic food in a college town.
The landscape has changed somewhat, of course. NYC has several now, and so does the Bay Area. I ran into a Tibetal place a few years ago in either Ann Arbor or Madison. (Aren't they interchangeable?
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The food, in any case, isn't strikingly different from what you'd expect of the region - sort of a mix of China and the -stans (why do I hear echoes from another thread), with stir-fries common, not usually hot-and-spicy; flatbreads, wheat noodles and a kind of dumpling called momos are the usual starches, although most of these places serve rice too, perhaps because a Western audience expects it.
Disclaimer: I haven't eaten at Snow Lion since about 1990, but I had one of their T-shirts ("Second Only Tibetan Restaurant in U.S.") until it fell into shreds.