Wild Yak Tibetan Restaurant
Walking around the Northcote end of High Street and stumbled upon the Wild Yak Tibetan restaurant and thought why not?
The inside interior was a bit too campy and would baffle the likes of Edward Said. It's Tibetan orientalia trying to accommodate the flourishes of Western dining: fan-folded paper napkins, plastic laminates for tabletops, poorly placed dim lights, and a menu that's structured according to the logic of soups, entrees, main dishes further divided into categories of beef, chicken, vegan, etc. Ordered two dishes whose names I cannot recall. One was mixed vegetables sauted in ginger and garlic, the other was chicken in a tomato-based sauce infused with lemons and an assortment of wonderful herbs.
The mixed vegetables is pretty stadard East Asian and Southeast Asian fare. And I thought of it immediately as the inevitable intersection in understanding Tibetan cuisine. I would have wanted more ginger in mine, but this works just right.
The real surprise is the chicken in tomato sauce. The sauce is just heavenly and while its flavor is distinctly Asian (sweet-sour, and then some), the combination of herbs placed in it is magical. I can only guess a couple: coriander seeds and some nutmeg I think. You get sweet and sour sauces anywhere in the region, but nothing tastes like this.
I wish I did my research before going to Wild Yak. I'm a virgin when it comes to Tibetan food. Never had it before, and I simply wasn't able to imagine what it's going to be like given Tibet is, or was, isolated pretty much by geographic constraints. What grows there? A quick survey of googled information reveals barley to be the staple crop, and the altitude is so high that it's impossible to grow stuff like rice while there. My eyes roled when I kept reading cheese on some of the menu items only to find out eventually that cheese is an important staple. The Tibetan dumplings are also a sharp contrast to that of its neighboring countries (am I allowed to say that?), and I am curious to see how such traditions translate into the cooking of something not really Tibetan as squid or calamari, which is on the menu. This place deserves another visit.
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