We never understood the deal with Carter Road. Why the greatest city in India would abandon its prime, oceanfront real estate to hordes of teenagers with Honda Activas will never make sense to us. As expected, we witnessed a few distressing sights on the way, like a small girl being chased by two grown men, and a sports car with a Californian number plate, presumably owned by someone half our age. But those are the kinds of things you learn to filter out from your subconscious with patience, practice and gin.
We were there strictly on business, to review what numerous, reliable sources promised us was one of the greatest French fry dispensaries in the city, The J. We’d like to point out that in the past, Derrick, our intern, has used the term “The Js” to unfavourably refer to Jewish people, and that has nothing to do with this article. For all the buzz we’d heard about it, and all the scholarly articles written about its success, The J at Carters wasn’t very much to look at. Like most of the other restaurants on Carter Road’s infamous Khau Gully, it’s just a stall overlooking the road, without so much as a plastic lawn chair to sit on, or a fence to keep out the Js.
While our orders were being processed and we sat about admiring the local maidens, someone in our entourage happened to point out that there’s no real way of even vaguely determining a hot girl’s age because young girls don’t dress like children anymore, and they almost always have on three inches of makeup. We then came to the harsh realisation that at some point in our lives, we may have inadvertently checked out a 16 year old, which until only recently was India’s official age of consent. So technically, we did nothing wrong. As we contemplated our morals and reveled at the beauty of the female form, our food arrived;
Magic Fries
Rs. 140
Contrary to what people think, there’s no elaborate master plan behind anything we do, we just wing it, no matter how many lives it destroys. We called for the Magic Fries because it had the coolest name on the menu. We really wish we could say at least something remotely positive about the Magic Fries, but it had literally no redeeming qualities. There appeared to have been some sort of fried Maggi noodles sprinkled over some very average fries, which had been soaked in a McDonald’s-ish chilli garlic sauce. We didn’t mind the first bite, but everything after that was just painful. The Magic Fries were just wrong.
Chicken Pizza Fries
Rs. 180
Our favourite part about the Chicken Pizza Fires were the intricately cut chicken sausages that decorated the very top of the cone. It was nothing at all like a pizza, and the fries and cheese sauce weren’t particularly compelling, and then sickeningly heavy. We were only able to finish about half a cone by the time we found a nice young beggar girl willing to accept it, and paid her handsomely for the service of taking that cursed item off our hands.
The Decree: We regularly treat our stomachs like trash cans, we’ve eaten seafood under bridges and almost regularly turn to substance abuse to numb our crippling depression. But the few mouthfuls of fries we managed to get down at The J were the first to seriously make us worry about what we were putting into our bodies, our temples. We were really looking forward to eating at The J, because we like fries, and we like cheese, but maybe we did something wrong, or caught them off guard, we’ll probably never know. Would we ever eat at The J again? Maybe, just not any time soon.
