Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

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I might be biased in saying Skillet Street Food is one of the best places in Seattle to grab great food since my wife works there and they bribed me with a ticket to the Sub Pop 20th anniversary show. Forbes agrees that Skillet’s great and it’s generally a good sign when non-food press is talking about a restaurant. Just past their 1st year in business, Skillet is still grabbing headlines with their outstanding food served from Airstream trailer on the streets of Seattle. And if you haven’t tried it, bacon jam is out of this world.

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I needed to escape the confines of the swanky Grand Formosa Regent last night, so I jumped in a cab and headed for the Shilin Night Market. This was similar to night markets I visited in Beijing, offering many foods that go beyond my ability to recognize. In the covered market stalls serve oyster omelets, giant fried chicken patties, squid on a stick, noodles, hot pot, and tons of stuff I couldn’t recognize. There’s also an arcade and shopping for trinkets under the cover of the large market building. It’s what Pike Place Market in Seattle might look like if there were no health inspectors. Nearby the streets turn into an outdoor bazaar, where vendors setup in the middle of the street and shops line both sides. Plenty of photos of food here:

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I’m in San Francisco this week doing some consulting for digital signage startup OneCast. I wanted to find coffee near the office (preferably not Starbucks). A quick search using Google Maps revealed several choices that I’d never heard of. Clicking on one choices in Google Maps, I hit the ‘more info’ link and find out that in addition to reviews, Google Maps now includes CleanScore.com ratings, which are based on health inspections. Now I don’t need to look for the letter grade in the window when I get to a restaurant, I can see online at a glance whether I want to risk eating at a restaurant based on their health code data like the following:

Moderate Violation: Empty soap dispenser or towels., Food prepared in unsafe area or with bare hands.
Minor Violation: Inadequate cleaning fluids.

I’m not sure whether this is good for consumers as a warning when you might go somewhere known to have problems, or if it will make us more paranoid of going places that might simply have an off day when the inspector drops by. Either way, it’s nice to see Google giving us all the information it can aggregate on a given restaurant in one location.

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I’ve seen Chicken 65 listed on the menu in a number of Indian restaurants. It’s always a spicy dish. Sometimes Chicken 65 is made with whole chicken legs and thighs, sometimes it’s made with boneless chicken. The dish is always an unnatural red color, presumably due to some food dye used in the cooking process. But why the name Chicken 65?

Each time I visit a restaurant with Chicken 65 on the menu, I ask them why they call the dish Chicken 65, which sounds far more mundane than a vindaloo, gobi, masala, or one even curry. The answer varies, but the common theme seems to be something along the lines of, ‘it’s just a name, we could call it anything.’ So why not Chicken 64 or Chicken 66? Surely there’s a good story in here somewhere.

Looking online for an answer to the question, ‘what is chicken 65?’, the stories vary widely. Some versions of the story claim it was a chicken dish created in 1965. Another story claims the spices soak for 65 days. My favorite version of the story is one that I read on The Hindu, which suggests that the Chicken 65 recipe first used 65 chilies for every kilogram of chicken – based on the popularity of spicy food as a way to prove one’s manhood.

If you know a story of Chicken 65 or have some insight into the history of this Indian dish, please share it in the comments.

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