PAANING FOR GOLD-The new hot treat from India (NY PRESS)

My first experience with paan was at the Mavalli Tiffin Rooms, a famous old restaurant in Bangalore. I was there alone, and because the place was crowded with noisy families, both seated and waiting to be seated, the waiter led me to a table already occupied by a respectable middle class couple in their early sixties. I soon found out that their son lived in New Jersey and worked at Merrill Lynch.

After we finished eating, a waiter handed each of us a little plastic bag holding a small triangle of aluminum foil. It was about the size of a thin mint cookie.

“This is paan,” the woman explained. She unwrapped the foil, revealing a dark green leaf folded into a triangle. “It’s good for digestion,” she said, “and for your breath. It sweetens it.” She popped hers into her mouth and began chewing. “You don’t eat it. You chew it for a while and then spit it out at the end.”

“What’s it made from?”

“Oh, lots of things. Lime paste, spices, and it’s all wrapped up in a betel leaf.”

I was trying to follow my doctor’s advice and only eat food that was served piping hot. A cold, raw leaf filled with who knows what did not seem to fit the bill. But curiosity won out, and I inserted the small packet into my mouth. A rush of unfamiliar flavors flooded my tongue. After a few moments, I got nervous and spit it into my napkin. While I hoped that I wouldn’t later be punished by days in my hotel bathroom, part of me regretted the fact that I hadn’t had the full paan experience. I doubted that I’d have another chance to try this popular after-meal treat, since I was soon returning to the U.S.

You can imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled across a paan shop just around the corner from my apartment in Manhattan. I enlisted my boyfriend Dan into the expedition.

After excellent dosas at Saravanas, the newest outpost of the international restaurant chain based in Chennai, we walked around the corner to the Kenara Paan Shop, a tiny, fluorescent-lit convenience store sitting near the corner of 27th Street and Lexington. The store, owned by two middle-aged Pakistani brothers named Dnyal and Shuab Ahmad, also sells South Asian DVDs, phone cards, coffee and newspapers.

I ordered two paan and asked Shuab if he could name the ingredients as he put them in. He took two betel leaves from a large metal bowl on the counter and explained that they were grown in Florida. He then painted them each with a chalky white liquid. “It’s lime,” he said. As in the mineral. He laid the leaves on the green marble counter top and proceeded to squirt them with a bright red syrup from what looked like a former hand soap dispenser. “Rose syrup,” he said. Then a swipe of menthol goo, a dollop of some brown, wrinkled rose petals in syrup, a sprinkling of fennel seeds, both plain and candied, a pinch of cardamom pods, one of grated coconut, and then a few betel nuts. He rapidly folded the leaves into fat elongated triangles and then wrapped them in foil.

I turned to Shuab’s brother Dnyal and asked him who their customers were.

“We have all customers” he said, “American, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian. Everybody loves paan. My little nephew can eat like ten sweet paan in a row.”

“What’s its appeal?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were crazy, like I was asking him why people liked chocolate.

“It’s good. Everybody likes it.”

Shuab handed us our paan in a little paper bag and we handed him a $1.50 each. Back home, we sat on our couch, carefully unwrapped the foil, counted to three and popped them simultaneously into our mouths.

The first taste was one of overwhelming sweetness—from the rose syrup—and then I got a tang of menthol. The contents were crunchy, and the rose petal scent was strong. As I continued to chew and as the sweetness subsided, I began to taste the licorice flavor of the fennel and the warm spiciness of the cardamom. The flavors were surprising and unfamiliar, and I almost wanted to spit it out. The betel leaf and the betel nuts are both mild narcotics, and after about fifteen minutes of chewing, my mouth started to feel somewhat numb.

It was strange and jarring, kind of how I remember very dark chocolate or Marmite tasting when I was a kid. But it wasn’t just the taste, it was also the mix of unusual textures—the feeling of chewing some mulch, twigs and gooey gel wrapped up in a leaf. Yet there was something exciting about such a startling gustatory experience; paan is pure flavor and scent, and it woke up my tired nose and jaded taste buds, like a walk through a crowded market in India where sounds and smells overtake you with a stirring ferocity.

Kenara Paan Shop
134 E. 27 St.
212-481-1660