Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Garance has some fun with Gourmet’s spread on dining in Kabul. Turns out that finding high quality cuisine in Kabul can be difficult:

the subhed to “Kabul Nights” is “Most of the restaurants in Afghanistan’s capital, where there are few named streets and no addresses, are tough to find. One clue: Look for the guards.” I love when the upscale glossies do spreads on such places.

Afghan food in the United States, however, is both delicious and can be rather upscale. Hamid Karzai’s brother is a restaurateur, with three restaurants named Helmand with locations in Baltimore, San Francisco and Cambridge. I went to the one in Cambridge about five years ago, and from what I can remember, it was fantastic. Afghan food is, not surprisingly, something of a mix between Indian/Pakistani food and Middle Eastern/Iranian food. So lots of rice, yogurts and lamb. Also, Fremont, California — a city about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco — has a very large Afghan community and has many smaller and lower scale Afghan restaurants which are also quite good.