Tomorrow I set foot in California for the first time in over a year. As much as I like to think I’ll be able to spend my two weeks on the west coast exploring brave new worlds of flavor, my rotation of meals will probably be a lineup of long missed favorites, determined by the function f(x)=x+beer, where x={burrito, sushi, burger, Oaxacan food}.

After all, there’s a reason I named this blog The Eaten Path. After thirteen months of sinking my teeth into one of the world’s richest dining destinations, I have yet to eat at a single place that requires a reservation, and my favorite menu item at my favorite restaurant in New York is the soup.

I have no shame, then, in including Go Go Curry on the eventual short list of must-eat destinations when I’ve someday up and left this fair town. As an establishment, it combines almost everything I love about dining: an informal, hole-in-the-wall setting, invariable aluminum feeding bowls, atmosphere comprised entirely of Japanese newspaper clippings devoted to former Yankees player Hideki Matsui, and garish gimmicks that don’t make sense, even as gimmicks. If there’s a one-dimensional string connecting Japanese curry, baseball and a gorilla, it might be called a grand slam.

As a meal, Go Go Curry’s katsu curry combines almost everything I love about comfort food. A perfectly panko crusted and deep fried pork (or chicken) cutlet, pre-sliced, sits atop a mound of rice drowned in salty/spicy/sweet Kanazawa kare aside a garnish of raw cabbage – it’s fast food, and it just might be factory food, but I’ll be damned if just the sight of this meal doesn’t expose the raw nerves of hunger. Lunch at Go Go Curry combines the noblest of textures, the most addictive of flavors and the most yielding of white rices in one hefty bowl of bliss.

Go Go Curry’s grand slam ups the ante by adding hard boiled eggs, snappy sausages and a curiously good shrimp to the already winning lineup of pork and chicken katsu. I shared one of these platters with Bobby Digital the other day, expecting an epic feast but ultimately realizing that I was in fact thinking of something else altogether:

Go Go Curry’s World Champion Curry weighs in at five-and-a-half pounds of rice, curry and breaded, deep fried meats. Go Go Curry limits service of the World Champion platter to five orders per day. There’s little else I can say about this, except that it’s only a matter of time before twenty five dollars’ worth of curry says hello to my GI tract.

For now, though, nothing satisfies more essentially than a $5.00 bowl of plain Go Go Curry. Reduced to its barest form, the stupidly simple good of this curry spoons a substantial deal of virtue over what would otherwise be called goop, slop or sludge. Tiny pieces of pork add just the right amount of variation in texture, and a measured dose of umami in the recipe keeps my spoon traveling from tray to mouth without pause – except, of course, for the moment that I realize that I should have gone for a double.

Go Go Curry USA
273 W. 38th St.
New York, NY 10018
212.730.5555

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Manhattan, New York.