Kanishka

We're headed to Portugal for two weeks in February -- a week in Lisbon and a week in Porto. Has anyone been recently? We'll be traveling with a toddler so baby-friendly recommendations are particularly welcome, as are tips on good places for seafood. Thanks!

If you get in late to Vienna and are searching for a good meal, you can do worse than stumbling into Victus and Mili (http://victusundmili.at/). We had the added complication of a grumpy toddler weary from five hours on the road, and they simply smiled and let him wander the restaurant while we waited. It's a painfully hip, brightly lit space, catering to a young crowd. Occurred cabbage soup starters were good but a bit under acidic for me, though the bits of fresh sour apple helped. For mains Marisa got the gnocchi with red cabbage and greens, and I got their version of schnitzel. Both were made to order in the open kitchen, and were lighter than expected. They were of course the only two mains available - they only offer two appetizers and two entrees a night. At €54 for two apps, two entrees, one dessert (red wine poached pears with mascarpone cream, Ian loved it), three wines, and a beer, you would be foolish to not try this place out if in Vienna. But if you are coming from DC, trust me, there is no reason to go to Ethiopian Restaurant, Austria's only... Ethiopian restaurant. I would put it in the bottom tier if compared to DC Ethiopian. For us, having driven over 1k kilometers from Kosovo? Worth it. Edited to add: no we did not cover 1k kilometers in 5 hours. We broke the trip up and celebrated Thanksgiving in Belgrade.

Two Amys? CityZen? Citronelle is already gone. Marcels?

All about the weekends, right? Rosslyn sees lots of transient traffic Monday through Friday, but is a dead zone Saturdays and Sundays.

Zingermans in Ann Arbor. Katz's Deli, obvs. Carnegie Deli too probably.

OK, so maybe Lonely Planet has won back some points. On our last night in Thessaloniki, after four long hours of driving, we decided to stretch our legs and walk, and see where whims would take us. We ended up walking on the seaside strip, from the pier to the White Tower, skipping all the bars/cafes filled with youngs and youngs at heart, bars virtually indistinguishable from one another down to the thumping bass. I would have been all about those places once upon a time, but with a nine-month old? Not so much. We ended up at the White Tower ravenously hungry, with no idea where to go. That's when I saw a sign for Myrsini, a restaurant I knew had a "top pick" marking from Lonely Planet and had looked intriguing. (Thank goodness I know a bit of the Greek alphabet -- no English signage at all!) What proceeded was the best meal we had in Greece, and frankly one of the best meals I have had in months. We ordered the chef's meze variety plate, two sides, and one dish described as entree sized. In order of deliciousness from worst on up: The OK -- a plate of chickpea puree was a good go-to between other, more delicious bites, but this had little flavor. The texture was nice though, and mixed well with the other dishes. -- vinegar-smoked sausages were good after the first two bites but steadily declined, both as they cooled and as you kept eating. Less evident than the vinegar smoking was the saltiness. The pork was clearly high quality. The Very Good -- I got to hog a plate of of fava beans cooked with very good olive oil, lemon, parsley, and onion. The beans were served cold but were cooked well, with a little bite like I prefer my beans. -- The dolmades were clearly homemade, stuffed with a rice mix and served with a soft sheep's milk cheese. I love dolmades but Marisa tends to find them greasy, or the grape leaves are underdone. No such problems here. -- Perfectly cooked cow's liver chunks, served in the same high quality olive oil, cooked with fresh rosemary and vinegar. A small plate but very satisfying bites. The Fantastic -- Roast rabbit. Roasted and slathered in a fresh tomato sauce, served on rice. So tender, not gamey at all. We fought over the last pieces, and I gnawed on the bone, something I never do with rabbit. The Oh-my-god -- Never did I think I'd describe a plate of sauteed greens as transcendent, but here we are. Deep green, slightly bitter radish greens, with a healthy dose of lemon juice, amazing olive oil, and topped with that soft sheeps milk cheese again. Marisa's eyes got as big as saucers after her first bite, and she did what she normally does with food she loves and assembled a small "perfect bite," set aside to be her last taste of the meal. We both love sauteed dark greens but have never had radish greens before. The simplicity of preparation really made this dish, clearly something that emerged from a home kitchen and made it onto the restaurant menu. I'd go back to Thessaloniki for this dish alone. Here's the best part: the entire meal, with a carafe of white and some raki, cost us 33 euro. We left 40, as the service was the best we've had in Greece, and walked back to our hotel slowly, pushing a sleeping baby that had managed to charm all of our fellow diners and then had fallen fast asleep during our culinary reverie.

Smack against the rocks of Meteora in Kalambaka is a small, dingy tavern called Koka Roka. We are here in the extremely low season. Hotels and restaurants are closed, and the town is dead. Koka Roka was our last hope before hopping in the car and going to the next town over. And it was terrific. An old Greek grandmother type (half inch thick bifocals, cardigan etc.) greeted us into a dining room filled with wood smoke from a roaring fireplace. We were given no menus but did have a choice of meat: lamb, pork, or chicken "cooked on grill!" she said. We went with lamb, and took her offer of tzatziki and Greek salad to start. I had the house made ouzo as well. Color me surprised when the lamb - chops, mostly - came out, were sandwiched between two squares of thick wire lattice, and were put on top of the wood fire, on a grill rack I had not seen. This was only a few feet from us, a Greek barbecue in January! The grilled lamb was salty, with a squeeze of lemon, and fresher than any lamb I think I have had. It was cooked to a perfect temperature, with cracking and glistening fat as an added bonus. We literally devoured our plates, as well as the very garlicky tzaziki and the standard salad. This experience makes me wonder about the Lonely Planet guide to Greece, sad because 90% of the tips I've gained from Lonely Planet, in contrast to Trip Advisor Restaurants, have been great. We have eaten five meals in Greece so far excluding hotel breakfasts, in two cities. One was a Lonely Planet rec while four have not been. The L.P. recommendation was over priced and just ok; the two dinners we have had on whims, including the one described above, have been wonderful. We would have never found Koka Roka if just relying on Lonely Planet. ETA: idle curiosity led me to the trip advisor entry on Koka Roka. Let's just leave it as YMMV.

Dinner tonight at a Cretan (Cretin?) restaurant in downtown Thessaloniki whose name I never caught (starts with an alpha and is not the one Lonely Planet recommends). Great bread, taramosalata. Fantastic roast pork stew and some of the tastiest marinated white anchovies I have had - marinated enough to still be meaty without being overly fishy. Can't say the same for my grilled squid. Was billed as being fresh and may have been, but I think an entire grilled squid may be too much for me. We got in to Thes quite a bit later than planned and were starving and tired, so we were not as picky as we could have been. Tomorrow: inland into Thessaly!

We will be in northern Greece for five days/four nights starting the 16th -- Thessaloniki the nights of the 16th and 19th, and Kalambaka (near Meteora) the 17th and 18th. Any recommendations?

I avoided shutki maach like the plague all through my childhood, only to have it forced on me on a trip to a village in the middle of the Bangladeshi jungle some years ago. The odor and taste certainly take some getting used to... and I never have. Now if they start serving paturi, I'll be on the next plane over...

Goat curry is one dish Bengalis really do right. I've had multiple other versions, but the unique "panch phoron" (five spice) common in Bengali cuisine really puts it over the top. Now I'm homeland-sick!

I first went to the Taj Mahal when I was 8. I thought it was amazing. I returned when I was 30 and believe it or not, it was bigger than I remembered. No other site I've visited multiple times has had that level of impact on me.

I keep hoping this thread generates responses of some sort, but realize that it's highly unlikely given the fact that a) few people want to know about Kosovo and b ) fewer people want to visit Kosovo. So I'm unashamed to post that in the midst of a day of election monitoring here I and two of my colleagues went to the Sabaja Brewery's restaurant, where we had burgers -- or more correctly for me and one of my colleagues, bacon cheeseburgers -- and commented to each other "they taste just like American burgers!" It was fantastic and I am not ashamed at all to report that I'm quite homesick, and so perhaps loved it a bit too much. If you are in Kosovo and want a real American burger, go to Sabaja. It's still not exactly right, but nothing else comes close. Edited to add: my two colleagues were Kosovars.

A few weeks ago Marisa and I took advantage of unseasonably warm weather to venture out for lunch at Country House, a restaurant we'd heard much about but never taken the initiative to try. It's a bit of a bear to find, a right turn off a secondary artery, onto an unmarked dirt road you can only access by going through the "parking lot" ("patch of flattened dirt") of a Mercedes dealership. It's then another kilometer or two down one of the worst roads I've ever been on here (and that's saying something), climbing steadily until reaching a stone building, probably from at least the 1950s, at the road's end. Walking in, just past the host station, you see the kitchen, totally open and dominated by a massive, extremely hot wood-burning oven. In the winter the oven probably makes the interior of Country House warm and inviting, but on this unexpectedly warm day we made a beeline for the large deck, which overlooks miles and miles of bucolic farmland, a few minutes and a lifetime from the smog of Pristina. I took the opportunity to introduce Marisa to flia, the national dish of Kosovo. It's layers and layers of dough, interspersed with butter, yogurt, or cheese, and then backed over a hot fire for a very long time. Frankly, it's not that good; even the "best" renditions leave me feeling like I've eaten a moderately flavorless brick soaked in butter. Better were the roasted sweet peppers, served with a light yogurt sauce, another traditional Kosovar plate. We also had some warm bread to dip in the yogurt, and it was amazing -- as good as any fresh baked bread I've ever tried, though a bit hazardous for your fingertips. (The bread here in Kosovo is often very very good, which makes the fact that the one south Asian restaurant here has such utterly mediocre naan all the more confusing.) My entree, chicken breast with a mushroom sauce served over rice, was just OK. But Marisa's tave Elbasan (she's starting to really love tave Elbasan) was outstanding, and fed the two of us for two meals. The tave Elbasan was five euros; total bill, with two glasses of wine, came to just over 20 euros. A few days after our trip to Country House the temperature here plummeted. It's not getting over 45 in the daytime, and we had our first snowfall the day before Thanksgiving. That lunch on the deck of Country House was likely the last outdoor meal we'll have in Kosovo until April at the earliest. I can still taste the bread, and if we're feeling brave we may try going down that road, winter be damned, to try the other traditional dishes they feature on their longer-than-normal menu. Thank goodness we have a Subaru. Attached are some shots of the view from Country House's deck.

Tonight I went to a pretty fun jazz concert and came home with my ears ringing. I am exhausted and should got to bed, but instead I'm here sipping rakia from the Decani Monastery. If you visit Kosovo, Decani is one of about three places you cannot miss. The wine from the monastery is excellent, as is the rakia, though the red wine is by far the best of their options. Oddly enough, their are no vineyards around the Monastery itself. They are located some hours away by car in the amazing town of Velika Hoca, which at one point was home to twelve vineyards, each of which belonged to a different monastery in the area. This is all the more amazing when you consider Velika Hoca is the size of a postage stamp -- we walked from one side to the other in a little less than ten minutes. Each vineyard has its own church, each church has its own Orthodox decor, and they are all subtly different. My first sip of Decani rakia was straight from the still, given to me by Decani monastery's resident monk-slash-vintner, Father Marko. He was quite drunk when he gave me the glass (it was the village's festival day) so his explanation of the process of making rakia escapes me. But the taste he put quite well: "It burns a bit," he said. "That's how you know it is good." Having never had bathtub gin or moonshine, I can't make a legit comparison, but I suspect the homemade rakia I've had here in the Balkans comes quite close. If so, the rakia from Decani is a beautifully refined version of that. With just the right amount of ice, and served quite cold, I think it makes a terrific digestif.

I think I've found the single most unhealthy food this part of the world has to offer: steak "karadjordjeva." That's a cutlet (pork or beef, usually) rolled around cheese, breaded, fried, and topped with tartar sauce. And served with fries. We had this after a long drive back from Bulgaria, served at Bella Vista, a fine Serbian restaurant in Laple Selo, a local Serb enclave just outside of Pristina near the highway to Skopje. If you're in the mood for fried meet stuffed with cheese, this is a good dish to try -- but it is a lot of fat. Not for the faint of heart -- or the weak of heart, I suppose. Also, it does indeed look like a phallus.

Tonight we decided it was high time we tried Himalayan Gorkha, the only Nepalese restaurant we know of in Kosovo. That last clause feels funny -- "the only Nepalese restaurant in Kosovo" is like "the only kosher deli in Ulanbataar," as if the adjective "only" is really necessary. Anyway. It was good! Not very good, but good! Closer to Indian than Nepali, really. The chicken momos were different than others I've had, filled with a (delicious) mildly curried ground meat mix. I had their "chow mein," which was noodles stir fried with carrot, peppers, egg, chicken, and dried beef. Doctored with some spicy cilantro chutney, it wasn't amazing but was fairly good. Marisa's lamb rogan josh was better, more tomato heavy than other rogan josh curries I've tried and quite punchy, though not spicy. The naan was actually good, too. Not as doughy as some versions but warm, slathered in butter, and at 1 euro a basket well priced. The waiter kept talking to me in Hindi, a language I once knew, and though I tried valiantly my responses kept coming out in Albanian. If you've ever had the experience of one language replacing another in your mind, you'll understand how frustrating that is.

One day, two nights in a tiny village an hour north of Sofia, Bulgaria. A nice escape from Kosovo and, more importantly, from the city. We had mostly home-cooked meals over our short stay, including several large portions of home-made banitsa, a terrific breakfast, appetiser, or road trip snack. We have another pound of the stuff in our fridge -- seems the trend of me losing weight here will end very soon. For our last night in Bulgaria we went to a local restaurant, where we all shared traditional Bulgarian stews -- pork, chicken, and beef -- and salads. I also had shkembe, Bulgarian tripe soup. The soup was a mildly flavored stock I was encouraged to doctor with garnishes of garlic, vinegar, and chili pepper. What I ended up with was basically menudo without the onion and cilantro. And it turns out shkembe, like menudo, is renowned as a hangover cure. Who knew?

Wow, that last entry cut off abruptly! I know I had more to say at the time... but I can't remember what it was for the life of me. So it goes. In other news, our car finally arrived in Kosovo, freeing us from only being able to go to restaurants in relative walking distance. There are numerous very tempting places outside of Pristina proper that I've been dying to try! Last night, we drove about a mile outside of town to Tokyo, the only nominally "Japanese" restaurant I know of in Kosovo. I say nominal because the staff are entirely Filipino, serving Japanese basics (teriyaki chicken, miso soup, basic sushi) alongside some Filipino dishes. We stuck to Japanese this time because I was having a craving, but I wasn't brave enough to try the sushi. We started with seaweed salad and spring rolls. The seaweed was, in a word, terrible, the gloppiest and most tasteless seaweed I have ever had. i was surprised because I know there is an importer somewhere around here selling the standard neon-green seaweed salad you can pick up at Harris Teeter, as I had a bowl of it at a restaurant in Skopje a few weeks ago. But this was something else, and it was nasty. After two bites it went uneaten. The spring rolls were simply OK, served hot and greasy with a side bowl of a red sauce that was neither Sriracha or sweet and sour sauce (I suspect it was doctored ketchup). Main dishes didn't exactly disappoint us, but they were certainly not good. Marisa had what she called "standard" chicken teriyaki, while after two failed ordering attempts (no udon, sorry, no pork, sorry) I had chicken on the chef's "special" noodles. His special noodles were clearly some sort of minute ramen, not low quality but a bit of an insult to the word special. It was all sauteed in soy sauce, with your standard carrot/onion/spring onion veggie mix. I've cooked better at home, and it was closer to Chinese than Japanese. So after all that, why did I leave the restaurant happy? Because we're learning that though there are many, many restaurants here, far too many of them are extremely similar. There are only a few places in town that serve anything other than traditional Albanian food, Italian-ish food, pizzas, or grilled meat. Tokyo is one of the few doing something different. You pay a premium -- dinner for two with drinks was 30 euro, highway robbery around these parts -- but for the sake of variety it was worth it.

This post is not about Kosovo, but I'd like to keep it in this thread as I suspect I'll be traveling the Balkans quite a bit. Don, arrange how you think is most appropriate. Skopje, Macedonia, is a boring city (in my opinion and compared to Pristina) filled with plaster statues and fountains that make the entire place feel like the Bellagio. There is old beauty, and culture, and life to be found. But you have to look for it across the river, in the old part, the old Albanian bazaar. In the bazaar, we had our anniversary dinner at Pivnica An, an unbearably cute space sunken in what was, I believe, an old hamam. We had a simple meal, bread, salad, and Muckalica, a delicious pork and tomato stew. I was surprised by the muckalica, different than other stew-y dishes I have had.

We've now been in Kosovo for about a month, and I'm sad to report that the combination of adjusting to a new job, getting the baby adjusted to a new life, and some late nights at work has meant we haven't explored the restaurant scene as much as I would like. Hopefully that will change soon! What I have managed to do is start a tour of the beers of the region. Despite being relatively small, each of these little Balkan states has at least one beer they call their own, and though they're all variations on your standard eastern European lager, they're fairly different. Right now I'm working on a can of Kaon, a mediocre lager from Albania just a touch sharper than it's fellow Albanian brew Tirana. Both are watery, but if it's hot out and the beer is served cold, they both suffice. Better are Jelen and Niksicko, from Serbia and Montenegro respectively. We've only been able to find Jelen in the Serbian enclaves of Kosovo, but it's malty and goes well with our standard Serbian meal of grilled pork with a side of more pork. Niksicko is easier to find, including in plastic two litre bottles at almost all the grocery stores. The flavor is pretty close to Jelen, actually, but don't tell the Montenegrins that. The best beers so far, in my opinion, are Peja, the local Kosovo brew, and Skopsko, from Macedonia. Skopsko is the hoppiest of all the beers I've tried yet, close to what Budvar tasted like back in the day. Peja is crisp and clean, and at one euro a bottle almost everywhere, is my go-to. Left to try -- Lasko, from Slovenia, the various beers of Croatia, and the whatever Bosnia produces. I've got a bottle of Lasko in the fridge but finding Bosnian and Croatian beer is proving to be a bit more difficult. I'll let you know.

Greetings from sunny Pristina, Kosovo! Marisa and I have been living here almost two weeks. This is a fascinating place both in terms of food and in terms of everything else (politics, lifestyle, getting the day-to-day done, and so on). I wish I could write about it all, and I'll probably try in a different venue. But I promised some writing about the food here, and I want to keep that commitment. In our last two weeks, we've found Kosovo (or at least Pristina and its surroundings) to be an interesting and often delicious place to eat. Pristina actually has a bit of a reputation as a restaurant city, possibly due to the fact that over a decade of international attention has meant that "internationals" (diplomats, NGO types, mercenaries, etc...) have ended up here. Perhaps not to the quantity that Sarajevo has seen, but certainly significant. Based on our near fortnight here I can say that rep is deserved. We're eating out fairly regularly, almost purely "local" cuisine, and we've enjoyed it. (Because of the unlikeliness any of you will actually visit Kosovo, I'm going to omit locations for the time being. This place is tiny (in the city of Pristina, "far" means 15 minutes drive away), giving directions can be maddening, and I am still getting my bearings. If you are coming here let me know and I will tell you where things are.) So: the restaurants, first impressions. We've had at least four very good meals here, and one that nears outstanding. For absurd prices. The one outstanding meal was at a restaurant that serves traditional Albanian cuisine, but you can also find very good Italian, likely a legacy of Italian influence in the region and the fact that fresh produce is widely available here this time of year. Tiffany's, in downtown Pristina, serves "pure" Albanian-Kosovar cuisine based around baking dishes in a very hot wood fired oven: mantia (small balls of layered phyllo and ground meat, covered in yogurt and baked), lamb "tava" (baked lamb in a yogurt gravy until it is fall-off-the-bone tender), and of course the traditional Balkan shopska salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and a very salty soft brined cheese. All of these are accompanied by piping hot bread ("buke," rhymes with "Luke"). Meals at Tiffany's are served family style and there is no menu: you just ask the waiter what they have for the day and have to remember what you want off of their long list of offerings. All our dishes felt decadent and homey, like someone's grandmother was stuffing us at Thanksgiving. The mantia in particular were my favorite. The sheer amount of work involved boggles my mind -- they made the phyllo from scratch, baked small dumplings I can only think of as "meat baklava," and then proceeded to cover these dumplings in yogurt and bake them again. But the result was a soft, gooey exterior and that flaky and buttery phyllo crunch in the middle. Unreal. Also unreal: three of us ate there until we were stuffed to the gills and sweating excess yogurt. The bill came to twenty bucks (including two glasses of local white wine). Other notable places in town that we've tried: Pinocchio (Italian, amazing views overlooking town, good service), Five Senses (Pinocchio minus the views and a bit cheaper), and a Serbian restaurant closer to the Gracanica monastery that served this delicious dish of a spicy pickled pepper stuffed with feta-esque cheese dish I'm dying to try again. The latter restaurant is also notable for having lots of pork on the menu -- not something you can find in Albanian parts of town. Oddly, the Serbian place calls itself a pizzeria, but no one goes there for the pizza. I am not an objective judge of service quality here. According to my employer, I speak professional-fluency Albanian, and when the locals hear someone clearly not "one of them" speaking Albanian they tend to go out of their way to welcome them. Plus we're dining with a baby, and they *love* babies here. That said, service can at times be a bit slow and inattentive, like any developing country (or a number of spots in New York and DC.) Persistence pays off. Tipping, by the way, is seen as unnecessary but welcome if you want to. More to come, particularly more specific stories about going out to dine here. All the best to you, my foodie friends back home! (in case you are curious, here's a shot from the back of my house of the exterior of the city. No, that's not a nuclear plant, that's just another coal stack from two of the dirtiest power plants in Europe.) K

"What should we have for our last DC dinner?" "Something we won't be able to get in Kosovo, I guess. Ethiopian?" "We had that on Monday. Texmex?" "We can get that for lunch tomorrow, it's easier. South Indian?" And so Malgudi it was. Bit of a risk, going to a new restaurant for pseudo-significant dinner, but in the end a good decision. We were with my parents, who also appreciated the choice as they haven't had south Indian in quite a long time. My mom raved about the sambar and the rava masala dosa, which she said was some of the best she's had. Dad finished his lamb poratta (sp?) in record time, which I guess is a good sign, and he thoroughly enjoyed Malgudi's variation on dahi vada, his favorite Indian snack. Marisa had the keema dosa, an odd combo for us as back when we were in Mumbai non-vegetarian dosas were anathema. She enjoyed it, though my one taste just felt.. strange. Not used to tasting meat with dosa and sambar I guess. On the other hand, my chicken gongura with tamarind rice was unique: more sour than most curries I've had outside of India, if a bit mild in the spice department. Definitely not sour like vinegary vindaloo, but sour all the same. My rasam was awesome. The best I've had in the area, frankly. We've been through the "last dinner in DC" routine multiple times now and the overall goal remains having a meal that will make us miss this city, which we call home (-ish, in my wife's case, as her allegiance to DC is far more tentative than mine). In this sense, Malgudi did well. We'll miss you, DC! But not you, donrockwell.com. Stay tuned for posts from the Balkans, as soon as we get our internet figured out...

Ran a 5K out in Fairfax this morning and walked into Chutzpah sweaty and starving. We'd found the place by pure chance -- we go out Fairfax-ward very, very rarely. I'm not sure if they weren't prepared for the Independence Day breakfast crowd, or if the service is always just... weird. Our server took a good 10 minutes to notice/greet us, and disappeared for very long stretches between saying hello, getting us our coffee, taking our orders, and finally delivering our food. The list of what bagels were available changed seemingly from moment to moment, and our waitress openly said she could not keep track of what was available and what wasn't. At one point, she told our neighboring table that there were no bagels available at all, and then turned to us and said they had a limited selection of poppy and onion. It was all just very strange and chaotic. I ultimately ordered a whitefish salad platter with an everything bagel. It was quite a lot of food -- a bagel, plain and veggie cream cheese, a large serving of whitefish salad, lettuce/tomato/onion/cucumber, and what seemed like a half cup of kalamata olives (?!?). For the price, the amount was quite generous, and the whitefish salad was good, though not great -- Neopol in Union Market does it better. Normally when I am as famished as I was I "over like" otherwise mediocre food, but my wife agreed Chutzpah's was passable. My wife, not much of a breakfast person, had a turkey sandwich. Ordinary and unexciting -- and it came out unaccompanied, no fries/chips/anything. Guess you have to get one of their specialty sandwiches to have anything come with. I'm in no hurry to go back, but if trapped in Fairfax for lunch I wouldn't say no. But I'd bring a book, or a paper, or a good conversation companion. We were there for almost an hour, and we ate fast.

As a few of you know, Kanishka is simply my first name. It still irks me to no end that "Kanishka" wasn't available as a handle on gmail way back in the day, and as those who know me really well know, my last name is so very long and complicated that having it as any sort of handle would be cruel. As for the etymology of the name Kanishka, my mother tells me it is after the famous Kushan dynasty king. My father, on the other hand, says it was my mom's favorite sari boutique back in the old country.