This Is the Moment for Mexican Indian Food to Flourish
Hamachi crudo and its endless, perfunctory variations blur together, but the rendering at Mirra, in Chicago, is a striking thunderbolt of flavor: slices of yellowtail drenched in lime-spiked buttermilk, hot and tangy with a garlic and serrano achar, tucked under a delicate crunch of nopales, ginger and curry leaves.
In one bite, the fresh and drinkable buttermilk, called chaas in Hindi, is invited to party with Sinaloan aguachile, bringing together flavors from India and Mexico into something new, delicious and essentially stateless.
'Is it Indian? Is it Mexican?' Rishi Kumar said on the phone. 'No, it's something else.'
Mr. Kumar and the co-chef Zubair Mohajir opened their restaurant last year in the Bucktown neighborhood, and quickly found the house packed for their energetic and sharply intelligent Mexican Indian cooking.
It's not unusual to see margaritas crowding tables in the late afternoon as diners share quesadillas shining with melted Amul cheese and rip pastry off their lamb barbacoa biryani. Like the more successful dishes on the menu, the biryani surfaces regional ingredients and techniques without veering toward the formulaic.
Mexican Indian food might sound like a bit of a novelty, orchestrated for a fast-food chain's viral marketing campaign — it's not.
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New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
Billionaire YouTuber MrBeast ‘borrowing' money from mom for his wedding
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MrBeast has his hands in several projects, including the competition series 'Beast Games,' which gave its first season winner a whopping $10 million in prize money, and his Feastables chocolate brand. He recently attacked Trump's 'brutal' tariffs, informing his fans that it would be 'way cheaper' to produce his ethically sourced chocolate overseas. However, he's also been at the center of several lawsuits, including one that involves his snack brand. 9 The billionaire claims he's borrowing money from his mom to pay for the wedding. Honey 9 'I personally have very little money because I reinvest everything,' he admitted on X. MrBeast/X 9 MrBeast and Thea Booysen recently teased a possible island wedding. mrbeast/Instagram In May, the Mexican government sued the media house behind MrBeast's popular video titled, 'I Explored 2000 Year Old Ancient Temples,' in which he hawked his Feastables outside the Mayan pyramids, calling them a 'special Mayan desert' and 'the only Mayan-approved snack on the planet.' While the government admitted that MrBeast and the company were issued a permit to film at sites including the Mayan pyramid Chichén Itzá near Cancun, it claimed he was not given permission for commercial use. They claimed the YouTuber violated the terms of an archeological permit and profited from the 'heritage that belongs to all Mexicans.' 9 MrBeast was sued last month by the Mexican government. mrbeast/Instagram 9 He was accused of violating the terms of an archeological permit and profiting from the 'heritage that belongs to all Mexicans.' mrbeast/Instagram But he denied those allegations. 'This video … was meant to highlight these treasured Mayan sites in Mexico,' a spokesperson for MrBeast told The Post. 'No advertisement material was shot on any archaeological sites overseen by INAH (Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History), so it is unfortunate that this has turned into a political issue.' MrBeast was also sued by five 'Beast Games' contestants in September 2024 for alleged 'chronic mistreatment,' sexual harassment and more. 9 He was also sued by a group of 'Beast Games' competitors in 2024. mrbeast/Instagram In response, a spokesperson for MrBeast's company exclusively told The Post, 'The MrBeast promotional video shoot, which included over 2000 participants, was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather, and other unexpected logistical and communications issues, which we are currently reviewing, but we are grateful that virtually all of those invited to Toronto for our next production have enthusiastically accepted our invitation. 'We have communicated directly with 97% of the 2000 people who attended to ask for feedback, have launched a formal review of the process, and have taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience and we are excited to welcome hundreds of men and women to the world's largest game show in history.' 9 MrBeast and his future bride met in her home country, South Africa, in 2022. Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize 9 The pair said their wedding will be 'more private,' with only friends and family. thea_booysen/Instagram The YouTuber and Booysen met in 2022 while he was visiting her home country, South Africa, and have been going strong ever since. The pair recently teased their upcoming wedding, revealing it won't be a show for the world to see. 'This will definitely be more family and friends — definitely more private,' MrBeast told People. 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USA Today
5 hours ago
- USA Today
TikToker Sana Yousuf shot dead, man arrested in case of 'repeated rejections'
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Miami Herald
6 hours ago
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Mystical painter highlights MOCA North Miami's spring season
There's plenty going on in the mind of Philip Smith, and it shows in his art. The Miami-born painter's canvases are full of esoteric symbols and mystical imagery gleaned from years of studying ancient cultures, world religions, and the work of historical magicians. Spirals, DNA strands, minerals, magic circles, foliage, human hands – all coexist in a ghostly mélange of images and ideograms. 'These images are meant to basically provoke your imagination,' says Smith, who is currently the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, which opened Wednesday, April 30 and is on view through Sunday, Oct. 5. 'The idea of looking at my paintings is a bit akin to sitting in a planetarium, where you're looking up at the stars and they project all these patterns. And you're told to see those patterns, that this is the Milky Way, but then your mind wanders and you start to see other things. And that's the idea with my work, really. It's a portal for the imagination.' Smith's encounters with the supernatural began during his childhood in Miami. His father Lew Smith, who had been an interior decorator for famous and powerful people such as Walt Disney and Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, one day discovered he could speak to the dead and heal the sick. He became a faith healer, and the difficulties this placed on then-teenage Philip, who eventually wrote about the experience in his memoir 'Walking Through Walls,' put him on his own spiritual quest. He tried drugs. He joined, and later left, the Church of Scientology. And finally, he moved to New York to become an artist, and from there he developed the image-dense visual language in his paintings. 'As a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist, so I was looking at, obviously, Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian temples,' he says. 'I wanted to sort of create a pictographic language, also a slightly cinematic language. Because I think we respond to that experientially and also cerebrally more than words,' he says. Smith explains that words have to be learned, whereas images are immediate. 'When you speak to mediums or psychics, they get their information visually. It's imprinted. They see things as they're talking to you. And so all those components go into making up this visual language,' he says. Smith's work managed to get noticed by the critic Douglas Crimp, who put him in a soon-to-be-influential show at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan called 'Pictures.' It included several artists, including Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, who would later be part of the so-called 'the Pictures Generation,' a group of artists who were deeply influenced by the culture of mass media that was present at the time. Smith describes the art scene of that time as vastly different from today's more professionalized art ecosystem, full of passionate people that did what they did not for money, but because they felt a calling. 'I didn't understand what kids learn with their MFA today, how to network, how to write emails, how to get curators into your studio. I thought my job was just to make art, and the art world was very small and very personal. You kind of met everybody.' He says he was friendly with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. '(Warhol) would call me every Saturday at the studio and chat. I interviewed Jasper Johns for Interview (magazine), and I would walk over to Bob Rauschenberg's house at four o'clock in the morning and sit there and drink with him. It was a very different world. And it was more a world where you kind of made it up as you went along. None of us knew what we were doing, but we all knew we were doing something different.' Still, he always wanted to come back to Miami, the place he considers his true home. After nearly three decades in New York, in 2019, he returned to South Florida and has staged several shows since then, mostly with the Little River-based gallery PRIMARY. The MoCA show, his first solo museum exhibition in Miami for several decades and one that incorporates work from 'Pictures' to now, is something of a culmination for him. 'I've always wanted to do a major show in Miami, because it's the city that I really love,' he says. 'I had to leave Miami as a young artist, because there was no opportunity. There were no real museums, no galleries, no collectors. There was nothing here. So that's why I went to New York.' Smith mentions the progression of Miami's art museums. 'Whether it's the Rubell Museum, or Marty Margulies, or Art Basel – it's an extraordinary transformation that I don't know, that people appreciate, how it went from the desert to Tribeca in a generation or two.' For the artist, the retrospective at MoCA is important on many levels. 'It's a very meaningful show to me, because I feel it's giving back to Miami as a Miami person, and I'm not coming in as a New Yorker saying 'see how great I am.' I'm coming in and saying, 'I want to share with you what my life's been about.'' Smith's status as a Miami-born artist who spent much of his career in New York complements that of MoCA's other spring show, a New York-born artist who spent much of her life in South Florida. Vickie Pierre worked for Miami art institutions, including at the former Miami Art Museum (now PAMM) and as registrar at MoCA NoMi. But alongside that career, she also made art herself, and now her work is on view in the show 'The Maiden is the Warrior.' The exhibition zeros in on the artist's 'Poupées in the Bush' series, featuring amorphous black blobs with clearly defined feminine features, somewhere between figures and abstract forms. Some have fingers, horns, and other protrusions appended to their bodies. Others wear rings or are surrounded by floral assemblages. Reflecting the duality of womanhood as in the title of the show, the Poupées are meant to have a bit of softness as well as ferocity, according to curator Adeze Wilford. 'The thrust of our show is really about the duality of their forms. Like they can equally be these, very soft, reclining figures, kind of droopy and globular but also very, almost Rubenesque in how they're conceived of. But then there are some that have these very fierce bearings,' says Wilford. Though the two shows are quite distinct, Wilford, who is curating her final show for MoCA after moving to the Memphis Art Museum in January, hopes viewers will be able to envelop themselves in each. 'The way that I conceive of solo presentations is really that the artists are inviting you into their world, into how their brain is working, and so they're very different people, and we can see how things are unfolding for them both.' WHAT: 'Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields' and 'Vickie Pierre: The Maiden is the Warrior' WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami WHEN: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 5. COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for seniors, students with ID, ages 12 to 17, and disabled visitors; free for museum members, children under 12 years old, North Miami residents and city employees, veterans, and caregivers of disabled visitors. INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 and is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don't miss a story at
