Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I was in a mood to walk around at lunchtime, and had no particular idea of what I wanted to eat, so I went east a bit, and south, and then back west a little, and found myself outside a vegetarian South Indian restaurant, which had reviews in the window praising its all-you-can-eat $7 lunch buffet. Okay, why not?

I went in, was seated, and walked over to the buffet. I filled a plate with cucumber slices, a pancake, a piece of flatbread, two random curries of the "I wonder what this is, let's find out" school, some tamarind sauce, and some of the red chopped-onion relish. (There were a other things that I didn't take.) The first curry turned out, when I got a look at it, to be okra. Well, I already had it on my plate, might as well taste it.

I liked it enough to go back for seconds. (The other curry, a string bean-cauliflower-carrot dish, was less interesting.) I haven't liked most okra in the past, because of the texture; the cooks at Chennai Garden made it tasty and not slimy. By the time one of the waiters put a plate of some kind of pudding on the buffet, after another customer asked about dessert, I was too full to bother finding out what kind.

A nice thing about being my age is that while you don't have to eat okra if you don't want to, if you find out you like it nobody will stop you from taking seconds.