A few years ago I witlessly brought a few beers to Salam, a Middle Eastern storefront on North Kedzie. The host, a man with impeccable manners, politely pretended that city law prevented us from drinking there. “Also,” he added casually, “it’s against our religion.”
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Bringing your own bottle is a practice so established in Chicago that a place without a liquor license is commonly assumed to allow it. But on Devon Avenue, where restaurants are as likely to be Muslim-owned as Hindu, the situation is more complicated. Chopal Kabab, for example, doesn’t have a license because the owner follows Islamic dietary precepts forbidding alcohol. Bhabi’s Kitchen doesn’t have a license because it wants customers to bring in alcohol. Sometimes it seems easier just to order a mango lassi.
To many palates, Indian food is best with beer–there’s even a specific style for it. In the 18th century, beer shipped from England to expatriates in colonial India kept going bad en route, so brewers upped the alcohol content and the hops, both of which act as a preservative. The result, lively and sharply bitter from the extra hops, was christened IPA, or India pale ale. The style’s now wildly popular with American craft breweries, which hop their beer far more than their European counterparts: if the IPA didn’t already exist, American brewers would have invented it.
