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Tandoori roti, kaali dal, butter chicken, piyaz, nimbu, mirchi. The quintessential ‘Indian restaurant’ meal at Delhi’s Have More Restaurant |
- How does one define Indian food? Should one go by the erstwhile definition of Indian food is equal to Punjabi and Moghlai food?
- There are modern day restaurants such as Bombay Canteen and Soda Bottle Opener Wala that have showed us that this need not be so
- Chefs in restaurants such as Toast & Tonic and Amaranta opened one’s eyes to the possibilities of what can be done with Indian food
- Home chef and food historian, Pritha Sen, showed us that there is so much in our backyard that we might not know of
- Classic eateries such as Andhra Bhavan in Delhi too showed us that they offer a lot of richness that we are yet to acknowledge
- A video on an Assamese meal that I had which might be of the sort of food which you would never have associated earlier with Indian food
- Hence the argument, should we be in a hurry to define and box what makes up Indian food?
Back to one’s roots
I was introduced to Indian food, read Bengali food in my case, a bit late in life. This was when I was around 10 years old and after we had moved into India. I can’t say that I was very excited about the prospect of eating it back in the day.
It was only after I moved to Mumbai for work that I begin to appreciate Bengali food. The prospect of eating what one knew as ‘Indian food’ food per se – largely Moghlai and Panjabi fare- didn’t excite me still. I would rather spend money on European or Asian food when going out to eat. My point of view on this has changed considerably in the last couple of years though. I still love trying out food from across the world but the difference from the past is that Indian food excites me as much as that these days, if not more.
Order link for The Travelling Belly Please so buy it of you haven’t already
Restaurants that set the trend
Soon exciting things began to happen in the new age restaurant space too and that’s where trends in food are set. Restaurants such as The Bombay Canteen, led by chef Floyd Cardoz and Thomas Zachariah and team in Mumbai, made going out to eat Indian food ‘cool’ here. They offered an ambiance, service and even dinnerware, yes that’s important too, that you would expect to see in an upscale Indian cafe/ restobar/ bristo and not in the ‘Indian restaurant’ of yore.
It was not just all about the presentation though. The food that one had there stayed on in one’s memory. It was the sort of food that made you feel like coming back to it. This started a welcome trend here in Mumbai and across the country too, with more restaurant owners beginning to follow this path. Success, of course, followed only when the chefs and management behind these restaurants were passionate about the cause and about the food that they served, and were not just rehashing Indian food in order to cash in on a trend. Others opened and shut down soon.
The success story of Soda Bottle Opener Wala, championed by Mohit Balachandran and their chefs such as Anahita Dhondy and chef Danesh and backed by AD Singh, is another example of this. It is near impossible to get a place at Bombay Canteen or at Soda Bottle (especially BKC) at lunch and dinner time.
A reflection of the interest that the new wave of Indian chefs have instilled in Indian food can be seen in the release of the recent Conde Nast, Top Restaurant Awards 2017 list, of which I had the privilege to be a part of the jury.
The top 2 restaurants in the list, and I know that this is looking at data rather selectively, are Indian Accent at no 1 and The Bombay Canteen at no 2. Both are restaurants that have showed that Indian restaurants don’t have to confirm to the way we have known such restaurants to be from our childhood days. That they can draw inspiration from our day to day food from across the country and not be limited to one region in north India.
‘Free Style Cooking’ at Manu Chandra’s Toast & Tonic
The first meal, coincidentally, was on India’s Independence Day earlier this year. This is when K and I had gone to the Toast and Tonic at Mumbai’s BKC for lunch. We had four very nice dishes that afternoon which pushed the boundaries of flavour, format and texture, and yet seemed so much like comfort food.
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Kokum and coconut prawns at the Toast & Tonic |
‘Gimmicky’ is a trap modern Indian/ Fusion cooking can often fall into with the rush for example, to add bacon or foam, or bacon foam (!!), to everything. Or micro greens for that matter, which seems to have become the answer of the new generation of chefs to the dhaniya/ kothmir (coriander leaf) garnish that was prevalent across India. There were plenty of micro greens in the Toast & Tonic dishes too but I think that we can look beyond that given the exquisite quality of the dishes that we had there.
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Soft eggs with Bandel cheese & sourdough bread and sausage at Toast & Tonic |
It’s a journey which could lead to any direction and it is up to you to be alert to it. The critical factor being of course whether the food talked to you and made you happy. Was the food good?
Saluting the federal nature of the Indian Republic at the Amaranta
This was one was an lunch at the Amaranta in the Oberoi Gurgaon. This restaurant, earlier dedicated to seafood and coastal Indian food, has been repositioned as a regional Indian restaurant and what I ate showed that have put their money where their mouth is.
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Salmon and hamachi with mustard cream at Amaranta |
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Tortellini stuffed with kadhi, served with finely chopped goat meat and ker sangri at Amaranta |
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Millets two ways at the Amaranta |
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With chef Tejas Sovani of Amaranta |
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Sugary rice crisps, raw mango, pea mash and chhana at the Amaranta |
The dish was served at room temperature and offered a combination of the tanginess os sliced raw mango (often used in bhel in Mumbai in summer), Bengali moa-like (which my granny recently made for my brother) rice crisps rolled in sugar syrup ball ( Moa is usually made with jaggery in Bengal but the taste was similar), cottage cheese or chhana (my mother’s choice of super food) and green pea mash. The combination turned out the be one of the most wonderful flavour and texture bursts that I’ve had in a long time. It broke every restaurant cliche of Indian food so far which had made us believe that Indian food has to be always served piping hot, has to be brown in colour, soaking in oil and doused with chilli powder.
Chef Manish, executive chef of the Oberoi Gurgaon, and Chef Tejas at the Amaranta seemed to tell us, ‘think again,’ through the food that they served.
A short lesson on the vastness of Bengali food by Pritha Sen
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Pritha Sen and her Bengali home cooked meal that she served me at Gurugram |
Not really, if you ask me. There’s so much more in the world of Indian food that is out there, waiting patiently for us to open our eyes to its charms. To make my case, let me refer to another meal that I had earlier in the year in Gurugram.
This was a meal prepared by ‘home chef’, Pritha Sen, if we can call her that. She is after all a a journalist, writer, researcher and a development consultant, whose work in sustainable livelihoods has led her to explore food history and culinary traditions in India in general and Bengal in particular. In her home chef avatar, Pritha takes catering orders for a select few food lovers. ‘To keep my skills honed and hand active,” as she once told me when I asked her about what motivates her to take catering orders. She is also the consultant for the Bengali side of the menu at Mustard, the Franco Bengali restaurant in Goa.
And yet, during the lunch at Pritha’s, I came across Bengali dishes that I had never heard of before and even got to know about strains of rice which I had not heard of before. Let me tell you about some of what I ate.
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Lau malai curry |
The same sense of surprise and discovery applied to the patoori too. One is used to patooris where with betki fish is steamed in a mustard paste in banana leaved. One had never come across a grated radish patoori before. At the most, one has had patooris with mocha or finely chopped banana blossoms recently at restaurants such as Bhojohori Manna and chhanar patoori at Peetuk aimed at non-Bengalis in Mumbai.
Don’t tell anyone this, but I liked Pritha’s version of the patoori made with grated radish better than the conventional bhetki patoori that one has at restaurants!
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Mulo patri by Pritha Sen |
This exchange made made me wonder, should we be in a hurry to define the authenticity of our food, given the variety that exists from kitchen to kitchen, house to house, even within the same community. Perhaps there’s merit in leaving things a bit fluid. What do you feel?
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Fulkopir mudi ghonto by Pritha Sen |
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Pritha Sen’s Khasi pork wth black sesame |
Let’s hear it for our friendly, neighbourhood canteen food. Specifically Delhi’s Andhra Bhavan
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My meal at Delhi’s Andhra Bhavan |
Delhi has a number of state Bhavans/ head quarters which provide lodging to those visiting from the state. They often have canteens (eateries) which are usually open to all and which offer food native to the state. Some of the popular ones are Goa Bhavan, Bengal Bhavan (with food catered by Bijoli Grill) and Assam Bhavan which I am told is shut right now. Andhra Bhavan is the most famous of the lot though and I managed to go there this time after meaning to so for a while.
Interestingly, each dish had a spice palette which was distinct from the other. The mutton curry, for example, had the coconut flavour typical of coastal food. The prawn curry had a slightly tangy feel to it. The chicken fry spoke of curry leaves and crushed black pepper. There was a lot of variety in this humble meal too if you were ready to look for it.
So are we ready to define Indian food yet and do we know how to do so?
To start with, as we have seen even by just a few examples, it is not possible for most of us to even comprehend the vastness and diversity of food that India has to offer.
Then, as my meals at the Amaranta and the Toast & Tonic showed, you can’t slot Indian food into boxes either as the possibilities here are so immense and near infinite.
I would like to know if you feel otherwise.
There’s a bit more to this post though, so do read on and you will get to know about one more meal that I had and which you might not have thought of being something to expect under Indian food. It’s an Assamese meal in this case.
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Madhur Jaffrey cheering for Indian Food at the Tasting India symposium 2017 held in Delhi |
Appendix: Some thoughts from the Tasting India Symposium and the tale of an Assamese meal back home
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Clockwise: rice, dad dal, til paste, pork with mustard greens. duck with ash gourd, duck intestines |
No right, and yet it is so.
If you have read on so far then please accept my thanks and compliments and please do let me know about your thoughts on the topic in the comments box.
The question is, it even possible to have one definition of Indian food, and if so, what could it be.
The video of the Assamese Winter Harvest Meal by Gitika Saikia
The video of my Assam Bhavan meal
Happy meal pics
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At Amaranta with my mom joining us and Sourish Bhattacharya too with Mallika Dasgupta, exec chef Manish and chef Tejas Sovani from the hotel |
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Enjoying the feast at Pritha’s |
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The Toast &Tonic meal which made me smile so much, that it has become my profile pic |
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With Avantika at Assam Bhavan |
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With Plavaneeta Borah after the Assamese meal at her pop up |
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Wiping my plate clean at Toast & Tonic, as I did after the other meals mentioned in the story Some pics from the Conde Nast Awards |
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Jury Swag |