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With chef Kartikeya Ratan and Rishabh Doshi of 
Kiki & Pastor

Me: Is the music a bit less loud at the other side.

Brent: Hmm. Let me see.

K (rolls her eyes after Brent left): This is a place for young people. I can imagine you when you are old. Going from cafe to cafe in Bandra and asking them to reduce the volume.

Me: I am sure Baby Loaf will take my side. At least at Candies they have told me where the controls are. Others will too.

K: Then you guys will call me to vent. I will be at office. At 90. Them not knowing how to tell me that they wanted shut 20 years back but had to keep it open because I keep turning up.

Me: Excuse me. I am not that old!

Brent (comes back with a sheepish look): Er, it’s the same everywhere.

Me (with a smile): That’s cool. I just thought that the speakers are at our end. Wait let’s take a picture.

I requested chef Kartikeya Ratan to join us. Rishabh Doshi, her business partner at Kiki&Pastor and batchmate at IHM Mumbai, too. And Ronak Rajani who heads Mumbai Foodie, whom I had just complimented on the evolution of his Instagram site into one which is truly one for ‘Mumbai Foodies.’ A nice balance of brand and city posts. Making money too it seems as his team gets bigger by the day. Very inspiring. Involves too much hard work of course.

As we lined up for K to click us, I suddenly looked at Brent and said, ‘Where’s your daari (beard) Brent. You are so old fashioned.”

Brent (bashfully): My face gets oily.

Too personal a question to ask? I’ve known Brent Gomes for at least ten years. Right from when he was a polite and earnest young kid in a PR agency which handled the Impressario group. Today he works independently with chef Amninder Sandhu and manages her brand. He also consults with the folks at Little Easy. He had organised the Taco Tuesday collab with Kiki&Pastor at the Little Easy for which we were invited. 

It’s on for a month I believe. Featuring a special menu of tacos and tequilas/ margaritas. I remember a few wild tequila shot downing nights in Mumbai in the 90s when they were quite the thing. We don’t drink these days. Don’t enjoy it anymore. That’s all. Skipped the mocktails too. If I was to deviate from what my dietician said, let it be for the soft maida tortillas and not sugared drinks. 

I remember there being a place called Dhanraj where Little Easy is now. One of my PG mates back in the day, a grouchy big built vegetarian from Bhopal, used to go there as it was a vegetarian bar. A fellow Bengali in the PG and I strongly felt that being vegetarian is what made him so taciturn.

Brent told me that the grandson of the founder of Dhanraj converted it into The Little Easy, a contemporary restobar, It is going to complete five years soon. And it’s not longer non-veg! Thanks to the Dhanraj heritage, Little Easy has one of the oldest liquor licenses in Mumbai. ‘No 8,’ said Brent.

All of us in the pic, except Kartikeya of course and Brent, have beards. As did all the other (male) customers in The Little Easy that evening. The young crowd was a mixed gender one. I don’t know if Dhanraj was one, but The Little Easy definitely is not an old fashioned drinking hole. You could call it a gastro-bar perhaps. A youth hotspot. 

Left to right: Ronak, Rishabh, Beardless Brent
Kartikeya and me at The Little Easy

This made the collab between The Little Easy and Kiki & Pastor a natural fit. Kiki&Pastor is a delivery kitchen/ cum catering outfit which offers Mexican food. In our Foododcracy For Her podcast chat, chef Kartikeya said that her dream was to open a taqueria in Mumbai someday. ‘A casual place for the young to hang deep into the night and have fun over drinks and tacos.’ The sort of place I would have loved 25 years back. Today even the thought of it makes me tired! As I felt tires when I went to Foo, which is in the building opposite, for dinner a couple of weeks back. Rashmi Uday Singh had most kindly invited K and me for dinner. It was dark. I could not read the menu. The server kept disappearing midway while taking the order. Thankfully he had not been kidnapped. He would eventually re-appear and we would start again. Then he disappeared again and this continued for a while The music at Foo was extremely loud. We could not hear each other. I strained my back as I leaned forward to listen to Rashmi who is not really a soft spoken person. When I fretted and fumed, Rashmi said, ‘you are growing old champ. Today’s kids suspect if a place is doing good when it is not noisy.’ Point taken and of course unlike us, Rashmi is evergreen. Touchwood.

Coming back to Kartikeya, Kiki&Pastor is where she manifests the food part of her taqueria dream. The Tacos Tuesday collab with The Little easy allows her to bring in the drinks part of it too. The world of food post the pandemic lockdowns has seen many interesting movements in the food world. People have looked beyond the restaurant dining model making things a lot easier in cities like Mumbai where rents are so high. Despite having worked in marquee places such as the Zodiac Grill and 11 Madison Park, Kartikeya chose the cloud kitchen model when it came to opening her own business. Gives her the freedom to focus on what she wants to. Casual Mexican dining. She misses interacting with customers, but caterings and such collabs offer that. ‘I want to spread joy. That’s what matters the most,’ said Kartikeya in a matter of fact manner when I asked her if getting used to running a cloud kitchen was tough.

I’ve had Kiki& Pastor food delivered home before and enjoyed it. As have our friends for whom we have ordered it and sent it. The experience of having it served fresh at the Little Easy took it a notch up. Seeing it plated the chef wants you to see it. At the temperature she wants to serve it. All added up to a lovely experience. I am not very conversant about the world of tacos. I took the opportunity to get a dummies guide to tacos when I interviewed her for my Foodocracy For Her podcast, starting with how to pronounce it properly!

I won’t bore you with the details. You should listen to her talk about it instead on the podcast as she really brings the world of tacos and Mexican food alive with her enthusiasm for it. 

Of the tacos we tried at The Little Easy last Tuesday, the lamb barbacoa (with slow cooked goat meat that took me back to Nizam and its rolls in its heydays in terms of its charcoal flavour), the baja style fish taco (batter fried delectable snapper), the chile relleno taco with its crunchy Bhavnagiri mirchi stuffed with corn taco and the chipotle chicken wing (ooh, that juicy bite of meat) won our hearts with their simple and yet intricate and diverse flavours. There was a symphonies of sauces, salsas, moles, and a mix of vegetables giving company to the beautifully cooked meats and seafood. A burst of freshness from Mexico on a rainy Mumbai evening. Comfort food from a culture that is not ones own. 

We tried the pork carnitas too but I found the flavour too intense/ woody for me. Perhaps it was the chimole at work.

While we had interacted before, this is the first 
time that I met Kartikeya in person.

I had once urged chef Kartikeya to experiment with millets over refined flour for the tortillas but then it struck me that this would be like expecting the Kolkata roll to be made with aata instead of maida. Her tortillas are very thin so you are consuming a lot less flour than in parathas. Plus you can be disciplined and have the filling without the tortillas. The default option for tortillas is masa flour, but I am told that it’s hard to procure.

Talking of beards, I grew it after the insistent and persistent advice of my hair stylist at Dessange. Diverts attention from ones balding pate was her logic. I think the beard’s taking shape now. Most like it. Some feel it makes me look old. Most importantly, K likes it.

I will probably keep it till the new year at least. We managed to take a family picture with the boys thanks to Erika and Gia the other day. I landed with a bad back the next day with all the heavy lifting involved. The picture has me in a beard and given the very low chances of getting another pic with the boys together, I will have to keep the beard for continuity.

A rare family pic with the boys
Foodocracy For Her chat with chef Kartikeya Ratan:

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