It is easy to miss the tiny symbol next to the title of Asian Street Kitchen, a new restaurant in Chowpatty, Mumbai. Some diners who left minutes after scanning the menu during the first two weeks of its opening might have been saved the heartache if they had spotted the green dot trapped in a box. "Sorry, we thought you served non-vegetarian too," a lot of those diners told owner Arjun Dhinsa on the way out. While this is a disappointing scene for any restaurateur, thankfully, those diners do not form the bulk of his target group.
Dhinsa's is one of two all-vegetarian specialty restaurants to have sprung up in Mumbai in the last two months. If rumours are to be believed, chef Joël Robuchon of France, who has to his credit 28 Michelin stars (the highest ever), is also mulling a restaurant in Dadar inspired by India's versatile vegetarian cooking. Aside from the 'pure veg' Udupi and Vaishnav restaurants that speckle the city, dining places like Burma Burma, Quattro and New Yorker that offer meat-free pan-Asian, Italian, Mexican and American cuisine have popped up too.
When Dhinsa first pitched the idea of vegetarian Asian street food to restaurant consultant Mitesh Rangras, they both laughed about it. But it soon appealed to them as a potential USP. "Asian restaurants are present in every corner of the city. But we decided on a menu where vegetarian items didn't look like an afterthought," says Rangras, who gave up meat for two months while testing dishes for the menu. Besides the usual suspects like paneer, tofu and potato, they experimented with mushrooms, sprouts and soybean.
For instance, in their Indonesian mie goreng, shrimp paste and scrambled egg are replaced with spring onions and shitake mushrooms on skewers. The Vietnamese pho includes minced mushrooms instead of beef. Some 70 to 80 per cent of the menu at Asian Street Kitchen is Jain, while Burma Burma leaves out onions, garlic and potatoes from half of its offerings. It is challenging to strike the right note with authenticity, but vegetarian hoteliers are careful about not letting the flavours get repetitive.
Around 40 per cent of Indians are vegetarian. While there is no big shift towards vegetarianism, there is a definite desire among vegetarians to widen their palate. "People are travelling more so they want to taste different foods. It is very difficult to recreate some cuisines without meat and garlic. But if you can get it right, the market is immense," says Rangras. Home caterer Perzen Patel of Bawi Bride says she routinely gets orders for vegetarian or Jain versions of Parsi dishes, traditionally in which meat and eggs are staples. Not just upmarket eateries but fast food chains like Domino's and Pizza Hut too had tweaked their menus on entering India and more recently, KFC has been pushing its vegetarian offerings.
The real compulsion for Dhinsa to keep his business vegetarian, however, apart from the fact that his mother is one, came from Asian Street Kitchen's location. Chowpatty is inhabited mostly by Marwaris and Jain Gujaratis and the building that houses the restaurant does not allow non-vegetarian establishments. On the stretch dotted with only-vegetarian joints, Saffron Bay is alone in offering meat-based dishes.
Like Asian Street Kitchen, it was the location in Sofitel at Bandra-Kurla Complex, next to the diamond bourse populated by mostly vegetarian merchants, that prompted Tuskers to stick to vegetarian.
Some pockets of the city are in fact known to practise a near-militant rejection of non-vegetarian food. In a 2005 interview to journalist Manu Joseph, hotelier Sanjay Narang recalled how some Malabar Hill residents pelted his customers with nuts and nails, causing him to eventually fold up his restaurant Roti. Joseph noted at the time, "In Bombay's tony Malabar Hill, there is everything that money can buy, like Maybach, Armani and woman's love. But chicken burger is a somewhat difficult aspiration."
The intolerance towards seeing or smelling meat is not rare. A prominent Indian newspaper, for instance, recently issued a memo asking employees not to bring meat into the office canteen. Often, in areas like Kalbadevi or Kandivali, homes are not rented out to non-vegetarians. Rangras says the concerns of vegetarians who choose not to eat at multi-cuisine restaurants are legitimate. "All restaurants may not use separate utensils. I once worked at a hotel with a German chef who insisted on cooking even vegetarian dishes with chicken stock."
"Fish sauce and seafood pastes have an overpowering smell that tends to linger. We wanted to avoid that," says Ankit Gupta, co-founder of Fort-based Burma Burma, which opened in May. Gupta and his business partner Chirag Chhajer are both vegetarians. The restaurant, which specialises in Burmese khow suay made with vegetables instead of chicken or curried beef, is adorned with Buddhist motifs like prayer wheels, candles and temple wall patterns. Meat, the owners felt, would interfere with the air of spirituality.
According to chef Ritu Dalmia, who runs Diva and Diva Piccola in Delhi, people are recognising that they cannot treat a vegetarian as a second-class citizen. "There has been a constant increase in people, not only Indians but also expats, who are opting for vegetarian," she says. CEO K S Narayanan of Pan India Food Solutions, which owns chains including Spaghetti Kitchen, Copper Chimney and Bombay Blue, agrees. More than half of the sales at the group come from vegetarian dishes. He points out how even packaged food companies realised the importance of wooing such consumers with eggless mayonnaise and cheese that is processed without rennet (an animal-byproduct).
Still, the highest praise for the owners of these specialty restaurants is when a non-vegetarian diner leaves with a smile and a compliment.
