Restaurants serving regional cuisine may not be new to the metros. But they are getting more adventurous, serving specialised micro-cuisines to enthusiastic diners in smaller towns.
Two thousand kilometres is a long way for fish to travel — especially when it isn’t being airlifted! But that’s exactly what’s happening, as Ludhiana takes to surmai, rawas and pomfret gassi from Mangalore. Even five years ago, a restaurateur could not have dreamt of feeding the robust people of this industrial town anything other than tandoori chicken. Certainly, coconutty masalas from ‘Madras’ would not have curried favour. Today, Ludhiana is gastronomically on the make. Jayaram Banan’s Swagath opened this April and is doing brisk business selling Mangalorean and Chettinad flavours. But that’s not all. From Ludhiana (and the more cosmopolitan Chandigarh), Swagath is now set to take over nearby Amritsar and Jalandhar as well.
In Delhi, menus have to promise more. Forget restaurantised (Punjabi) food that went under the generic ‘Indian’ tag till some years ago — serving up dal makhani or rogan josh or made-up dishes like ‘Madras curry’. Offerings have to be much more specialised today. Which is, perhaps, why Swagath’s showpiece outlet, recently launched at Hotel Janpath, is offering patrons not just its older, well-thumbed menu but also newer regional flavours: Malvani style ‘tikhat’ (very hot) curries or the equally fiery Andhra fish.
On the other hand, if you want a jazzed up version of the homely dal Moradabadi, sample it at Sudha Kukreja’s Ignis in Connaught Place. Try Rajasthani lal maas at Marut Sikka’s Kainoosh (DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj), dig into the culinary remnants of the Raj at Brown Sahib (MGF Metropolitan Mall, Saket), or taste Syrian Christian roast duck at Zambar, the latest addition (in Gurgaon’s Ambience Mall) to the Amit Burman-Rohit Aggarwal-owned LiteBite Foods, one of India’s biggest restaurant companies (for more regional restaurants).
“Today’s customer wants an experience that is authentic and unusual,” points out Aggarwal. Zambar, which serves the cuisines of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala, has a chef from Kanyakumari, though there are occasional concessions made to the north Indian palate by way of paneer or bater (quail). But dining in the restaurant, whose interiors resemble a Kerala houseboat, does have its charms. On a busy Friday evening, the waiting queue snakes out, and one thing is sure: different is in.
No takers
Indian food, the way we eat it at home, and restaurant fare are, of course, different entities. This dichotomy can be traced to the fact that we never had a tradition of eating out — unlike the medieval inns of Europe — till Partition. Post-1945, when enterprising refugees from the Punjab crossed over, often with just their tandoors, a new breed of restaurants was born. Soon, concoctions such as butter chicken (courtesy Lala Kundanlal Gujral of Moti Mahal in Daryaganj, Old Delhi) were wooing palates. Restaurants set up in the late 1940s and early 1950s (such as Kwality in Connaught Place, New Delhi) served essentially this variety of Punjabi food, which would go on to dominate the Indian restaurant tradition later, not just in Delhi but elsewhere too.
Camellia Panjabi, marketing director till 2001 of the Taj group, tells of her despair when she tried to introduce regional specialties. “I worked closely with a team of Taj colleagues opening new restaurants within hotels in Chennai, Goa, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Attempts to introduce regional Indian dishes always met with consumer resistance,” she writes in her book, 50 Great Curries of India. Panjabi’s hypothesis is that it was the Punjabi community whose lifestyle supported regular eating out. And since the community liked its own fare, restaurantised Punjabi food inevitably dominated menus.
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Out of the five-star shadow
The opening of restaurants such as Dumpukht and Bukhara/Peshawari (by ITC) and Konkan Café (by the Taj) finally put regional cuisines on the food map of India, but the attempts remained essentially limited to five-star hotels.
It’s only in the past few years that specialised restaurants serving regional food have come of age. Some are well thought out business propositions like Zambar, others are the handiwork of passionate foodies: Gunpowder in Delhi, for instance, is run by a former journalist who cooks and serves the food himself along with a friend.
In Bangalore, several Oriya restaurants such as Kalingas have been tapping young professionals who love to eat out. “At least 10-15 small Oriya restaurants have come up all over the city. We couldn’t find Oriya restaurants even in Kolkata and here they are mushrooming all over,” says Radhika Misra, a young professional who left her native ‘Cal’ to work in Silicon City.
In conservative Chennai, on the other hand, Kerala restaurants rule the roost at the moment. “Chettinad has gone bust,” says chef Praveen Anand of the ITC Park Sheraton. Instead, new places like Ente Keralam are popular. The Chennai market is notoriously tough with people more likely to eat their ‘own food’ even when dining out. But, obviously, things have changed.
In Mumbai, a surprise success has been Punjab Grill, an outlet of the chain co-owned by Jiggs Kalra and son Zorawar, serving Kalra’s signature dishes, including specialties from Amritsar, Patiala and Rawalpindi. “Of all the Punjab Grills [one each in Delhi and Gurgaon, besides the one in Mumbai that opened in December last], the Mumbai restaurant is doing the best,” says Aggarwal, who has a stake in Punjab Grill.
Finding flavour
This newfound popularity of regional cuisine(s) is as much a product of globalisation as of dislocation. With people moving frequently between cities, it is natural to miss the smells and tastes of home. Into that gap step the savvy entrepreneurs. It is no coincidence that regional legends such as Lucknow’s Tunde kebabi or the Rajdhani chain of (Gujarati) thali restaurants with its roots in Baroda, or even the Kolkata-based Bhojohori Manna chain have an all-India footprint — the last is now in Koramangala, Bangalore, too.
Restaurateurs and chefs are also willing to research and experiment. Executive Chef Manisha Bhasin of ITC Maurya says, “We are no longer on the back foot thinking of French or Italian food as superior. People are taking pride in Indian cusine.” Executive Chef Praveen Anand of the Sheraton Park Hotel and Towers, Chennai, learnt the nuances of Chettiyar food from an old lady who was hoarding 2,000 traditional utensils from her dowry and the attendant rituals of her cuisine and culture. “Do we even know that there are 23 varieties of bananas in Nagercoil…Why should we look to import ingredients at all?” Anand asks. It’s a valid question.
‘Micro’ cuisine comes of age
Regional cuisine has now gone beyond the generic ‘Bengali’ or ‘south Indian’. Instead, chefs and gourmands are exploring untried, unheard-of dishes from places such as Bhopal, Bundelkhand or Bhuj, and delving into little-known micro-cuisines. There are distinctions to be made between Avadhi and Rampuri, West and East Bengali (or, indeed, Murshidabadi), Moplah and Suriani.
Even when it comes to India’s all-consuming love affair with ‘Punjabi’ food, today, customers may just want to know, “…but from what region?” This means that a restaurant chain like Paatra (at Jaypee Siddharth and Vasant in Delhi and at Agra, too) positions itself as a distinctive brand serving cuisines from “Lahore to Amritsar”. On the menu are little-known recipes like chapli kebabs or kunna gosht from Lahore. Delineating the subtle differences “between this side of Punjab and that side — they (in Pakistan), use more of kachcha masala…”, Chef Janardhan Dhyani points out that he makes periodic excursions to Amritsar — if not Lahore. The latest recipe he’s brought back is an incredibly delicious churchuri parantha. Layered with onions, tomatoes and cheese, it is topped with sugar granules, lending it a crunchy texture, and can be rolled up and eaten as a meal in itself.
Cook and tell
Restaurateur Marut Sikka, however, sounds a note of caution. “Regional restaurants work only in small formats,” he says. “If you are looking at a larger format, it is suicidal since a big group always looks for the familiar.” Perhaps. The good news, however, is that some prestigious ventures are nevertheless taking a chance.
Rakabdar in Bangalore, for instance, has food done by Ashfaque and Irfan Quereshi, whose surname gives them away as the sons of the legendary Imtiaz, the ITC master chef behind Dumpukht. Ambitiously enough, the restaurant claims to serve 200-year-old Avadhi recipes— sometimes modernised. It seems to be a hit, but it will be worth watching how it fares in the days to come.
| LOCAL FARE, FIVE-STAR STYLE Walk into Machan at the Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi, and you will find dishes from Bundelkhand on the menu. That’s a result of a new campaign to preserve the environment and culture of the region, its trees and the tigers. Besides popularising the cuisine, 10 per cent of the revenue from sales at Machan will go towards conservation activities. Then there is, of course, the group’s blue chip Konkan Café at Taj President, Mumbai, an enduring masterpiece. The Park group too focuses on regional cuisines. The soon-to-be-launched Park Hyderabad will supposedly take food from the city to new heights, but for authentic delicacies go to Fire in Delhi. Everything from daab chingri with govindbhog rice to haleem, street style, is available. The restaurant also has promoted the cuisines of communities such as the Bunts, Moplahs and Mathurs in the past one year. |
But the biggest credit for pioneering research into regional cuisines should go to ITC Hotels. Bukhara/Peshawari and Dumpukht are stellar successes and the quieter Dakshin has been showcasing ‘south Indian’ food beyond idli and dosa for 20 years now. Inspired by the cuisines of undivided Madras, it launched in Chennai and serves the food of the Tamil-Brahmins, Reddys, Namboodiris, Chettiyars, Kerala Jews, et al. Not only did it succeed in feeding south Indian food to south Indians, but also successfully brought appams and meen moilee into the mainstream in the north.