Regional Indian cuisine, done well has many takers.
Among all the hot new concept lounges and the relaunched five-star fine dining restaurants, it was telling that the maximum buzz last year in Delhi was over a tiny, 30-seater eatery with canteen-era chairs and tables and home-style food.
Gunpowder in Hauz Khas Village is up four flights of stairs, tends to run out of the more popular dishes by 3 pm and offers few frills. It’s also always packed, and on the one occasion when a food critic suggested that the food wasn’t that hot, he was almost lynched by the bands of the faithful who love the place. After multiple visits there, I can testify that Gunpowder does a dynamite pork curry, keeping in the fat; an outstanding toddy fish, crispy Malabar parotas and a succulent avial curry, among other things. But that’s not why it rocks as a restaurant.
Satish Warrier and Kirin Bhushi run Gunpowder like a family kitchen— the food tastes home-cooked, and the ambience is as relaxed as if you were at a friend’s home. Some of my writer friends take along their laptops and write in the quiet space between lunch and dinner; they’re made to feel welcome. Messages on Gunpowder’s Facebook page are equally informal: your card machine wasn’t working yesterday, I’ll come back to pay the bill tomorrow — that kind of thing. And by sticking to a menu drawn from the kitchens of six South Indian states, Warrier offers just enough in the way of choice without becoming too ambitious.
Indians have always, despite stereotypes to the contrary, had a palate for great regional cooking. But most specialist restaurants in the country follow either the Swati Snacks or Vishala formula. I’ve never seen an empty table at Swati Snacks in Mumbai; regulars queue up for the panki chutney and the classic pani-puris, ignoring the inconvenience of plastic chairs and the fact that you won’t be encouraged to linger with your meal. Like Andhra Bhavan in Delhi or Kolkata’s traditional-Bengali-thali experts Aheli, Swati Snacks is zero-ambience, no-frills, one hundred per cent about the food. Vishala in Ahmedabad has a faux rustic environment that slides cheerfully between kitsch and caricature, showcasing Quaint Village India; but again, it scores with its redoubtable menu, which brings together classic Saurashtra cuisine with the best of Ahmedabad’s farsaans.
Excellent as these places are, they don’t inspire the fanatical loyalty and possessiveness that Gunpowder does. It’s not just that Satish and Kirin are obsessive about serving regional classics that don’t make it to the menus of most South Indian restaurants, like tapioca-fish curry. Two years before Gunpowder opened its doors, Mosaic in Connaught Place promised to offer some of the classics from the North-east, Bengal, South India and Kashmir—and while it delivered initially, the menu’s too ambitious. Mosaic’s chefs don’t always live up to the promise of the menu, and while they used to do a fantastic black-sesame pork curry, can struggle with some of the more delicate regional specialties.
Bengali specialty restaurants offer an insight into why it’s so difficult to run a really good regional cuisine restaurant. From Kewpie’s Kitchen — the tiny, redoubtable Kolkata restaurant — to the Oh Calcutta! chain to Delhi’s new Brown Sahib (Anglo-Indian and Bengali cuisine), all of these do excellent food from what you might think of as Bengali party menu.
More From This Section
Oh Calcutta! scored high with me and my homesick Bengali friends by adding in the more humble dishes on its seasonal special and buffet menus — you can, if you’re lucky, find the kind of chorchori (a mixed vegetable dish) or lauki curry there that reminds you of some long lost mashima’s cooking. But even the best Bengali restaurants, aside from the no-frills, no-atmosphere rice-and-fish places in Gariahat, can’t replicate the feel of home cooking very easily. It’s that much easier to do a fancy prawn malai curry than it is to do a humble, everyday maacher jhol — the basic, three-spice fish curry of daily fare.
What Gunpowder seems to have cracked is the Goa syndrome. From the stalwarts, like Fiesta in Baga, to the experimental, like chef Gregory’s Le Poisson Rouge in Arpora, to the shacks and specialty places like the Burmese Bomra’s in Candolim, I can’t think of a Goa restaurant outside of the five-stars that has an institutional feel to it. Fiesta is huge, compared to Bomra’s comfortable and relatively small space, but Yellow will be there at her restaurant at the height of Goa’s season, just as Bawnra Jap will oversee his kitchen at Bomra’s. Every one of the good Goa restaurants is proprietor-run, hands-on and welcoming; and every one of the great Goa restaurants is run by people who haven’t lost sight of their basic passion for food in the middle of the daily vicissitudes of the restaurant business.
That’s what makes Gunpowder work. It fills the gap between the great specialty restaurant where you’re there just for the food, not for the atmosphere; and the professional, slick restaurant where the ambience is perfect, the food is excellent, but the passion is a little muted. Delhi could do with more Gunpowders, and perhaps the new breed of young, enthusiastic chefs will deliver on this count — but that’s a whole other column.
Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based freelance writer