Hurry burry curry

India's best-known food writer serves up somewhat ambivalent fare on television.

Given India's culinary variety and excellence, the lack of food writers is almost woeful. Some of the better ones write (or have written) for this paper, but if there has been one consistently great food writer, it has been Vir Sanghvi, whose column (and book), Rude Food, has had an almost fanatic following.

Sadly, he has not written for this paper, and access to his writings has been limited to those who read the Hindustan Times' Sunday magazine, Brunch, or the occasional pieces he's penned for the iconic The Taj Magazine.

Therefore, the news that he was shooting a food-based programme for Discovery's Travel & Living channel was greeted with some enthusiasm. The only other "food" based presenter with a mass following has been chef Sanjeev Kapoor, but it is his middle-class appeal and jugadu recipes trotted out to make the average housewife in Ranchi appear like a Cordon Bleu cook that has had his audiences salivating.

But the sophisticated diner or foodie turned up his nose at the wannabe Kapoor and his gharelu recipes. Sanghvi was going to plug their specific niche, combining food with travel, and presenting it, surely, with the aplomb he brought to his talk shows as host.

From his columns one knew that Sanghvi had been travelling to Makaibari in the Darjeeling foothills in search of tea, to Benares for its street food, researching India's very own, very peculiar adaptations of Chinese food. That these columns would, in fact, translate into the script for A Matter of Taste (airing on Sunday at 8:30 pm) was, however, the big surprise.

Sanghvi's fans have argued that it is not his knowledge, nor even his opinions as much as his style of writing that has endeared them to his col-umns. The information in any case is easily available off Google. So it is his ability to combine that comprehensive material with an ever so slight sneery tone (oh, okay, I know that truffles are great, but those synthetic shavings you get in Indian restaurants are a sham...etc) that has been his hallmark.

But a cynical sideswipe in print is vastly different when it is delivered sotto voce on television, and A Matter of Taste's verbose, wordy and sarcastic tone does not sit comfortably with the viewer.

For years, critics have debated whether a film can do justice to a good book, but what's clear is that great columns don't necessarily translate into equally winning television programmes. Let me offer two examples.

In "Sino-Ludhianvi Cuisine" Sanghvi makes a case about not just the Indianisation of one of the world's greatest culinary traditions but its assassination in Indian kit-chens. When he wrote about it in Brunch, one empathised with the subject, laughed at the way "Manchurian" was created by restaurateur Baba Ling to cater to the garlic/ginger loving palate of the Indian diner.

On television, this makes less than compelling watching. Filming a Chinese family's Sino-Indian adaptation is less quirky on the little screen than in the pages of a magazine. Having Baba Ling recount the "history" of his Manchurian recipe has no high moments.

Chasing through the streets of Delhi's Lajpat Nagar to sample and then tell us that the Chinese chaat being served off a cart is terrible fare is not going to keep you hooked. The viewer wants good food, not an upset stomach.

What one expected from Sanghvi was his pick of favourite places, help in locating hidden gems, pointing out some fabulous, perhaps overlooked, treasures. Here, though, instead of tracing the Tangra tradition to Mumbai and Delhi, we are invited to laugh because the Chinese living in India for several generations have married off the two cuisines "" it doesn't work for me, and it doesn't work for a lot of viewers.

Sanghvi's trip back to "My Old School" is just as flawed. His journey to a few old Mayo boys' palaces and castles serves up a lot of exotica, almost no food at all, and a great deal of snide remarks besides. The only meal he ends up trying on television is at Deogarh, the one palace hotel in all Rajasthan guaranteed to beat even Castle Mandawa for its culinary austerity.

Instead, you have Sanghvi selling the merits of Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, discoursing on royal titles in Udaipur, hop-skip-jumping through Samode, to at least half-heartedly recreate something resembling a raison d'être in Deogarh for the focus of this half-hour. (So for those of you who're wondering which heritage hotels serve the best cuisine, right on top of the heap is Rohetgarh, just outside Jodhpur; next on my menu would be the vegetarian Bhanwar Niwas in Bikaner; and even though it's a bit of a tourist trap, Chokhi Dhani outside Jaipur serves up one of the state's finer dining experiences.)

I watched "Two Leaves and a Bud" with the same apprehension "" because Sanghvi combines here the commonplace (masala chai, tea auctions, a patchy tea tasting) with a bizarre visit to Makaibari where he tells the startled owner that one of his teas smells of "sex".

If I'm not going to be tuning in to Sanghvi's other programmes, it has as much to do with the flawed scripting as with his sartorial sense gone haywire. For some mysterious reason Sanghvi has taken to wearing loose black shirts over jeans and floaters. If there is to a be second season, Discovery, can we have the sophisticated Mr Sanghvi back please?