Last Friday, Nehru Park in New Delhi looked like it had been converted into one of those absurdly luxurious tented camps at a safari lodge in Kenya or Rajasthan. Everywhere one looked, people were putting the finishing touches on large white tents, the positioning of dining tables and chairs was being fussed over and flower decorations big enough to be statues were being moved hither and thither.
The clue that this was a preview to a food festival was the large number of men in chef's coats looking as concerned as fathers whose wives had gone into labour. The promotional material for the New Delhi Palate Fest 2014 that advertised its noodles partner (Cup Noodles) and atta partner (Sampoorna Chakki Atta) was underwhelming, but we were in for a surprise. Tens of thousands turned up as scores of restaurants and major hotels did pop-up outlets for three days. There was no entry fee and the tapas-style smaller servings were priced at about Rs 400.
Similar to Taste London and planned by two enterprising young women, the event was spectacular. On Sunday, I arrived straight from the 11-month remembrance for a friend's mother who died last year just a few months after my friend had succumbed to cancer and found the spectacle of Delhiites queuing in good humour under benign autumnal sunshine uplifting. Before I knew it, I was sampling the Kerala stir-fried meat dish from a stranger's plate at the Toddy Shop. (He was the friend of a friend of a friend) My father, growing up in Mumbai far from his Kottayam roots, called it khushi ghosht. That was the effect it had that afternoon and indeed every time I have cooked it in the days when I had time to cook. Suddenly, there were crowds thronging to the small outlet as if it was offering winning lottery tickets.
Colleagues came back with similarly rave reviews of the calamari from the outlet of Le Bistro du Parc, the pork belly at Olive's stand and the duck at the JW Marriott enclosure.
Unlike the Calcutta of my childhood where eating out often meant literally that - the puchkawala near Loreto's, the Nizam's kathi rolls wrapped in The Statesman and then put in brown paper bags before being passed through the windows of our ancient Ambassador - in Delhi it is mostly an air-conditioned affair. The al fresco ambience was partly what made Palate special. The other notable feature was how restaurants I had never even heard of - such as Farzi Cafe - had long queues, while the hotel stands looked like staid grande dames by comparison. At Nehru Park, the Davids of the food world were trouncing the Goliaths.
This defection is true of so many of us, and is partly why hotel restaurants often seem like marble mausoleums today. One of the revelations of moving back to Delhi after a couple of decades away is how eclectic the food served at dinners in people's homes is. The other is how many independent restaurants have sprung up offering everything from modern Japanese conjured up by a Filipino chef to authentic regional Italian food by a woman chef. By contrast, when I was a college kid in the city, I salted away as much of my Rs 300-monthly pocket money as I could to make a quarterly trip to the Taj's Machan or the coffee shop at Maurya for a soup called Hungarian goulash.
On my last trip to the Machan for a business breakfast with a guest staying at the Taj, the service was so stretched that we finally gave up waiting for the bill and went to the cash register. (By contrast, lunch the same day at the Andhra Bhawan canteen was a model of good humour, super-efficient service and superlative food.) The upselling at five-star hotels has become so bizarre that at the Oberoi's some months ago, when I asked for a pot of Darjeeling tea at the start of an interview with Google's engaging India CEO Rajan Anandan, I was mystified when the waiter suggested I try a virgin mojito instead. And it took Daryl Hannah, the Hollywood actress, speaking at a conference at the Taj Palace in New Delhi last year, to wonder aloud why hotels in India place bottled water on every square foot of unoccupied space in restaurants and conference halls when presumably even hotel managers have heard of the invention of water filtration machines.
Such missteps aside, the food at specialist restaurants somehow tastes better and the places have a buzz because they are usually packed. But, what I like most of all these days is eating in friends' homes. Half my friends in Delhi are Calcutta emigres, for whom food was an obsession long before the overused word "foodie" came into vogue. The abundance of exotic ingredients means you can be eating a slow-cooked Persian lamb dish at a dinner presided over by a boisterous Delhi Scheherazade one night or a perfectly grilled salmon with rocket salad on the side at lunch the next hosted by a friend so trim she must dine only on the leaves. Come by for dinner by the TV tonight, says another friend a week later, a prelude to an unexpected tasting of her Tamil husband's family recipes.
Delicious food and the bonhomie of the host and guests can work a certain magic. The rigours of the day, its missed opportunities and trivial irritations and resentments are soon forgotten. In a city all too often characterised by aggression and aggravation, but also by warmth and good humour, that is what Delhi's Palate Fest achieved last weekend.
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