Table Toppers
With pulled kathal and
drinks in mason jars, formulaic menus are trending in restaurants. You aren't a
fashionable foodie if you haven't tucked into these
It is not strange for
restaurant menus to remind you of Bollywood potboilers. In the 1970s and '80s
block busters, you could shut your eyes and still follow the plot: a blind
sister, the long-suffering mother, the an gry young man, a bromance, a sizzling
song and dance, the vamp and chiffon saris coming together in a happy ending.
It is much the same at many of our buzzing restaurants in 2016. From the
deconstructed vada pav on the slate to the runny curry in cutesy tif fins to
desserts and drinks in mason jars, formulaic menus are trending and you could
shut your eyes and eat through them.
The best chefs work
differently. You can recognise the brightest, most talented ones from the
whimsy of their menus. But once that surprise has settled and commercial
success attained, the me-toos take over, serving with elan the same things that
had seemed so inventive and fresh once. Bung in “pulled kathal“ tacos with baos
and banta cocktails and you have a trendy restaurant going. Almost.
If the formulaic dishes of
the past ranged from butter chicken and rogan josh to chicken a la kiev and
mezze platters, today we have an entirely “new“ top-of-the pop list. You aren't
a fashionable foodie, if you haven't eaten these:
1 Pulled Jackfruit Tacos:
Kathal, of course, is the
hottest new discov ery of the millennial about town, who never quite managed to
find the jackfruit on her plate at home. Or, perhaps, mother did exhort her to
scoop some with a hot phulka when there was no pink pasta for lunch. But that
exhortation was scoffed at.
That can be the only reason
why so many people now consider what is one of the most common and oldest In
dian fruits to be exotic. It took the genius of chef Manish Mehrotra of Indian
Accent to make the homely kathal fashionable. He served this as a vegetarian
substitute for his pulled pork phulka tacos in 2012. Since then, both the
phulka as an Indian taco and the raw jackfruit curry -which can look like
pulled pork, even if it doesn't quite taste the same -have had an unbeatable
run, appropriated by all wannabe modern Indians, restaurants and people.
2 Deconstructed Vada Pav:
With chutney in a
molecular, edible plastic pouch. The irony of converting a poor man's dish into
gourmet chic may escape us, but, hey, we can always deconstruct it. Both
deconstruction and vada pav are so utterly chic that if you haven't sampled
either, you are as square as those ladi pavs, which few outside Mumbai ever get
right.
3 Pork Belly:
Like the cafeisation of
chaat, the gentrification of the pork belly is full of irony.One of the
cheapest cuts of the meat, its renaissance as a chef's favourite in the US led
to global popularity. In India, this means a stab at skewered pork belly tikkas
with masala slathered on or, well, pork pakoras with chaat masala.
4 Baos:
All through the 2000s,
American restaurateur David Chang's reputation rested on the huge popularity of
pork buns, a reinvention of the Cantonese char siu bao, at his Momofuku
restaurant. The average Indian diner perhaps does not know either. What she
does know is the bao sandwich, which went mainstream after the suc cess of Manu
Chandra's The Fatty Bao. Move over crispy lamb and chilli chicken, crispy
chicken in the bao is here.
5 Quinoa Salad:
In In dia, we have been
spared the kale but an inter est in global superfoods means quinoa is very much
a favourite. We have the ecofriend ly and equally nutritious local su pergrains
-the millets -but nothing is “super“ if it is not shipped from across the
world.
6 Railway Mutton Curry:
What's in a name? asked
Shakespeare in pre-brand days. A runny curry with tamer spices just cannot not
be as flavourful as the “railway mutton curry“ set on your table in
made-to-order brass, three-tiered tiffin box!
7 Red Velvet Cake:
Red cakes are back in
fashion, globally, courtesy of the Game of Thrones parties. In India, they nev
er went out of fashion. The Red Velvet has been trending in the metros for
about five years now -considerably after the New York wave, which start ed in
1989 with its appearance as a groom's cake in Steel Magnolias.
8 Banta Cocktails:
You cannot get into a bar
or on to Instagram without seeing this fizz.
Banta soda has got a new
lease of life.
Lemon, orange, jalzeera and
other flavours are spiked, marble-fitting machines installed at many premises
and it is the It-drink for millennials who matter.
If you cannot appreciate
the virtue of nostalgia, you've just lost your marbles.
9 Sangria:
It is perhaps one of the
worst cocktails you can order at a bar. Most pre-make it terribly. And still it
trends.
10 The Almost Trending:
These are the naanza
(naan-pizza), seafood bhel, samosa-focaccia (don't ask why), hoppers with
butter chicken... Have you eaten these yet?.
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Anoothi
Vishal
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ET15MAY16
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