Arvi satay, makhane ki kheer brulee, grilled zucchini, potatoes?more rosti than tikki, and ?dal? fashioned out of chironji seeds: Those who decided to go down to Indian Accent, a restaurant at the understated The Manor boutique hotel in Delhi, for a Navratra meal last week were certainly not fasting! Chef Manish Mehrotra, who has newly returned to the Capital from the swish Tamarai in London, had turned the boring vrat thali customarily served up this time of the year by F&B outlets, into a work of art. And if you hadn?t been abstaining, it may have been possible to even pair this meal with wine. But that?s not all, come April, Mehrotra will be presenting some other unusual bites at the restaurant, including, well, foie gras tikkas?cubes of the luxury goose liver, all skewered and tandoored.
?We wasted several tins of it (foie gras) trying to make it stick (to the skewers) before getting it right?,? laughs Mehrotra, talking about an ingredient which costs hotels about Rs 3,500 a kg. But regardless of price and even ingenuity, what Mehrotra?s meals represent is a whole new direction pan-Indian food, as served up in our restaurants, is now taking. If the advent of the clay tandoor, post Partition, changed the course of dining out within India, an equally significant ?revolution? is underway today.
It was really only in the 1950s that the first restaurants started popping up. Till then, most Indians only ate at home, bound by strict caste and cultural mores. The bazaars had their street eats – the kebabchis and khomchawallahs?but ?restaurants? per se were hardly the norm. Then came the influx of Punjabi enterprise; families who had fled their homes with very little brought their rustic tandoors to erstwhile Mughal centres of power and sophistication. The rest, as they say, is history. In our mixed up realities, we could be excused for labeling ?restaurantised? Punjabi food as the ubiquitious ?Indian? or even ?Mughlai?. However, the last two years seem to have seen a change.
Instead of the clich?d ?Mughlai? /Punjabi restaurant, it is another kind of pan-Indian restaurant that now stands at the cusp of commercial success: one like the discreet Indian Accent, where a five course super-imaginative meal comes paired with five different wines, or the elaborate Varq, the Taj brand that ?contemporarises? regional cuisines, mixes and matches flavours, and stylises presentations. And these are just the most prominent examples of stylish diners dishing out local bites with a twist.
Take a look around and you will realise that most of the new pan-Indian resta-urants opening these days fit into the ?contemporary Indian? genre, employing Western plating or ingredients to exoticise familiar bites. Salmon tikka has thus become as commonplace as the fowl of yore, blue cheese naan is India?s new gourmet fix, and even the grand old man of authenticated but hearty Punjabi dining, Jiggs Kalra, now serves liquidised paan in a shot glass.
There are other trysts with experimentation (I shudder to use the word ?fusion?): Monsoon, at Le Meridien, Delhi, will present an appetiser that brings together fried bread, puri, with grill-ed paneer! At Hyderabad?s Siaa, mangoes may be served on bruschettas, cheesy chicken on thepla. And then, there is Rakabdar (by Ashfaque and IrfanQuereshi, sons of the famous Imitiaz, ITC master chef), a ?contemporary Avadhi? diner in Bangalore, where a shorba may combine salmon, calamari and prawns with lime and orange juice?
Of course, contemporary Indian restaurants are not really new. Chefs like Vineet Bhatia and restaurants like Zaika (in London) and Tabla (in New York) have been at the forefront of such flavours internationally for almost a decade now. From being just cheap curry, ?doing Indian? acquired Michelin Star credentials as a result. In India, on the other hand, such contemporarised cuisine, served in chic surroundings instead of an ?ethnic? looking restaurant, was not immediately acceptable. When, The Park, for instance, introduced aubergine pate (not baigan ka bharta) a couple of years ago at Fire, its snazzily designed Indian restaurant, it didn?t find too many takers.
The wheel has come a full circle today. With more Indians travelling and thus open to culinary adventures, chefs can express their creativity in myriads of ways. And certainly exoticising the familiar seems to be commercially more viable than digging out obscure regional flavours and bringing them to the mainstream. Yet, like everywhere, experimentation only succeeds when the basics are strong. Chef Mehrotra, for instance, may caramalise the top layer of his kheer with a blow torch the way you would for a cr?me brulee. But dig in, and you?ll find that the taste is true.