Regional Indian food has been making slow but steady inroads into the mainstream restaurant market over the last couple of years. Prior to that, we, of course, had the various Udupi-style places, specialty restaurants like Dumpukht and well-thought-out endeavours like Oh! Calcutta or Swagath, but really, these were the exceptions rather than the rule.
One way in which Indian restaurant food has evolved today is in that it seems to be finally acquiring a soul: Modern Indian consumers are, of course, to be credited for this. In their search for diversity, exotica and authenticity, they have been encouraging chefs and restaurant-owners to take risks and dish out newer experiences?which include those where one needs to delve into micro-regions and culinary heritage. But, equally, there is a large and growing tribe of passionate foodies-turned-restaurateurs in the country who are fueling this trend.
People from diverse professional backgrounds are today taking that plunge into opening restaurants despite the notoriously fickle nature of the trade. More often than not, the cuisines they want to serve are from their hometowns?or those that they acquired a passionate taste for somehow. These restaurants themselves may not have the marketing muscle of big chains and lack the resources for fancy interiors and mall- or high-street locations, but one thing that you can be assured of at these mom-and-pop places is good food?reasonably authentic, if sometimes patchy.
In dining capital Delhi, amidst all the high-profile launches, some such operations have been regularly sprouting up. We now have some regional representation by way of Assamese, Malyali, Tamilian, and Andhra eateries. To these, add Kashmiri and Bengali now.
City of Joy is exactly a year old and by far the best Bengali restaurant in the city. If you overlook the rather decrepit location of the restaurant in an Alakhnanda shopping complex that civic bodies urgently need to do something about, the fish dishes (at very affordable prices) here are a rave-worthy. Debjyoti Roy, a chartered accountant, quit his profession, to launch this with his Kolkata-based partner Samar Majumdar, who has a well-established catering background and has provided the cooks, including an old Oriya gentleman (the best cooks in Bengali homes, after all, have been from Orissa) who has been cooking for 20 years. As a food enterprise then, this one?s on a firm-footing with sourcing and consistency issues sorted out and a big menu handled competently.
My favourites (apart from the to-die-for club-type fish fingers) are the poshto narkel bora, made out of poppy seeds and coconut, the steamed-in-banana leaves paturi, daab chingri, where shrimp (here, it is large prawns) is cooked in coconut milk and mustard, and the ilish curry. It is food that I would go back to any day, never mind the smelly staircase.
The Kashmiri Kitchen, on the other hand, is a takeaway based in Malviya Nagar. It is a welcome addition to Ahadsons at Masjid Moth and Rohit Khattar?s Chor Bizarre, the other two popular catering options in this category. Set up by Pearl Khan, a Kashmiri PR professional and Abhijit Barkataky, an Assamese devoted to cuisine from the Valley, who had a sales job before dabbling in food, the takeaway?s star attraction is a vast waza (traditionally, a master chef) from Srinagar.
Ghulam Mohd is a fourth-generation cook and has been cooking wazwans (the fabled ones would run up to 36 courses) for the last 17 years. He cannot speak English or Hindi but with the help of an interpreter, he can tell you about feasts which went on for eight days, comprising 50 different dishes cooked every day!
In Delhi, the vast waza ostensibly goes daily to the market at 6 am personally selecting the meat before assistants start pounding this on stone (for delicacies like the rista or gushtaba, meatballs both).
Ingredients such as the cockscomb flower (that gives a distinctive red colour to the curries), Kashmiri shallots and saffron are sourced from the Valley. And while I have had better Kashmiri food and experiences (no takeaway can rival eating off the trami, after all), there are a couple of standout-dishes here: aab gosht, cooked in milk, is subtle and perfectly tender. And apart from gushtaba or rogan josh, there are other, lesser-known wazwan dishes such as dhaniwal korma (in curd, with lots of coriander).
Retailing regional Indian food is a high-risk business and not merely because the success rate is incredibly low. Instead, in a country, where the best food is still to be found in homes, getting consumers to pay enough for what they perceive as ?home-style? and, therefore, low-value is a challenge. On the other hand, if these new restaurateurs succeed, it will only benefit our dining scene. After all, for any vibrant gourmet city of the world, it?s important to have enough, reasonably-priced local cuisine experiences. In India, the advantage is that there are so many cuisines to choose from.
The writer is a food critic