'A Fake Nair' Puts Real Chettinad Cuisine on North Indian Mind Map & Finds A Heritage Gem

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Bangala at Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, inspired
Sumeet Nair's exploration of Chettinad Cuisine
and his labour of love, The Bangala Table.

SUMEET NAIR first made headlines when he set up the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) and organised the first India Fasion Week in the late 1990s. That was a humongous achievement, for it is hard to get so many creative and opinionated people on to one platform. Nair moved out to pave the way for seasoned professionals -- Vinod Kaul and Rathi Vinay Jha -- till he was brought back again to stage a rescue act in 2007, for the FDCI was collapsing under the weight of competing egos. Nair ("the fake Nair," as he calls himself, for he's a Punjabi born and brought up in Mumbai), as they say, rose to the occasion and rescued the FDCI from certain disintegration.

All the diplomatic skills that this Stanford Economics graduate mastered during his stint with the FDCI must have helped him prise the secrets of the Chettiar table from the grande dame of Karaikudi, Meenakshi Meyyappan, for The Bangala Table: Flavors and Recipes from Chettinad. The effort took him six months and the book, another three years.

Nair, ironically, did not even about The Bangala's existence some four years ago, when his good friends, hotelier Priya Paul and her husband Sethu Vaidyanathan, urged Nair and his wife, Gitanjali Kashyap, to spend their New Year's Eve in Tamil Nadu, instead of the usual suspect, Goa. "Sethu drew up my itinerary and The Bangala was on it," remembers Nair. Befittingly, the book is being released at The Park New Delhi on Tuesday, August 26, at a Chettiar-style sadya (feast) served on banana leaves, and hosted by Priya and Sethu.

A passionate cook (a trait he has inherited from his late parents, Sunny and Saroj Nair) with a personal collection of 400-500 cookbooks, Nair made innumerable trips to Karaikudi to master the combinations of spices and understand the nuances of the goondu maligai (berry-shaped round red chillies), which he now also uses to make kung pao chicken, and mor maligai, green chillies soaked in buttermilk and then dried. He also roped in Atul Sikand, shepherd of Facebook's most vibrant recipe-sharing community, Sikandalous Cuisine (21,000-plus members, and counting!), to test the recipes and see whether they could be replicated at home. As many as 35 Sikandalous Cuisine members were roped in for the recipe tests and Sikand remembers that his Palam Vihar home was "smelling like heaven" after he made the Chicken Chettinad, which is nothing like what we are condemned to eat up north. "This book will re-define Chettinad cuisine as we understand it," says Sikand.

When I first heard the name of the book, which is embellished by some fine examples of Rohit Chawla's photography and has a short introduction to the Chettiar community by the 'Chronicler of Madras', S. Muthiah, I thought it was Bangla mis-pronounced. I was wrong.

Dating back to the 1910s, The Bangala is a heritage hotel recreated from an old 'gentlemen's club' in Karaikudi, one of the three main seats (the other being Pudukottai and Sivaganga) of the mercantile, world-travelled and prosperous Chettiar community in Tamil Nadu. The Chettiars, as Guy Trebay of The New York Times recounts in his evocative Foreword, owned magnificent homes that had pillars made out of entire teak logs rafted from Burma via the Bay of Bengal and brackets made with African tusk ivory; Brescia marbles skirted the walls, the English ceramic tiles came from Minton and the crystal chandeliers, of course, could only come from Bohemia. Still, the men, their palatial mansions notwithstanding, had their own getaways for entertainment.

The Bangala, originally called the Senjai Bungalow, was one of them. It was developed by the MSMM family (the initials stand for Meyyappa, Settiappa, Meyyappa & Meyyappa), which had earned its fortunes in Ipoh, Malaysia. The family evidently was very important for Karaikudi -- it built the area's first school for girls, then established the town's water supply system and was one of the founders of the local electricity supply corporation.

Unsurprisingly, back in 1936, the Senjai Bangala played host to Archibald Nye, the then Governor of Madras Presidency, who started his day with Fish Moley, Mutton Chops, Grilled Chicken, Buttered Eggs, Pears and Cream, Tea or Coffee, and Fruits, and ended it with Pigeon Soup, Fried Fish and Potato, Mutton Cutlet, Kidney Curry, Egg Pilav and Chicken Kurma, Brain Balls, Pudding, Dessert and Coffee, with Johnnie Walker being the tipple of choice!

After World War II, the Senjai Bungalow became the Town Club with its own tennis court and rummy room, but the high noon of socialism did not bode well for the MSMM family. Senjai Bungalow was in a state of utter neglect till, in 1998, two remarkable ladies of the family, Visalakshi Ramaswamy and Meenakshi Meyyappan, started working on its turnaround into a heritage hotel. Their vision was to make Chettinad a heritage tourism destination, showcasing the Chettiar houses and the work of the area's sari weavers, and in the 15 years since the time The Bangala opened its doors, it has inspired half-a-dozen other heritage hotels to come up in Chettinad. Like so many success stories of the South, though, this one too eluded our attention. Nair has ensured it would no longer be so.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Recipes for a Multitasking Generation

This column first appeared in the Mail Today dated January 30, 2014. If you wish to see the original page, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=3012014 and go to Page 15. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A NEW generation of cookbook writers are rewriting the ground rules of the craft. It may be because of the criticism that their recipes are meant to be admired for the pictures that accompany them because they are impossible to follow. Elaborate recipe requiring numerous ingredients and many stages of cooking may demonstrate the prowess of the person writing them,  but these are impossible to replicate at home, and can be frustrating for both the homemaker and the hobby cook.

It is heart-warming therefore to see the efflorescence of cookbooks that the Regular Ritu or the Neighbourhood Neha can relate to even as she juggles the multiple chores of managing a career, running a home and raising children, who can never be satisfied with the food they get. Cookbooks must address the needs of our multi-tasking, multi-cultural urban middle-class universe, where each family wakes up every morning with one existential question: What shall we eat today that will be different from what we had yesterday?

The debut cookbooks of Kunal

Kapur (above) and Rushina

Munshaw Ghildiyal address

the needs of a time-challenged,

 multi-tasking homemaker

 and hobby cook

We have two of them that have just been published and stand out in the crowd. A Pinch of This, A Handful of That (Westland; Rs 595) is by a popular food blogger (A Perfect Bite), Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who lives the life of the average working mother making a desperate daily effort to prevent her children from seeking out junk food as deliverance from 'uninteresting' food at home. I first met her at a Godrej Nature's Basket cookery demo and was impressed by the turnout -- there's clearly an audience of young mothers out there among whom Rushina is the new domestic goddess.

The other cookbook (A Chef in Every Home; Random House) is by the sunny-faced Kunal Kapur from MasterChef India, a good-looking Punjabi munda whom every auntieji following the reality show co-hosted by him would want to have as her son-in-law. Away from his popular television persona, Kunal is an inventive chef who works very hard in the kitchens of The Leela Gurgaon and I first discovered him through his paan-flavoured panna cotta at the hotel's under-rated Indian restaurant, Diya, whose kitchen is now headed by an acolyte of the Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar.

In his acknowledgements, Kapur mentions an array of male relatives, unintentionally pointing to a rising constituency for cookbooks -- the urban male hobby cook, whom you'll find all over Facebook and Twitter, exchanging their recipes and holding forth on those of others on Sikandalous Cuisine, the busiest and the largest (at least in South Asia) recipe-sharing social media community. The audience for cookbooks clearly has transformed dramatically since the glory days of Mrs Balbir Singh and two Mrs Dalals -- Tarla and Katy.

The beauty of Rushina's book is that like the average day of a homemaker, it follows no order. Each page, as a result, throws up a little surprise, or an interesting anecdote, and you can start reading the book from anywhere and still find a recipe you'd want to replicate at home. You could find a recipe for something as easy as Keema Pasta or as challenging as the 13 Onion Pasta, or as nostalgia-laden as the chicken curry that is served with roomali roti at Mayo College on Tuesdays, or as exotic as the Root Spinach Soup of Istanbul's Asitane restaurant, or the South African Bunny Chow, or Pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup, or the Channa Bateta of Bhendi Bazar's Bohri Mohalla. There's something for every inclination.

Kunal's book, as you'd expect from a chef, is structured like a traditional cookbook, but its sweep is remarkable -- from Menaskai, the famous spicy pineapple curry from coastal Karnataka, Bhutte ka Shorba with Chilli Butter Popcorn and Potli Masala Creme Brulee, to Mutton Varuval, Fish Amritsari, Prawns Moilee and Char Siu Mutton Chops, the recipes come with a twist to excite your imagination. And perhaps prevent your little ones from ordering in a McDonald's lunch or Domino's dinner.

LOVE YOUR BREAKFAST? INSTAGRAM IT!

WHAT do Instagram, India Art Fair, signature breakfasts and tea-time eclairs have in common? I asked myself this question as I watched Arnaud Champenois of Starwood Hotels and Resorts walk in, his fluorescent green shoelaces grabbing my attention before anything else. We were at Le Meridien, at an exhibition of Instagram pictures of Delhi's sights and people by Dan Rubin, who with 600,000-plus followers on the picture blogging site is a social media hero. The three-city show (San Francisco and Paris are the other two big cities) is a part of the Filters of Discovery initiative of the international hotel chain -- one of nine owned by Starwood -- and the event where I met Champenois was timed to coincide with the India Art Fair.

"Mobile photography is the new language of our social media-obsessed world," Champenois said as he went about explaining the connections. After the Obama selfie kerfuffle, don't we know all about it! Travellers "unlock destinations" with the pictures they shoot with their mobiles and they have turned the social media into a global repository of these millions of "picture story books", as Champenois described them. To engage their guests in a more creative way, Le Meridien hotels (#lmfilters) around the world encourage them to Instagram or tweet their mobile photographs, and get rewarded for their work. And by connecting with the art community through the concluding dinner that Le Meridien New Delhi, where the country's many culinary traditions will be showcased to the accompaniment of music by the Bandish Project, Champenois said, the hotel is reaching out to "creative-minded travellers" who are "more plugged in" than the rest of the world.

The Dan Rubin show coincides with the global launch of Le Meridien's signature breakfast, which after nearly four years of carrying American top chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's stamp, will have a strong local flavour. You can now order a rasam poached egg served with a lentil galette to start your day, or have a baked omelette rolled in a gramflour cheela with tandoori chicken morsels and mint chutney. Craving for an eclair with your coffee? Don't miss the one with ginger and jaggery, or maybe rose and cardamom. Indulge -- and Instagram. That's the new mantra.

GOOD FOOD FOR THE COFFEE TABLE

OK, I did extol the virtues of cookbooks for the new homemaker and hobby cook in the lead piece, but there's still a market for the strikingly illustrated tome that looks good on your coffee table and also has recipes that you can attempt at leisure (and of course, if you're adventurous as well!).

One such cookbook, appropriately titled Taste (Om Books), has been moving fast in the market. You'd  expect it from a cookbook with recipes from four Michelin-starrers (Vineet Bhatia, Vikas Khanna, Frances Aitken and Marcello Tully), Australian celebrity chef Ian Curley, Michelin Rising Star Laurie Gear, and BBC2 cookery show host Anjum Anand. Creative Services Support Group's Anand Kapoor, whose grandfather's Chicken Korma and Coffee Mousse Cake recipes are the ones you must attempt at home, has accomplished the surprising feat of getting the celebrity chefs together to share their best. Having done two annual charity events with these chefs, Kapoor seems to have mastered the art of balancing their egos and managing to get the best out of them, and it shows in the selection of recipes, which are arranged in the form of meals.

Surprisingly, despite the heavyweight presence of Michelin stars, the recipes are not that hard to replicate. Start with Anjum Anand's Fluffy Spinach Koftas in Creamy Tomato Curry, or the New York-based Vikas Khanna's Octopus Chaat and Watermelon Shorba, Ian Curley's Tortellini of Pumpkin and Ricotta, Marcelo Tully's Bread and Butter Pudding, and find out for yourself how these creative powerhouses elevate the simplest pleasures of life.

Turning Point Wines Get A Capital Welcome as Delhi Gourmet Club Serves Paradise on a Plate

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IT WAS only appropriate that the wines being showcased at the Delhi Gourmet Club's 68th event are called Turning Point. DGC's first-ever al fresco wazwan lunch on Saturday, January 25, was indeed a turning point for the club, which is now, despite being a 'Secret Group', a 5,000-strong Facebook community.

Delhi Gourmet Club's founder-member Rocky
Mohan (left) with Shafi Waza, one of the four
brothers who are carrying forward the great
gastronomical legacy of Khan Abdul Ahad
Waza. Picture: Shalini Chauhan

It was the first time that the club had invited a well-known catering company, none other than the inimitable Ahad Sons, which is carrying forward the legacy of Khan Abdul Ahad Waza, to present a traditional 16-course wazwan lunch. A celebratory wazwan meal can accommodate up to 32 courses, but the club's three founder-members (Rocky 'Mr Old Monk' Mohan, Atul 'The Guru of Sikandalous Cuisine' Sikand and yours truly) decided that 16 would be more than enough! And believe me, they were.

Of course, with Rocky, whose book Wazwan: Traditional Kashmiri Cuisine is the most insightful on the subject, to guide us, with the suave Shafi Waza, the third of the four brothers who are now the custodians of Ahad Waza's legacy, personally supervising the proceedings, and with Mohit 'Chowder Singh' Balachandran orchestrating the service with club member Nikhil Alung, we could expect the lunch to be a memorable affair, even though the weather wasn't.

Turning Point wines, which have just been launched
in Delhi and Gurgaon, share the limelight with
the invincible Old Monk, Ketel One and Bacardi.
Picture: Ajay Gautam

It was a cold and gloomy day (we joked that we had brought Srinagar's weather to Delhi), and the ever-hospitable Rocky, at whose sprawling Vasant Kunj farmhouse the lunch had been laid out, was worried that the chairs would be wet. The weather made no difference to the elevated spirits on the ground, for there was enough warmth to be had from the wood fires, the lavish spread of delectable wazwan dishes, and Turning Point wines, which have just been launched in Delhi and Gurgaon after a fairly good run in Mumbai and Pune.

Turning Point is the brainchild of Ashwin Deo, whom many of you'll remember as the man who steered Moet Hennessy India very successfully in the company's early days. A product of Nashik's wine lands, Turning Point is India's first wine label that addresses young people, the  country's largest population segment that hasn't evinced much interest in wine.

I suspect it is because wine has been presented in a manner that it comes across as some 'serious' drink that only 'connoisseurs' can appreciate. The truth is, wine, like any other alcoholic beverage, is meant to be savoured in the company of friends, with good food to accompany it, and not intellectualised upon. Turning Point wines draw you in with their bottle design -- it's sassy, youthful, vibrant. You just have to keep a bottle on your table to get people talking about the wine. It's a great ice-breaker.

But Turning Point wines have more to offer than their sleek bottles and meaningful conversations. The wines are made from grapes sourced with great care from contract farmers in Nashik, and matured and bottled at Ravi and Kailash Gurnani's York winery with expert advice from the roving biochemist-turned-oenologist from Bordeaux, Marc Dworkin. I had the Turning Point Rosé, made from Zinfandel grapes, and I was surprised by its lively freshness. It was not overly sweet; instead, it balanced crisp acidity with a hint of fruitiness.

I thought I would stick with the Rosé, but I changed my mind after I had the Cabernet Shiraz. It was young, flavourful and delicately balanced. The vines from where the grapes are sourced for the Turning Point Cabernet Shiraz are 10-15 years old, yet there's no rawness in the wine, which made it a perfect match for the food that was served piping hot from silver containers by by Shafi's men, all clad in white kurta, pyjama and skull cap.

And what a feast it was, from the nadru (lotus stem) fritters and mutton lahabi kebabs circulated as appetisers during the meet-and-greet hour, to the pounded mutton kofta with an apricot at the centre, the ruwangan chaman (my most favourite paneer dish), the unbeatable Hind roghan josh and its polar opposite, the aab gosht (mutton cooked in a milk curry), the unputdownable haak (Kashmiri spinach) and monje (turnips), the spongy gushtaba bearing the unmistakable Ahad Waza stamp, and the sooji halwa, phirni and kahwa (Kashmiri tea) at the end. It was a meal I won't forget in a long time.

For DGC, it was without doubt a landmark event -- a brilliant showcase of a regional cuisine rooted in tradition and a new wine label that has set out to re-write the old, cobwebbed rules of wine drinking.

RIP: India Loses Her Sunny Granny of Comfort Food

This obituary first appeared in the 7 November 2013 edition of Mail Today, Delhi/NCR. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/mailanartical.aspx?parentid=87147&boxid=42432875&issuedate=7112013

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

FROM Narendra Modi to India's first television chef Sanjeev Kapoor, all of India is mourning the passing away of Tarla Dalal after a heart attack at 77, for her cookbooks have been an essential ingredient of our national life, and a rite of passage for the pre-internet generation, for four decades since she was first published in 1974.

Tarla Dalal lifted home cooking from its
cycle of predictability and affected the
lives of millions in the pre-internet age

A chatty Mumbai homemaker with a sunny temperament and halting command over English, who'd gained a considerable following for the cooking classes she was running at her Napean Sea Road home since 1966, Tarla Dalal (with her husband taking dictations) spent 18 months writing The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking. It became a runaway best-seller after its debut in 1974 and a mandatory gift for brides in an age when cookbooks and Eve's Weekly were the only sources of recipes, and it was eventually translated into six languages (including Dutch and Russian).

With the cookbook, Dalal took home cooking with everyday ingredients to a new level of replicable creativity, lifting it out of its self-limiting cycle of predictability with her brand of accessible excitement. She was the grandmother of comfort food even before the term became fashionable. Betty Crocker was a figment of a publisher's imagination; Tarla Dalal was real. Her constituency was the country's mushrooming middle-class trying hard to bring some excitement to its table. And she achieved the impossible: to quote Atul Sikand, founder of Facebook's most vibrant Indian recipe-sharing community, Sikandalous Cuisine, "she made simple recipes, which are the toughest to get right, seem so easy to do".

Inspired to become a hobby chef by Dalal's cookbooks, Sikand remembers meeting his idol when he was 23-24, fresh out of his development economics master's programme at the University of Sussex, and asking her about how to get his kadhi right. She explained the intricacies of her recipe with the patience of an indulgent aunt and even said how he would become a great chef one day. Of course, he never became one!

Even chefs are proud to admit that they have liberally borrowed from Dalal's cookbooks. She authored 170 of them, which have sold more than four million copies, and her TV show,  Cook It Up with Tarla Dalal, ran on Sony Entertainment Television for three years. Yet, she was candid enough to announce in Harmony magazine some years back that she had stopped cooking, leaving the job of creating recipes to a team of chefs and nutritionists guided by her. The pre-internet diva's website, www.tarladalal.com, which is run by her son Sanjay, now has 17,500-plus recipes that people pay to access.

Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, whom Dalal had ranked in 2003 as one of India's top 10 chefs in the in-flight magazine of Jet Airways, says he dipped into these cookbooks to sex up the vegetarian fare served to the 25,000 people who ate daily at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre cafeteria. "Where else but in Tarla Dalal's cookbooks could I have found recipes for vegetarian dishes with a Mexican twist?" asks Gorai, adding that when he was working in Australia, chefs at Indian restaurants liberally borrowed from Dalal.

Rushina Munshaw Ghildayal, corporate food consultant, blogger and modern-day Tarla Dalal, says her icon was special because she touched the everyday lives of ordinary people. Her Gujarati parents gifted her Tarla Dalal's cookbooks when she got married and, Rushina recalls, she got addicted to 'Spanish Rice' (a desi version of a vegetarian paella), a recipe she had picked up from one of the books, when she was pregnant.

Few middle-class Indians who grew up in the pre-internet age can say they haven't had a Tarla Dalal moment in their lives. She taught us how to cook at home and make our next meal a little more exciting.

DINING OUT: Fashionably Late, But Cavalli Caffe Gets Its New Menu Right

This review first appeared in Mail Today, Delhi/NCR, on 10/11/2013.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

To see the epaper version, go to http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1112013

and click on Page 23.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

DINING OUT

WHAT: Cavalli Caffe

WHERE: Ground Floor Atrium, DLF Emporio, Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj

WHEN: 11 A.M. TO 11 A.M. (last order)

DIAL: 011-46950000; +919582645245

AVG MEAL FOR TWO (SANS ALCOHOL): Rs 2,000+++

WHEN Cavalli Caffe (the 'ff' is deliberate!) opened last year, next to the flamboyant silver-haired Italian designer's boutique at DLF Emporio, people joked that it got as many diners in a day as would fit into the monogrammed stretch limo that had ferried Roberto Cavalli to the launch party in the glittering presence of Bollywood's young celebs led by the towering Sonam Kapoor.

Split into two sections--one in the luxury mall's atrium and the other inter-connected with the store, with crystal lamps, floor-to-roof mirrors, zebra-print sofas and chairs, and framed black-and-white photographs of Cavalli schmoozing with international stars, the Caffe was at once perceived to be overpriced and too snobby for regular diners.

Its misfortune was compounded by its location next to Cha Shi, whose wholesome South-East Asian street food, sensible pricing and accessible style made it an instant hit. The Caffe's indifferent menu and Cavalli prices did it in -- in our picky city, the only way you can make a restaurant successful is by serving good food. People pay for taste and not for an international celebrity's licence fee.

The new menu has the power to bring life back 
to Cavalli Caffe, whose bright and fashionable 
decor hadn't been getting people to come in 
and dine. Image: Shekhar Yadav/Mail Today

The restaurant's owner and promoter of a number of luxe brands, Manav Gangwani, was quick to read the writing on the wall and at once drafted Vidur Parashar, formerly famous for Circa 1193, the restaurant that met with a premature end even though it served honest-to-goodness Pan Asian cuisine with an international twist. Parashar took up the challenge, though he knew he would have to work hard to convince Roberto Cavalli's chefs that tweaking their menu was important to get the crowds that the Caffe needed to post decent-enough financial results. In this monumental effort, Parashar was aided by Jatin Mallick of Tres, who, in his capacity as independent expert, convinced the Italians that the menu was badly in need of an overhaul.

The Caffe's new menu is not only miles ahead of its predecessor, but also gentle on the pocket, with most dishes priced between Rs 200 and Rs 500, the notable exceptions being the Sweet Lobster Linguine (Rs 1,000) and the Lasagna Tradizionale/Tagliatelle Amatriciana (Rs 700 each). It has more items in the 'Cavalli International Specials', including melt-in-the-mouth chicken shawarma that'll make you ask for a repeat and a soul-satisfying, soupy tom kha, which has been renamed Oriental Meal in a Bowl keeping in mind the restaurant's global credentials. It took the burrata, or mozzarella with cream inside, with nothing more flashy than cherry tomatoes and a hint of balsamico to give it company, that convinced me the menu had indeed been turned around. And the burrata, oozing cream like a god dropping manna from heaven, had been sourced from saddi Dilli's Flanders Dairy at Brijwasan.

I was eating in the company of Atul Sikand, whose Facebook recipe-sharing group, Sikandalous Cuisine, has become a phenomenon with 10,000 members (and counting). It's very difficult to make him happy, but Atul was as pleased as punch, especially after we spooned up the last drop of the Crema di Pomodoro, a hearty tomato soup served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread -- old-fashioned but wholesome. Next on the agenda was the Beetroot Vinaigrette with feta and arugula (rocket), a much-abused salad that could have stayed that way, but it was actually a delight for the senses. The portion of Cavalli Burger (our choice was chicken) came in as two delicious sliders, with the juicy chicken patty encased in a slightly crunchy breaded batter. And the thin-but-not-paper-crust Margherita Pizza that arrived thereafter blew us away with its sauce, which finely balanced sweet and tangy -- it is apparently not taken out readymade from a bottle, but made in the kitchen with Italian canned pelati (peeled) tomatoes that you'll find in plenty at INA Market.

A regular mortal would have stopped here, but as Atul and I were on a serious tasting mission, we ordered the burrata ravioli with burnt butter and sage -- the description on the menu said it was "divinity on plate" and we had to agree with it wholeheartedly, despite the patent immodesty of the declaration. The burnt butter just did it! The sweet lobster linguine was yet another temptress and it justified its price with the chunks of lobster in it. Our final dish was the Oriental Meal in a Bowl -- the creamy, soupy tom kha with chunky shrimps was just what we needed to prepare ourselves for the grand finale: airy hot chocolate foam sitting atop a rum granita.

The hot-and-cold sensation was just what we needed to be convinced that the new Cavalli Caffe menu not only has depth, but also quality. With it coming back to life (I hope it gets the numbers), the DLF Emporio atrium is now a complete dining experience.

Saravana Bhavan Tops Table in Delhi Gourmet Club's 'Dosa Dance' Led by Facebook Phenom Atul Sikand

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WITH THE migrant population from the south finding employment in growing numbers at government institutions, a band of enterprising Udipi dosawallahs moved to Delhi to make their fortunes by serving them from the back of bicycle-drawn carts. They served the office-going crowds, took over canteens at such
bastions of the Capital's southern population as the Press Trust of India, which for years has been jocularly called the Palghat Trust of India, and got migrant Punjabis addicted to the lightly spicy potato-packed crepe that everyone knows as the masala dosa.
This is one vegetarian preparation (along with the accompanying sambhar and chutneys) whose mass appeal cuts across linguistic and economic barriers. The masala dosa is ubiquitous, and has held its ground even after the onslaught of fast food and Barbeque Nation, in the Republic of Butter Chicken. What the southern superstar Rajnikanth couldn't do, the humble masala dosa has achieved--it has invaded Delhi. The credit for making the dosa a sought-after speciality must go to a runaway boy from Udipi who started his life as a dishwasher in a canteen before going on to establish the Sagar-Swagath restaurant empire. The hero of this rags-to-riches story is Jayaram Banan. He was the one who made the Punjabi gentry of Defence Colony discover dosas in the days when he used to make them himself on his bicycle cart at a tree-shaded spot right opposite the location of the original Sagar Ratna, which Banan opened in the neighbourhood market in 1986.
As his business empire grew (the majority stake of the chain, valued at Rs 200 crore, was picked up by the New York-based portfolio management firm, Indian Equity Partners, in 2011), the quality of his dosas became uneven. I blame it on rapid expansion and indifferent franchisees, and now the media is agog with reports of differences erupting between Banan, who's still chairman of Sagar Ratna Restaurants, and Indian Equity Partners.
With so much happening in the world of dosas, it was to be expected of the Delhi Gourmet Club (DGC) to set off on a 'Dosa Dance' across the city to zero in on the best. The jury consisted of well-travelled DGC members from different walks of life--a travel industry professional, for instance, who used to run a cooking

The Delhi Gourmet Club's jury rated the Saravana Bhavan's
dosas as the best in the city. It scored 39.33/50, 0.33 points
ahead of Tamil Nadu Bhawan, which was at No. 2.
Image: Courtesy of www.tripadvisor.in

school in France, an international lawyer, a senior Times of India executive, an editor with Bloomberg, and a management consultant with strong views on the provenance and authenticity of dosas.
The leader of the jury was Atul Sikand, who has become a Facebook phenomenon--his global recipe-sharing page, Sikandalous Cuisine, now has 10,000 (and counting) followers. With a leader like Sikand, it was to be expected of the jury to be tough with its assessments.
Sure enough, none of the 10 restaurants shortlisted for the Dosa Dance scored above 39.33/50. I wish, though, that they had more on the list, such as the United News of India canteen behind the Planning Commission building; Kausstubh at DLF Place, Saket; Southy on Aurobindo Marg (near Adhchini); and the mithai shops Anupam Sweets (Greater Kailash, Part II) and Evergreen (Green Park). It would have given us an idea of the variety available across the Capital. Also missing were restaurants from Karol Bagh and Mayur Vihar, which have major concentrations of migrant populations from the south.
The jury clearly wasn't impressed by the credentials of the shortlisted restaurants. Upsets naturally were to be expected.
Sagar Ratna, the original and not some franchisee outlet, finished a lowly seventh in a field where a minuscule 0.33 points separated the winner (Saravana Bhavan, Janpath) and the first runner-up (Tamil Nadu Bhavan, Chanakyapuri, which was clearly the surprise of the pack). Carnatic Cafe, which is at the back of the New Friends Colony Market, came third, although everyone just loves it (and it is Rahul Gandhi's favourite haunt, when he's not visiting Smoke House Deli, Khan Market). Saravana got top billing because of both the consistency of its offerings and the care that went into the accompaniments (sambhar and chutneys).
It is followed by another long-time favourite, Delhi Karnataka Sangha on Rao Tula Ram Marg, which beat Chidambaram, Khanna Market, Lodi Colony, an icon for Delhi's Tamilian population, by just 0.63 points. Chidambaram apparently lost out because of its unsatisfactory paper dosa!
The top five were followed by five established names in the business: Sri Gururaj Udipi at Munirka; Sagar Ratna at Defence Colony; Naivedyam at Hauz Khas Village; Bhaja Govindam, next to Delite cinema, on Asaf Ali Road; and Ananda Bhawan at the Main Market, Green Park. Their lowly rankings made me wonder whether they had become victims of the complacence that their early success brought upon them. Or have the got trapped in a time bubble and are unable to do anything about the writing that is loud and clear on the wall?
The jury, which covered two outlets in a week without letting the restaurants know what they were up to, tasted three dosas--masala, paper and rawa onion--per establishment. In each case, they asked for the masala dosa filling to be served separately so that they could taste it as it is. Each dosa was judged by its crust (crisp outside, soft within), fillings, accompaniments (sambhar, gunpowder and chutneys) and, most important, overall taste. The points given by each judge present were added up and the weighted average became the score that the restaurant got. Apparently, as you'd expect from a qualified jury, the variations in scores were minimal.
With their effort, the 'Dosa Dance' jury has given foodies in Delhi and visitors to the city a list to refer to when they are overcome by dosa cravings, which is not an uncommon happening. The Delhi Gourmet Club now has four such well-researched lists--butter chicken, classic hamburger, seekh kebabs and dosa--to offer to foodies who wish to discover the city's best-kept secrets. Another one--this time on pizzas--is being released soon. Watch out for my report on it.