FORTUNE COOKIE: Priya Paul Dishes up a Chettinad Experience on Banana Leaves

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Tucked away in the Chettiar heartland,
The Bangala has preserved a cooking
tradition that can turn the humble chow
chow (above) into a taste sensation.
Image: Rohit Chawla

IT IS NOT often that the Capital's Stiletto Set eat out of banana leaves in a five-star hotel. Priya Paul made sure they did a couple of evenings ago. Those with manicured nails used cutlery; those without, including some of the city's most influential people, from image makers to fashion designers, dug in with their fingers. They did it to celebrate the launch of Sumeet Nair and Meenakshi Meyyappan's The Bangala Table: Flavors and Recipes from Chettinad, a brilliant showcase of a regional cuisine that is as well-known as it is misrepresented.

Paul, whose passion for food matches her head for business, was dressed like a Tamil daughter-in-law, which she is, being married to Sethu Vaidyanathan, and she succeeded in pulling off yet another culinary coup. Some time back, she got the high and mighty literally to dine 'under the table' -- giving the expression a new meaning altogether. This time around, Delhi's elite ate with their fingers, re-establishing the lost connect between their thumb and the brain.

What they ate was a Chettinad spread that turned our notion of the cuisine on its head. I have had Chettinad food in Chennai, but the delicate interplay of flavours, and the ability to turn even a humble vegetable such as the chow chow (an ugly cousin of the squash) into a sensation for the palate, which I got to experience at The Park, just blew my mind.

The spread had been laid out by Abishek Basu's team at The Park New Delhi and the cooks of The Bangala, a heritage hotel that Meyyappan opened in 1998 at Karaikudi, which is the cultural centre of gravity, two hours from Madurai, of the fabulously wealthy, well-travelled and cultured Chettiar community of Tamil Nadu. Their business took Chettiars all over south-east Asia, from Burma to Cambodia, which reflects in the depth of their culinary repertoire and the catholicity of their taste buds.

A mobile camera view of the banana
leaf treat laid out at The Park, in the
true Chettiar wedding feast style.
The spread will be available at the
hotel's 24-hour restaurant, Mist,
till Saturday. Image: Courtesy
of Mini Shastri

The former chairman of the Murugappa Group, M.V. Subbiah, who, incidentally, got his Padma Bhushan in the same year as Paul got her Padma Shri, shared a telling example of how foreign influences show up on the Chettinad table. The example was that of the kavanarsi, or black rice, which in early days used to be imported by the Chettiars from Burma, where they had extensive business interests. And the rice, which is used in a host of preparations, including a halwa, got its name because it used to be served first to the governor of the Madras Presidency in the days of the British Raj. Governor became 'kavanar' in popular usage, so kavanarsi is literally the 'governor's rice'.

Subbiah, whose humility left a lasting impression on me, and the Meyyappan family members went from one end of each long table to the other, urging the guests to have second helpings and explaining what the dishes were, as we negotiated a spread consisting of a procession of pachadis, kootus, curries and pepper fries. None of the dishes was allowed to be overpowered by spices, which are stone-ground every morning, or red chillies -- subtlety, as in the Chettiar lifestyle (or in Rohit Chawla's available-light photography for the book), is the essence of Chettinad cuisine.

This is most evident than in the Uppu 'Dried Mutton' Curry, where you'd expect a chilli attack, because, as Nair had informed me in an earlier interview, 40 pieces of goondu maligai (berry-shaped round red chillies) are added to a kilo of mutton. The chillies are mild, so you don't end up with a numb palate, but the complex flavours lend a distinctive edge to Chettinad dishes. This interplay of fresh flavours also defined the Pepper Curry, where fresh green pepper and mor mulagai (green chillies soaked in buttermilk and then dried) are the main ingredients. The dinner favourites, though, were the Chicken Pepper Fry, where black peppercorns and goondu maligai did a little waltz, and the tamarind-infused Fish Curry.

Subbiah spoke glowingly about Meyyappan achi's contributions to the revival of Chettinad heritage. Together with Nair, she has put the region's cuisine, as it is meant to be eaten, firmly on the country's culinary map.

A BRAINLESS LAW & RESTAURANT FIRES

IT CAN BE disheartening to wake up one morning and learn that an old favourite restaurant has been gutted as a result of a short circuit in a freezer kept at the entrance. Yes, that's exactly how I felt -- disheartened -- when I read about the fire at The Embassy in Connaught Place. It was the second fire in two days at Connaught Place.

What followed was utter shock when I learnt that restaurants in the city are not required to get a fire clearance if they seat less than 50 people. It has become common, as a result, especially for the pigeon holes of Khan Market and Hauz Khas Village, or Paharganj (where restaurants and bars are not on the radar screens of the elite media), to under-declare the number of seats they have. It saves them the struggle to acquire the fire licence -- getting one licence less can be a blessing! The subterfuge also saves them the money they would have to spend on the licence, the fire safety equipment, and the inescapable 'facilitation' expenses.

Can someone explain the rationale of letting restaurants with less than 50 seats get away with no fire licence? Each restaurant is a potential fire hazard unless approved fire safety equipment, in working order, are in place. Are lives less valuable in restaurants with less than 50 seats, or those that claim to be so, but cram twice that number of people in, especially on weekends? It's almost a rule for smaller restaurants to abuse the 50-seater rule to dodge the fire clearance.

I have an uncomplicated three-step solution to this life-threatening legal sleight of hand. One, introduce one-stop, online licencing for restaurants to reduce their incentive to dodge the process. Two, make annual fire safety clearance mandatory for all restaurants and bars, irrespective of the number of seats. Three, industry bodies need to work overtime to sensitise their hotelier/restaurateur members to the nature of the time bomb they are sitting on. They must, in fact, mandatorily be made a part of the inspection teams to ensure no compromises are made on the issue of safety. The industry owes it to the consumer.

AND WHILE WE ARE ON THE SUBJECT OF FIRES...

AFTER the Uphaar fire tragedy, it has become mandatory for cinema theatres to educate their customers about fire exits. Well, the next time you go to a restaurant, look for a fire exit. Consider yourself lucky if you find one. When you are in the third floor of a Hauz Khas Village restaurant, it is not comforting realise suddenly that in case of a fire, the only escape route is the window on the far side. Most restaurants also don't have water in the tank that is meant to be kept permanently filled for use in case of a fire emergency. The daily struggle for water makes this basic fire safety requirement a low priority for restaurants.

RAMEN BURGER COMES WITH A CALORIE TOP-UP

Guppy by Ai's Ramen Burger packs in pork
belly, bacon, fried egg, lettuce and tomatoes

BACK IN 2009, Keizo Shimamoto, a young American of Japanese origin, quit his computer programmer's job and hit the road in the mother country of his parents to get to the bottom of the amazing story of ramen noodles. His blog GoRamen.com became an international hit and his invention, Ramen Burger, edged out the cronut as the big food trend of 2013. In a ramen burger, the regular buns are replaced by two chewy and not crunchy discs of compressed ramen noodles made according to a proprietary process perfected by Shimamoto.

It may be a year late, but Guppy by Ai at the Lodi Colony Market, my favourite neighbourhood Japanese restaurant, can justifiably claim to be the first to put ramen burgers on the menu. Shimamoto used only a soy-based 'secret sauce', arugula (rocket), scallions and a chunky, juicy beef patty with a higher fat content than the standard burger patty. At Guppy by Ai, the options for fillings include beef, pork belly and bacon, chicken tsukune (meatballs), fried egg, five kinds of mushroom, sake-braised onions and Kewpie, Japan's most popular mayonnaise.

'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.

Hotelier and Art Investment Guru Kapil Chopra to Open Gallery at Lado Sarai's Art Mile

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

KAPIL CHOPRA, President, The Oberoi Group, who heads the luxury hotel chain's operations in India, is all set to open artdistrict XIII. It is the newest gallery on the 'art mile' in the gentrified south-west Delhi village of Lado Sarai and, as you'd expect a venture by Chopra to do, it will open with a solo show by the talented Australian artist, Paul Davies, who gives houses a distinctive personality

Kapil Chopra, seen with Yubvan Bothisathuvar,
winner of the Emerging Artist of the Year Award
2013, is opening artdistict XIII at the gentrified
south-west Delhi village, Lado Sarai. Image:
Courtesy of BestCollegeArt.com blog

in his paintings.

"The number 13 signifies my desire to overturn the notion that it is unlucky. After all, we are opening at a time galleries we know are closing," Chopra said to me in a phone interview. "I know it's not unlucky. My daughter's birth date is the 13th and she's the dearest person in my life," he added.
The gallery, though, is being launched on April 12 (it's Baisakhi eve) in a neighbourhood studded with serious players in the art business, notably, Latitude 28, Gallery Threshold, Art Motif and Studio 320. "It is going to be a cutting-edge gallery, but in the not-for-profit space," Chopra said, explaining his vision for the gallery. "Whatever we earn, we will invest back into art and developing institutions."
I have known Chopra in his many avatars, from the days when he was the front office manager of the late lamented Grand Hyatt at Vasant Kunj, and admired his enthralling rise and brilliant time management skills. A product of the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development (OCLD), without doubt the finest learning institution in the hospitality sector, Chopra first attracted notice when he spearheaded the Presidential Suite project at the Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road, when Abhijit Mukherji was the general manager (he's now Executive Director, Hotel Operations,  of the Taj Group).

Kapil then charted out a new path for Gurgaon, which had just one weather-beaten hotel in 2004, by opening The Trident and went on to give shape to the daring vision of East India Hotels Chairman and Chief Executive, Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, by building The Oberoi next door, creating a luxury enclave and winning just about any award that was to be won. His rise to the top was a foregone conclusion, but he surprised all of us five or six years ago by revealing a different side of his -- that of the art connoisseur.

Hoteliers, as far as I can tell, see art as mere real estate for walls. Very few of them are as passionate about art and the business of promoting young artists as Jyotsna Suri of The Lalit and Priya Paul of The Park. In 2008, Chopra launched his blog, Indian Art Review (http://indianartinvest.blogspot.com), and instantly drew the world's attention to his acute understanding of the business of art. He would bet, for instance, on the edgy duo, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, much before they became international stars. He would predict the highs and lows of the art market much before the world would get wiser about the trends.

I still remember reading his brilliant analysis of how India's contemporary art market, which was then in a state of euphoria over the emerging stars led by the powerhouse Subodh Gupta, was being artificially heated up by a bunch of fly-by-night operators, struck me as the kind of writing that one doesn't get to see in the dwindling number of pages devoted to art in our mainstream dailies and magazines. Chopra's sharp insights were like a life boat in a sea of fuzzy writing. I suspect, though, that he drew a lot of his insights from his good friends, Peter Nagy of Nature Morte art gallery, the launchpad of some of the finest contemporary artists, and adman-art collector-blogger Swapan Seth.

Three of them teamed up and launched BestCollegeArt.com in 2010 to give young artists, the median age being 30, an online marketplace to put up their work and sell directly to buyers for less than Rs 99,000 per work, without parting with fat commissions. Today, more than 1,000 artists have sold their work on this online marketplace.

In 2012, Chopra unveiled the Emerging Artist of the Year Award, where the top prize goes to a young talent selected from among 2,500-plus contenders spread over nationally. The winner gets a Rs 10 lakh award, the bulk of the money going into subsidising his or her three-month stint with the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Programme. Chopra can with justification claim to be the country's leading incubator of artistic talent and also the publisher of a bright and hip online art and lifestyle magazine and TV channel, The Wall, which helps this young generation make sense of the world they are about to navigate and provides seasoned collectors the tip-offs they need to broadbase their repertoire.

Having raised art in the esteem of the new generation, a gallery with his distinctive stamp was clearly the way forward for Chopra. Interestingly, just a couple of months, while writing on ways to engage the elusive buyers, Kapil commented in his blog: "Galleries who build on an old order, family and the story of 'I have been around two decades', need to wake up and smell the coffee. The game has always been to sell to a couple of museums, attend some art fairs and sell some art to old collectors. That won’t sustain them or their artists. They need to work on their marketing, have a better online presence, engage with collectors and be active." Well, he has set the benchmarks for himself, but I see him raising the bar. Kapil always sees himself as his biggest competition.

Priya Paul Unveils A Wow New Dining Experience to Delhi’s A-List

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

PRIYA PAUL and panache are soul sisters. Whatever she does, whether checking out the biryanis served around Charminar or conceiving new concept hotels, the guardian angel of The Park keeps setting new style benchmarks. On Saturday (August 31) evening, she invited the who’s who of Delhi to a dining experience that’ll be talked about for a long time.

How many of you have dined under a table? Well, that’s exactly what we did for two hours at The Park New Delhi's magically transformed banquet hall, eating canteen-style, without name tags demarcating our places on the tables. It was a communal eating experience of a designer kind — jasmine, marigold and orchid arrangements, diaphanous white curtains, firm plastic chairs (I was scared mine would collapse under my weight, but thankfully it didn’t) — and I found myself sitting across Sunil Mittal and his wife, the porcelain-perfect Nyna, sympathising silently with the telecoms mogul for having to field complaints about call drops even at dinners!

On our long table, we had food writer Reshmi Dasgupta, media stars Rajdeep Sardesai and Sagarika Ghose, ace corporate lawyer Ajay Bahl with his radiant wife Radhika, Guddu and Christine Patnaik, Madhu Trehan, the power behind www.newslaundry.com, Chandra Kant Birla, Avanti Birla, and Highway On My Plate hosts Rocky and Mayur. Other celebrities at the event included the nattily attired Minister of State for Power Jyotiraditya Scindia and his wife Priyadarshini, Priti Paul, Kalli Purie and Raj Singh, Shobhana and Shyam Bhartia, Hari and Kavita Bhartia, Pia Singh, Vikram and Seema Chandra, Amita Seth, artist Subodh Gupta, legal eagle Raian Karanjawala, fashion designers Suneet Varma, Malini Ramani and Abhishek Gupta, and PR ace Nikhil Khanna. With so many A-listers around, it was to be expected that the dinner would start half-an-hour later than the appointed hour!

Many of them knew each other, but others didn’t, yet we all kept talking as if we were old acquaintances. This is exactly what Marije Vogelzang, the Dutch ‘eating designer’ from Rotterdam who put this experience together, had said would happen. She said that when unknown people are thrown together in a dining experience, they start sharing, they start conversing, their inner child comes out. That’s an art we lost when we stopped having our meals around communal fires.

The menu prepared by Rajesh Radhakrishnan, Area Director (Food Production), The Park Chennai, matched the unusual setting. The accompaniments, from pickled vegetables and nuts to breads and luscious dips, were on the tables in tiered plates; each chair had a soft pillow and a small table cloth, which we had to place on our laps; and we had to pour water from bottles placed next to our chairs. These little elements heightened the sense of drama.

The dinner started with lobster fried in vermicelli batter, a mini duck puff pastry, a slice of pear and spun sugar (candy floss) served in a cocktail glass. The vegetarians got sweet corn, chickpeas, pear and spun sugar. Then came the quintet of grilled sea bass, Canadian scallop, crab cake, a divine caramelised walnut and cheese-stuffed Kashmiri morel, all served on a white tile. The vegetarians got samosa, beetroot dumpling and summer roll, apart from the last-mentioned two items. Then came the mind-blowing presentation of the evening: a bright red pepper serving as a bowl for corn-fed chicken kebabs dressed with truffle cream (or ‘zucchini-enrobed’ — delicious description — cottage cheese kebabs). And finally, the pots of lamb (or vegetable) risotto arrived, redolent of Indian flavours. The pots, sealed with spinach and red pepper rotis, were a treat for the weary eye.

For dessert, we had to come out of our under-table corners and just dig what was arranged on the tables. As accompaniments, we had coconut ice-cream served on halves of green coconuts and ‘molecular’ B-52s — heady spoonfuls of tiny pellets of Kahlua, Bailey’s and Cointreau. Of course, champagne flowed through the evening as if the world was running out of bubbly. It added sparkle to an evening that resonated with laughter and good humour. This is one dining experience we are not likely to forget in a hurry.