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GOURMET FILES

Dining fiascos

Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

Nothing if not lip-smacking: The tangy taste of chaat.

When a new restaurant opens in the neighbourhood, there is much rejoicing in the family. And at the first opportunity off we go. A Mexican one opened here about a year ago. I’m not too keen on chapattis, rajma and coriander leaves in any case, not even if they’re called tortillas, re-fried beans and cilantro. But the food at this Taco-Something was completely meaningless. Not only did everything taste of nothing, the helpings were miniscule. To fill up, we ordered everything the menu offered, so I don’t feel the slightest twinge of remorse that perhaps we’d ordered wrong and other dishes might have been better. The tortillas, fajitas, burritos, quesadillas — even the salads — all contained the same ingredients and tasted of… of… blandness. I think the head cook or some minion probably went to the wholesale market every week and stocked up on tomatoes, capsicum and coriander. And once a month they bought industrial sized tins of the cheapest processed cheese in the market and sacks of rajma and flour. And then they sautéed the vegetables, grated the soapy-tasting cheese on to it, wrapped it in a chappati, and waited for people like us to walk in. Then, whatever we ordered, they cut into different shapes and arranged artistically onto contemporary square plates, to be presented with a flourish, remembering to say the magic word: “burrito!” (or “tortilla!”) . The staff explained the size of the portions: every dish was a “snack”. Obviously there was a disconnect with the financial planner: prices were really steep. The only good part of this whole experience was that it didn’t last forever. Not only did we leave, never to return, but Tacky-Taco also left, hopefully never to return.

Sometimes, when eating out, I tell myself sadly that this must be the very worst meal I’ve ever had. I’m not daring to imply that meals at home can never be lousy, it’s just that the anticipation of dining out lends itself to greater chances of disappointment. And there are so many ways that a meal can be Z-grade; as they say, happy families are all happy in the same way, but when it comes to unhappiness, families are unhappy in different ways.

So just how many ways are there for a meal to be “the worst”? The food itself. The place. The mood. The service. But it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss an eating place or home for a bad meal just because I was feeling stroppy, so let’s leave “mood” out. The place — that’s another murky area. “Ambience” has been a buzz word with reviewers for a while now, and it certainly has value. Comfort is essential but relative and we all accept hard, narrow benches when we’re slumming, fan ourselves with newspapers and wave off flies when we want to, and cavil at inadequate air conditioning and deaf “waiters” when we’re feeling posh. And restaurant aesthetics — taste varies and it changes. This is not the time to philosophise, but for all the appreciation of clean, minimalist décor that’s now all the rage, don’t we quietly accept the ornate, over-the-top Chinoiserie we’ve been brought up with in most Chinese restaurants? I might even miss the fat Laughing Buddhas and “Ming” vases if they all disappeared.

Which brings me to an old favourite, now fallen from grace. For self-preservation I shall call it Lit-chi. It was a reasonably priced Chinese restaurant in the heart of South Delhi, with decent enough cooking. As long as you ordered Hot and Sour or Chicken Sweet-Corn Soup, followed by Chilli Chicken and Fried Rice or Chow Mien, you were perfectly safe and assured of standard Punjinese cuisine, with serious helpings and efficient service by staff who’d been there since you were in college and a meal cost 10 rupees per head (almost including the tip.) The price has gone up a little, consistent with the times. And the helpings are still pretty seriously large. But the food! It used to be unpretentious and deliciously spicy, true to its transcontinental roots. And in recent years, whenever we ate there, it didn’t disappoint. So when we went about a year back and got unrelievedly grey, bland food, I thought it was just a bad day. It’s impossible to remember what we ate, because it was all in a thick, starchy sauce which congealed while we watched (and I forecast a boom in the corn-flour starch industry.) The grey sauces, which could do double-duty as industrial glue for sticking posters on walls, contained grey balls of I know not what. Chicken? Vegetables? Prawns? No, probably just corn-flour and Ajinomoto. And this despite the inquisition when ordering: “I hope Hongkong/Shanghai/Szechwan doesn’t mean pakoras”. The second time, when the same thing happened, I thought the cook was off-colour. But when the third time we got the same, it was three times too many. In fact, the first recent time had been one time too many it was just that this place had earned some trust and had deserved another chance.

Another major fiasco was a recent lunch at a chaat chain outlet. More fool me, actually — for even expecting street food to taste right in that aseptic environment. But we’d been craving gol-gappas and though I asked myself how bad it could be, the prospect of chilly air-conditioning made me brush aside the thought. Okay, one by one. The matra-kulcha had thick, slightly sweet kulchas with plain boiled matra which had been sprinkled, in a nod to the real thing, with chopped onions and tomatoes. In one word, boring. Then came the gol-gappas, tidily sealed in a ziplock polythene bag, with little plastic cups of potato-chana filling and the jal jeera in plastic glasses. I’m putting aside the plastic patram angle — after all leaf-pattals would be considered unhygienic. It just tasted of clean health food — boiled and barely salted, no zing at all. Even cadging extras of chutney and chaat masala powder did nothing. It was like the chaat that was palmed off to us as kids, just shaped like the real thing but not tasting of all the sharp, useless flavours we’re seeking when we’re eating chaat. A disaster because, after all, what is a chaat lover after: lip-smacking or nutrition?

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