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photo: shanker chakravarty

The devil in kitchen Sudhir Mishra enjoying his meal at The Ambassador hotel’s Yellow Brick Road restaurant

The restaurant is enticing enough, especially for the kids, with advertisements and posters of the film The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum adorning the walls. This eatery gets its name from the “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” song in this film sung by E.Y. Harburg way back in 1900. So what if Mishra makes serious films with a message and rather unusual cast, here he feels no less than a kid admiring the wooden toy train on the wall, teddy bears and bright green, tangerine, yellow and peach colour furniture with ‘patina’ finish.

Starting with orange juice, the director of Khoya Khoya Chand recalls, “Every one discouraged me when I decided to cast Soha Ali in this film. But now they say, you made the ‘perfect’ choice,” he says with a chuckle.

Mishra admits that he has never been a good cook. “I would always end up making a mess of it. So, I when was living in Delhi and Mumbai with a few friends during my days of struggle, they would never ‘allow’ me to cook. They would assign me jobs like buying vegetables, bringing water and so on,” laughs Mishra while sifting through tabloid-size menu-cum-fun newspaper especially printed by the restaurant.

Mishra thinks that if you are surrounded by women, especially Bengalis, you end up learning cooking.

“I was married to a Bengali for 10 years. You know these Bengali mom-in-laws have a pet phrase for their son-in-laws, “Tumi roga hoe gacho” (you have grown weak) and then fill you with macher-jhol, mangsho, bhat-e-bhat and mishti doi (fish, curry, mutton, rice and dessert). They talk of food and literature too much. I also ended up learning some cooking from my wife and all those Bengali women surrounding me. But that helped me a lot when I didn’t want to eat market food,” he adds.

As he tries YBR chicken that is spicy grilled chicken marinated in soya chilli and vinegar, topped with red wine sauce and served with sautéed vegetables and jacket potatoes, he smiles mischievously.

He can’t hide the reason, “When I was living in Delhi in a rented apartment, my landlady would cook for all of us and serve us with great love and affection. But the problem was, she would invariably put lots of salt in the food. As she would insist on feeding us herself, we could never dodge her. We asked her to put less salt, but she would always forget. Finally, we vacated that house only because of her love-filled salted food.”

Switching over to Khoya Khoya Chand scheduled for release this Friday, Mishra says that the film is also a take on the sexual harassment of a woman in filmdom.

“But I believe it is more in academics than in films. I know that because I have seen both worlds very closely.”

Mishra who hails from Lucknow cannot but help talking about his hometown that made him “eat only good food”. But he adds that he is not an adventurous food eater.

“I can’t eat octopus, monkeys, dogs or whale when I visit other nations. I think one must eat only fish and mutton and leave the rest of the animals in peace. I love mutton, kabab and pulao. In Lucknow, today’s elite ‘biryani’ was considered ‘substandard’ in olden times. The standard rice meal was pulao and nawabi kheer.”

Concluding his meal with soup sticks and bun, he shares a very interesting thing,

“On film sets, if a producer doesn’t arrange for oily food, people think that he is a ‘kanjoos’. So, to keep all workers happy, it has to be made sure that the food is rich in masalas and oil. Yashraj excels in that.”

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