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Photo: Serish Nanisetti

Flavour in the air Grilled kebabs, warqi parata, pudina chutney and who wants fancy food?

And this food is cheap. And it smells of Hyderabad.

But you don’t have to be a George Orwell planning a Down and Out in Hyderabad and Secunderabad to experience this. All you need is Rs. 50 and a lead-lined street belly. First off is bagara chicken/egg/rice at Gosha Mahal between Rs. 15 and Rs. 28. Try bagara chicken and you get a heap of rice (not the frangrant long-grained biryani rice but ordinary rice). It looks like jeera rice but isn’t, there are curry leaves and the flavour is that of fat and a hint of cinnamon. The drumstick of chicken comes floating in a gravy with oil of doubtful vintage. Pour it onto the rice and tuck in.

Not the rice and non-veg kind? Head to Ramkote and in an inside lane that connects to Sultan Bazar is Gujarati Bhojanalya. No smells, only colours. For Rs. 50 get a limited supply of hot puffed up rotis that have the sweetness of wheat and not the toughness of maida served in a thali with dal, a curry with potato and one without it. Ask for rice and it comes accompanied by a papad. The food is sweet for the spice-spoilt palate of Telugus.

For a little more tang at the same price, head to Gachchibowli crossroads for Punjabi Rasoi. Not the pricier tandoori chicken dishes here but food that smells of home minus the oodles of ghee for the techies and BPO staffers. Roti, dal, runny curd and two curries one ought to have potato the other can range from baingan bharta to pindi choley.

Don’t be snooty. You are not what you eat. You are what you are. What you eat is a matter of choice. A choice that gets dizzying by the day as pockets swell, sensex rockets and dinner time declines.

So, check out the boiling cauldrons of delight in the evening near the Irani restaurants. “Char roti aur shorba,” would be Rs. 24. Cognoscenti would call the roti shermal but it tastes and is priced the same. A young boy with a broken comb marks out the dotted square and then punches four holes, another young man double bends into the tandoor and bakes the roti. The shorba gets various flavouring, paya, zaban, jabda..., increasingly chicken, depending on the taste and the pocket of the purchaser.

Any doubts about the hygiene can be easily erased by not peeping into the kitchen but seeing the diners on the tables. So many, that the food comes hot from the cooking vessel onto the plate without the customary stopover for a few days in the cooler.

Biryani hasn’t always meant pelf, flavour, overnight soaking of spices and the luxury of fine dining. Camp food for the marching army of Timurlane, it just meant dunking meat into rice and water with some spices to soften the raw smells of meat. Now, this humble food is no longer so. If Irani restaurants are pushing the Rs. 100 priceline, even the beef biryani, born in adversity at Kalyani Nawab ki Dewdi, is getting the treatment. Instead of one serving filling all bellies formula, it now comes in single or plate serving. One restaurant has modified the chicken/mutton biryani into three sizes: small, medium and regular.

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