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Taste of the crust and beyond

It was one of those lazy April mornings, and a government holiday. There was a sense of peace all around me. The kids in the neighbourhood were still to come out and play, and there was no honking or that terrible electronic sound of a car reversing. I was at home, happily pottering around when a cousin called me. “What are you doing,” he asked. “Just contemplating life,” I replied. “Then come and have lunch with us,” he said. So I went. The cousin and his family and friends were all meeting at Swagath, a restaurant that I am really fond of. Located in the Defence Colony market, it serves a wide range of coastal Indian food. The butter pepper crabs that I have eaten there are simply the best. But while Swagath serves everything – from mutton and chicken sukha to chicken Malabari and stew with appam, this is really a place for fish lovers.

I remember an evening there some years ago. We were a huge group of friends, and were gorging on all kinds of fish delicacies. But one of our friends – in whose honour, in fact, we were meeting there – was not greatly fond of fish. He had grown up in Delhi but lived in England so what he was actually yearning for was a nice and juicy piece of butter chicken. So while we had our prawns and pomfret, cooked in the Mangalorean way, he had naans and butter chicken.

This time I was convinced that our table would only have a heap of, crustaceans and other sea wrigglies. I was partly right, for a large section of the party that had assembled was from the east – Bengal and Assam. But one Punjabi aunt suddenly discovered, even as the waiters, brought all kinds of wonderful crabs to our table, that it was Good Friday, and she had pledged to eat vegetarian food. So while we ate crabs and prawn gussi, she had dal makhni and roti.

But I certainly wasn’t complaining. I started with prawn koliwada, medium sized prawns crispy fried in a batter, and went on to sukha gosht. Then I had prawn gussi, cooked in thick coconut gravy, and Malabari prawns, which had a tart and spicy gravy. Then I had some shelled crabs in pepper butter garlic and a spicy crab Chettinad. And to go with it all this was a pile of thin pancake-like neer dosas and appams. I wasn’t paying, but I checked the right hand column to see how much the dishes were for. The crabs are sold according to size, but the prawns come for Rs.350 a plate and the sukha gosht – cooked with desiccated coconut and roasted masalas – is for Rs.125.

At the end of the day, I think I liked the sukha gosht the most. The crabs and prawns were good as always, but I think we overdid the prawns that day. I was, by the end of the meal, pretty much shell-shocked – if you’d pardon the dreadful pun.

But it was a great meal, and I went back home whistling loudly. Two days later, I wasn’t whistling all that happily though. My wife, who was out of town on work when we had that great meal, came back breathing fire. Blame it on the cousin, I said, burping delicately.

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