Indian restaurant menus struggle with words, confounding paying customers with dry language and stunning but unreal images. Real food doesn’t look like that
With the right smartphone and clever lighting one can now make a boiled egg look like the last supper of a dying gourmet
For breakfast this morning, I recommend crisp, golden crêpes made from a fermented batter of pearly rice, split chickpea, split black gram and pigeon peas, infused with essence of asafoetida from Mazar-e-Sharif and flecked with coarsely ground dry red chillies and green chillies, with green islets of Coimbatore curry leaves plucked fresh off the stalk.
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The crepes will be roasted on a hot stone griddle with virgin cold-pressed peanut oil, and served with a pesto of shallots, Nilgiri garlic pods, dried Guntur red chillies and proto-Maldon salt, all fried in coconut oil and mashed by hand in an ancestral mortar.
If your response to that was, “Who talks like that? Would you happen to have a simple dosa and chutney?” then you’re in great company. According to a live survey by me, roughly 93.7 per cent of restaurant-goers are left addlepated and shell-shocked by the convoluted food descriptions in modern menus. Most Indian menus require a minimum doctorate in anthropology with geography as a subsidiary.
What do you suppose would land on your table if you ordered a “Burmese war coconut curried soup accompanied with the seven heaven’s additives”? (Available, if you’re wondering, at East-Asian Spice Trail or EAST at the Sahara Hotel.)
Care for an “Indian bread of flour and egg with or without fenugreek, made by rolling and tossing until paper thin before being fired on an inverted stone wok”? That, ladies, would be—abracadabra!—a roomali roti in its full glory.
Today’s menus, cobbled together by coriander chefs and clumsy copywriters who consider anything with garam masala and chopped dhania a masterpiece, kill food on paper before it is murdered on the plate. To set the record straight, no restaurant in India cooks anything overnight, let alone maa ki dal. Nothing is slow-cooked and nothing is “home-made”, no matter what the menu swears. The butter in the dal makhani is definitely not “home-churned”.
We are in the era of the Cookstagram chef who knows that with the right smartphone and clever lighting she can make a boiled egg look like the last supper of a dying gourmet, with a single parsley leaf perched atop the duomo and an instant Caribbean sunset in the background. (An exception, by the way, might be Deepa Ravi’s food_for_nothing Instagram channel. She focuses on the taste and lets her son Vedanta do the camera magic.)
Such exceptions aside, it’s a lethal combination—content-free gorilla words chosen for their ability to confound hungry diners combined with an off-duty bottle-washer’s images made world-class by his iPhone 13 Pro using computational photography. He just aimed and clicked.
But words on menus matter; they can create a deep longing just as easily as they can kill it. Dr Brian Wansink of Cornell University, in a six-week study of 140 diners, found that well-written descriptions of menu items increased sales by about 27 per cent. and left customers more satisfied with their meal.
Indian restaurant menus struggle with words, swinging between florid and vapid, verbose and cryptic. In some quarters, notably London, stating a few key ingredients and leaving the rest to the imagination is considered sufficient. The menu of Chourangi, the city’s newest restaurant, will offer, crisply—Railway Lamb Shank Curry Nutmeg, black cardamom, ginger.
You have to do the flavour math yourself. Too bad if black cardamom is a mystery to you.
No one has captured the transcendental heights of a well-made dish so perfectly as Sylvia Plath, who described her lemon meringue thus—“Baked a lemon meringue pie, cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill, stirring in black night and stars.”
David Baker, describing the hearty bouillabaisse fish stew in his book Vintage, wrote: “It can also work wonders on a broken heart… With a dash of cayenne and saffron, even the most battered hearts can be restored with enough vigour to again brave the turbulent and storm-ridden waters of love.”
One of my favourites is Min Jin Lee’s gorgeous description of simple food waiting to be turned from nature to nurture in her classic Pachinko. Walking past the kitchen, her character notes a soup kettle “half-filled with water, cut-up potatoes, and onions, waiting to be put on the fire.” My mind, cued, put it on the fire and imagined what would emerge.
Until you eat it, every dish exists only in your mind as an expectation, fed by those words on the menu. Once consumed, however, a good meal changes your soul. The best food alters moods, creating a profound reluctance to leave the table even after all the food is gone. Those are special moments, and the Spanish have a special word for it: sobremesa, meaning “over the table”.
Sobremesa is when everyone at the table, glowing with the pleasure of a wonderful meal made with love and consumed among friends, sits around laughing and talking about life, the universe and everything. No one wants to leave.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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