The Hindu Business Line : Order of the day

Then, there’s the show-off. He’ll walk in with a posse of people he wants to impress, and ask loudly if this year’s truffles have come in from Alba.

Marryam H. Reshii

Hah! I can tell you about that one,” exclaims Ritu Dalmia of Diva, Delhi’s finest Italian restaurant, now in its eighth year of operation. If a couple comes in for their first date, “I know that they will order a good (read expensive) bottle of wine, antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti and dolci followed up with espresso, just the way Italian food is meant to be eaten. If they’ve been toge ther for a while, they’ll ask for a glass each of the house red, share a primo piatto, skip the most expensive secondi on the menu and maybe share a dessert. Then, there’s the show-off. He’ll walk in with a posse of people he wants to impress, and ask loudly if this year’s truffles have come in from Alba. Needless to say, he’ll never dream of actually ordering the stupendously expensive fungus: he just wants his cohorts to sit up and take notice.” Contrast this with Ritu’s favourite type of customer, the quiet gourmet. “He – or she – comes in, orders something and the pleasure of eating it can be seen on their faces. That’s the kind of person my restaurant caters to.”

Ritu, a self-confessed Italophile, learned cooking in Sicily; hers is the only known Italian restaurant anywhere in the country where pasta is automatically cooked al dente. Any complaints about the rawness of the risotto or the linguine will make Ritu see red. And, woe betide the hapless customer who walks in to Diva to eat a pizza. “We are a fine-dining place, not a trattoria,” Ritu will inform him icily.

In Italy, the pizza only became popular when people from the city of Naples travelled to the US and cooked it for members of their community.

In the meantime, the user-friendliness of an “edible plate with morsels of sausage and vegetables on it” as the pizza has sometimes been described, caught on with Americans who made it into something of a national dish. That’s when the rest of Italy caught on: American tourists would land up in Rome or Milan demanding a pizza, and the locals just could not figure out what was happening! Today, the best pizzas are still to be had in Naples, and because their popularity has become something like dosas in North India, you can get pizzas all over Italy, but only at pizzerias or trattorias, never in a formal restaurant.

Ask the chef…

The upshot of all this is that Diva’s customers now tend to be global travellers who know Italian food. They visit Diva as a welcome relief from getting their pasta cooked to a mush, the way it is in many other places. But listen to chefs talking off the record and you’ll double up with laughter. One Italian national who is not in the country any more, claims to have encountered a customer who ordered al dente pasta. “He actually called me out of the kitchen to complain that there was no al dente in it! Did he think that al dente was an ingredient like eggplant or something?”

Another expatriate executive chef of a well-known chain of hotels was shocked when a food writer from a leading daily called him up to ask him what this word b-a-s-i-l was. “I mean, she didn’t even know such a basic ingredient and she writes on food!”

On the whole, however, it must be said that meticulous profiling does work, and Diva is a case in point. Since the sushi explosion three years ago, even standalone restaurants across Delhi have started serving their version of sushi, economising on everything from the type of rice to the filling: it is not only more expensive to use the belly of tuna, you must also have reliable chillers and generators. If you serve only vegetarian sushi, or sushi with smoked salmon, chilling facilities are not as critical. A downsized version of sushi can even be seen at every North Indian marriage: caterers in this part of the world exist by playing to the gallery, and the public likes what is in vogue, the showier the better. One thing is certain: no caterer is hiring a sensei from Tokyo to roll sushi every time he has a wedding to cater to, so the quality has reached the depths that Indian-Chinese has hit.

If there’s a mismatch between the restaurant’s quality and the type of customers it attracts, you do have scope for bloopers, when, for instance, diners realise that rare steak has traces of blood and is not quite what they ordered.

Or when self-conscious customers lack the nerve to ask the server to describe a dish to them. Or like the hapless Italian chef who was given an order for pasta with gorgonzola. When the dish was sent out, it was promptly sent back, because it smelt of cheese. “What did he think gorgonzola was,” wailed the Italian chef, “a beast that lived at the bottom of the sea?”

There is indeed a magic button that will have all the right customers rolling in, but either not many people know about it or can afford it. Hyatt Regency Delhi and Grand Hyatt Mumbai possess it. China House and China Kitchen have done consistently fabulous business since the day they opened their doors, but they have changed the way we Indians look at Chinese food. Many of the dishes on their path-breaking menu have never before been seen in India, famously the land of gobhi Manchurian and chilli chicken. The only concession to Indian dining habits that was made by Jack Aw Yong, Executive Chef – Projects for Hyatt International, was to reverse the order of the starch component of the meal: in Chinese-speaking nations, rice is eaten as the last course. In home-style restaurants, steamed rice is served to mop up whatever gravy is on the plate, but in mid- to upmarket restaurants it is fried rice, loaded with seafood and Yunnan ham. Rather like India where rice is eaten in the south and chapattis in the north, in North China noodles are eaten. You will seldom encounter a meal where both choices are proffered.

The other factor about Chinese food (the cuisine of China that is, not its distant country cousin that has washed up on our shores) is that all over the country, soup is drunk throughout the meal, as a liquid side dish, except in Guangdong where it is had after the meal. But the real reason why we will never see absolutely authentic Chinese food in this country is because we approach most non-vegetarian ingredients with extreme squeamishness: few of us would care to sample congealed duck’s blood or beef intestines, yet integral to the Chinese way of eating is the belief that no part of any animal should be wasted and therein lies the glory of their cuisine.

Variety… with spice

There are Indians who travel and sample exotic meats in other countries, but, as Sonia Mohindra, hospitality consultant of Under One Roof says, “Holidays put us in an altered frame of mind. We do and buy things on holiday that we would not in our normal day-to-day existence and experimenting with food is one aspect.

I may try stinky tofu in Hong Kong but may not want to repeat it back home in Delhi.” That’s a sentiment that a Chinese chef from Mumbai is very familiar with. One of his regular customers came to him enthusing about his recent trip to Beijing and an interesting dish he had there for the first time. The chef was overjoyed. “I know the dish you are talking about and I can make it for you.” The customer, however, had other plans. He wanted to stick to his tried and tested order of entry-level Indian Chinese. All he just wanted was for the chef to sit up and take notice of him as a serious diner!

The last word must be Ritu Dalmia’s, who claims that when a customer enters a restaurant, his defences are down. He orders from his heart. She has some diners who would not dream of changing their order from one year to the next, and others who get bored with the same menu after two months.

It really does take all sorts.

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