Vegetarians too can crow about it

Funnily enough, it was at the very non-vegetarian Nando’s, which recently opened at Chennai’s Phoenix Market City mall in Velachery, that I found some not-so-run-of-the-mill vegetarian food. The three-bean salad and interestingly named ‘Macho Peas’ were unusual merely by being available.

It’s not that a three-bean salad is rare or innovative but try finding it in a restaurant in this city — chances are that it won’t be available at all, or would be unimaginatively smothered in mayonnaise or some such sticky dressing. The usual options are a salad, in combinations of coloured capsicum, cucumber, tomato and cottage cheese (often used as a substitute for feta in a Greek salad), cottage cheese patties dunked in a cream or tomato sauce, or a vegetable or pasta bake in similar sauces with corn and spinach, if not with carrots and beans. And the menu never changes. A new vegetarian restaurant of Western cuisine that raised hopes of a more gourmet range of food had little but spinach and mushrooms on its menu.

Nando’s, a South Africa-based restaurant chain, specialises in

peri-peri chicken. The dish is an amalgam of traditions — peri-peri sauce (made with the piri piri , or bird’s eye chilli, grown in Africa) is used to marinate the meat, which is butterfly-cut and grilled on an open flame as per Portuguese tradition brought in by explorers. Joe Cruz, who is part of the Operations and Worldwide Licensing team at Nando’s, shows me the other peri-peri creations on offer. One is the espetada , which has its roots in the Portuguese island of Madeira. Usually, chunks of meat are skewered and grilled with spices, but at Nando’s it is only chicken — and paneer — that gets this treatment (the chain does not serve any other meat). The dish is served on the skewer, which hangs from a hook on a stand.

The other is the

cataplana , originally from Portugal’s Algarve region, which comes in a smooth, round copper dish that reminds me of a turtle. Originally made with seafood, in Nando’s it’s a mix of chicken, chickpeas, green and red capsicum and a ‘ cataplana sauce’ that contains some peri-peri .

Joe says that all the food is cooked with peri-peri sauce made only in South Africa. There are basting sauces for the kitchen and table sauces for the diners, the heat varying from mild to extra hot. The table sauces are on sale too.

But it is the vegetarian fare that I like most — because fast-food chicken, or dare I say most chicken, ceases to carry taste beyond the surface. The three-bean salad that day is a mix of chickpeas, kidney beans ( rajma ), and lima beans, tossed in a sweetish dressing with finely cut onion and green capsicum, and the macho peas are a mix of whole and mushy peas cooked with mint, red chilli, parsley and butter. The paneer espetada is the softest paneer she’s ever eaten, says the young PR executive accompanying me, and I have to agree.

The challenge is to make vegetarian food interesting and varied, but in most restaurants, the vegetarian menu smacks of tokenism. There are so many vegetables available in this country, so why do we have to restrict ourselves to just a few? While dreaming of a better and varied choice, with this visit I have added to my repertoire of vegetarian treats.