The Indian dining scene is getting hip but restaurants are co-opting cuisines while ignoring the techniques

My eggs Benedict at one of the fancy new cafes that have popped up in Kolkata came with a descriptor:  English muffin, mushroom/ chicken salami/ bacon, poached egg and hollandaise sauce.

The sauce was more Hollandish than hollandaise and a little scant. And the eggs arrived on a sweetish white bread pav, not an English muffin from any angle.

I realised then that for the restaurant English muffin is just a word that goes with eggs Benedict. In reality, they could serve pav, or a hamburger bun, but almost never an actual English muffin which is a small, round, flat, yeast-leavened bread, frequently sourdough, and not to be confused with sweet, floury cupcakes either. Soon some Kolkatan will go abroad and complain when they find a real English muffin in their eggs Benedict.

Eggs Benedict with bacon and Hollandaise sauce.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

The dining scene in India has grown far more cosmopolitan but sometimes it just adopts words without paying attention to their meanings.

Writer and chef Rajyasree Sen says she’s ordered a shepherd’s pie and been served some “weird mince thing without potatoes on top”. She’s asked for a pavlova and gotten a “normal tart with some meringue on top”. Pavlova is made like a meringue but it’s not a fruit tart with meringue on top. Except on some Indian menus.

Sounds more cool

My problem does not stem from some picky obsession with authenticity. I am all for gobi Manchurian even though it has never been anywhere near Manchuria. Cuisines evolve to capture local flavours. Tex-Mex is a classic example of a cuisine that started out as an American-friendly twist on Mexican food and now is its own thing.

But what we are seeing here is something different. It’s like cooking chicken pulao and passing it off as biryani just because biryani sounds more cool. We sprinkle our menus with terms from international cuisine to sound more worldly and sophisticated without understanding what the terms mean. A nasi goreng becomes regular fried rice with a fried egg on top.

At one time we were none the wiser. I remember when the bakery at my parents’ club in Kolkata started stocking pizza. We’d never been to even a Pizza Hut at that time, so we happily ate rectangular pieces of club pizza and felt very cool. Now I realise we were basically eating pieces of focaccia-ish bread topped with tomato sauce, chunks of chicken breast and slivers of capsicum.

But that was the ignorance of insular India where every hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant dubbed dishes Hunan, Szechuan and Mandarin just by varying the soy sauce and chilli sauce levels. (The only “authentic” dish was the Calcutta chilli chicken, a no-nonsense affair with dark soy and green chilli.)

Indo-Chinese food is ubiquitous in Indian cities and towns.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Slippery slope

Of course, the fetish for authenticity can be problematic. In our hotchpotch, melting pot culture, authenticity is a slippery eel. As Todd Kliman wrote in the now defunct food quarterly  Lucky Peach, authenticity is “a purely arbitrary, purely subjective surmise of a purely impure thing”.

Authenticity should not become an end in itself where the value of something is no longer measured by how it looks or feels or tastes but by its authenticity certificate. Worse, we often measure authenticity by the miles it’s flown to get to our table. Shalini Krishan and Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar of Edible Archives restaurant in Goa point out that “people are always chasing the tag rather than the quality that comes with the tag”.

So they will be excited about low-grade sushi rice as long as it’s imported all the way from Japan while ignoring the fact that there are rice variants from Nagaland and Bengal that can be excellent as sushi rice. A relentless obsession with authenticity can be a straitjacket when it comes to anything — food or morals.

But what is happening in the burgeoning Indian restaurant scene is not any kind of post-authenticity movement trying to breach cultural frontiers by putting hilsa in momos (much as the thought makes me shudder). They are now stripping the very meaning from words like sushi, quesadilla, nasi goreng and English muffin.

They are co-opting terms but ignoring the technique. That’s not just lazy. It is literally in poor taste.

The writer is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.