Gourmet boom tickles Indian palates
By Raja M
MUMBAI - With its economy surging ahead at 8.4% annual growth rates, a yardstick for measuring India's new wealth could well be "long tongues", a local metaphor for more taste-fussy palates. Riding higher disposable incomes craving for more haute leisure options, a booming gourmet restaurant industry is flourishing in India's major metropolitan areas, such as Mumbai and Delhi, and smaller cities such as Bangalore and Pune.
"Absolutely no doubt that there is a tremendous development in the restaurant business in the past three or four years," leading Mumbai-based restaurateur Anjan Chatterjee told Asia Times Online. "The stand-alone restaurant business itself would be worth Rs10 billion [US$218 million] in India."
A trendy tribe of niche dining options such as the newly opened Pure, at the Taj Group's Land's End in the Mumbai suburb of
Bandra, feed the restaurant sector's present and future potential. Created by chef Michel Nischan of the famed Heartbeat restaurant, in midtown New York, Pure serves organic gourmet dishes at five-star prices.
Organic food is not a new phenomenon in India, having been written about in Indian magazines 35 years ago, as can be seen in yellowing archival issues of JS (the once hugely popular but now defunct Kolkata-based Junior Statesman). But the difference now is options such as getting to chomp organic culinary creations in 204 square meters of luxury dining atmosphere, as in Pure, which boasts Crema Marfil Italian marble flooring, white wicker chairs with white leather upholstery, and carved wooden partitions. Menu offerings include "vegetarian shiitake mushroom rice cakes with English pea sauce" and a "mixed vegetable ceviche" (a popular Latin American dish using citrus-fruit mixture) and about eight choices of organic chocolate.
"With the economy opening up and with more ... Indians traveling abroad, customers have become more quality conscious and have more expectations," said Chatterjee. "These days nobody thinks twice about hopping across to Hong Kong or Bangkok." Or hopping across to outlets such as Crawford Market and the Grand Hyatt Gourmet store in Mumbai, which sell imported cheese, cold cuts, olive oils and pastas. Increasingly, the bigger grocery stores in India's biggest cities are stacked with continental fare to keep Western expatriates happy.
For anyone with creativity and a drive for quality, India's food business is a potential gold mine. Anjan Chatterjee himself is made of the hard-working rags-to-riches dream bricks with which Mumbai is built. He came to this city of hope with Rs600, created an advertising agency that now has an annual turnover of $21.8 million, and owns a stand-alone restaurant chain called Specialty Restaurants that employs more than 1,400 people in signature diners such as Oh! Calcutta, Sweet Bengal, Just Biryani, Sigree and Mainland China. Combined annual turnover, he says, is about $14. 8 million.
Oh! Calcutta serves authentic Bengal cuisine with ingredients flown in from Kolkata, while Sigree celebrates pre-Partition cuisine from Gafur Miya of the medieval city of Lahore, now in Pakistan.
"If a sauce available in our Oh! Calcutta in Mumbai is not of the same quality in Chennai, the client calls in and complains," said Chatterjee, which is a somewhat eye-popping grumble given the grim reality that the country still has 60 million undernourished children, according to a World Bank report released last month - the highest percentage of underfed children in the world, higher even than Bangladesh.
India's eating-out luxuries are also a departure from a traditional food culture hooked on home-cooked food to such an extent that many families even travel abroad with preserved food such as theplas (Gujarati rotis). Indian cities are rapidly breeding designer coffee-house chains and gourmet magazines such as the Mumbai-based Upper Crust, edited by Farzana Contractor, widow of India's pioneering food critic Behram "Busybee" Contractor.
The origins of India's restaurant business are unclear, but authors Peter and Colleen Grove, in their book Curry, Spice & All Things Nice, quote The Epicure's Almanack mentioning that the first establishment in London dedicated to Indian cuisine was the Hindostanee Coffee House at 34 George Street, Portman Square, London, in 1809. Opened by Dean Mahomet (Mohammad) from Patna, Bihar, this curry house came into existence a few centuries after the earliest-known commercial dining establishment in the world, the Bucket Chicken House Chuin in Kai Fung, once the capital of the Chinese empire. Dim sums were supposed to have been invented there in the 11th century.
In 1812, after just three years, Dean Mohammed had to file for bankruptcy, a condition many a restaurant owner could sadly identify with, including in Mumbai, where restaurant name boards change frequently in some locations. "People think [if they] just [open] a restaurant ... money will come, but it does not work that way," said Chatterjee. "Running a restaurant is back-breaking work." With his advertising and marketing background, Chatterjee saw the business wisdom of establishing a brand name and had his company incorporated.
A more discerning clientele means more eateries are run painstakingly by quality-conscious management, such as Tendulkar's in South Mumbai, an Indo-continental restaurant created by superstar cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, where every detail from the blue-illuminated translucent pillars to the menu was carefully crafted. Tendulkar personally chose the dining forks during a cricket tour of England.
With competition, Mumbai is beginning to enjoy international cuisine served with budget prices, as at Relish, in Churchgate and Nariman Point, serving a vegetarian diet ranging from "minestrone alla Milanese" ($1.20) and "Mexican tostada verde" ($1.50) to "German potatoes", "American hash", "Lebanese platter", and Thai curry. The Indonesian nasi goreng (fried rice) is the most expensive dish at nearly $3.
No restaurant in Mumbai or Delhi can yet claim to be in same league as Hong Kong's Felix (voted as Asia's best restaurant by Europe's Restaurant magazine) or Singapore's Dolce Vita, but given the increasing fuss about gourmet goodies, plentifully evident in the print and electronic media, Indian dining establishments could well be hitting the list of the top 100 restaurants in the world sooner rather than later.
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