Southern Comfort

Southern Comfort

For much of the 1980s, the gastronomic capital of India – at least in my limited imagination – was, of all places, Bangalore. But today, the rest of India has caught up ANDHRA CUISINE STILL HASN’T FOUND THE MARKET IT CLEARLY DESERVES

VIR Sanghvi
The Hindustan Times



I n this day and age when you can order appams in Defence Colony, Mangalore crab curry in Colaba, and kakori kababs in Madras, it is sometimes hard to remember that there was an era when regional Indian cuisines simply did not travel. All of us had our moments of discovery at different places. I ate my first kakori kababs in the late 1980s; my first authentic sorpotel in Goa in the late 1970s; my first kori gassi in Bombay’s Fort area in the mid-1980s and my first introduction to the heavyhanded but still subtle joys of the Nizam’s roll when I moved to Calcutta in 1986-7.

It is a funny thing though but for much of the 1980s, the gastronomic capital of India – at least in my limited imagination – was not Delhi or Bombay or even Lucknow. It was – of all places – Bangalore.

If you’ve been to Bangalore recently, then you will know that there is not a lot to recommend it. It has the worst traffic of any Indian city; the most pollution, the most expensive hotel rooms, the worst roads and the most venal politicians led, of course, by HD Deve Gowda, our most famous accidental Prime Minister.

The city is awash in money of course. The IT boom has meant that it is home to India’s richest nerds who form wine clubs, stay awake at night so that they can time their calls to Seattle and who tell us how much better off India would be if we outsourced its management to them.

In 1976, when I first went to Bangalore however, it was none of these things. It was a relatively small, sleepy town with parks, trees and lots of charm. In those days there were only two hotels. There was the West End, run by Spencer’s and pa tronised by the race-going crowd (it is located opposite the race course) and there was the ITDC-run Ashok, complete with thenfashionable rooftop restaurant and elephant shed-themed bar (I kid you not). The West End had its adherents but the Ashok was the fancy, modern hotel.

In 1977 when I went back to spend three days with Zeenat Aman (our relationship was entirely platonic and sadly totally professional, I have to add regretfully) for a cover story in India Today, the Ashok had been taken over by the film unit that was shooting Shalimar in which Zeenat starred with Rex Harrison and Dharmendra. (Don’t remember the film? Who can blame you?) While Bangalore was suitably charming, it came a poor second to Zeenat Aman and in any case, the Ashok was on strike so trainees and managers ran the hotel while the huge lawns were full of angry employees who kept shouting the Kannada versions of ‘Hai Hai’ and ‘Murdabad.’ It wasn’t till the early 1980s that Bangalore began to shake off its slumber and became something of a happening city. Everybody of my generation who went there would shop at the Wearhouse and buy trendy export surplus clothes; the foodies would buy fresh avocados and mushrooms; and people like myself would go for the restaurants.

In the early 1980s, I was vaguely aware that South Indian food extended beyond the vegetarian stuff we were used to but I had no real experience of its range and variety. In 1983, friends who lived in Bangalore took me to two simple but popular Andhra restaurants: RR and Amaravathi. I was an instant convert.


The spicy Andhra biryanis, the hot fish curries and the amazing sookha meat and chicken dishes took my breath away. I had never realised that Andhra food could be so amazing and soon, I began to treat every trip to Bangalore as an excuse to eat every meal at Amaravathi. The restaurant made its own pickles and I would buy every kind they had, take them back to Bombay and spice up the food at home with Andhra heat.

I believed, at that stage, that Andhra food was the wave of the future. All that Andhra restaurateurs had to do, I said, was to serve this amazing cuisine in Bombay and the entire city would abandon the North Indian dishes that dominated restaurant menus and eat Andhra biryani instead.

I was completely wrong, of course. By the end of that decade when Bombay discovered South Indian non-vegetarian food, it was the fish dishes of Mangalore that gripped the popular imagination. Even though some of the Andhra chains (including RR, I think) opened up in Bombay they never had quite the same impact as, say, Trishna or any of the Mangalore fish places.

Andhra cuisine still hasn’t found the market it clearly deserves. You’ll find it at the odd five star hotel (I think ITC’s Dakshin restaurants do Andhra dishes) but it won’t be the most popular cuisine even on a South Indian menu. In fact, it still commands a certain inverse snobbery. When I moved to Delhi in the 1990s, I was amused to find that Punjabis regarded it as the height of down and dirty sophistication to eat the subsidised meals at Andhra Bhavan.

It was in Bangalore too – in the early 1980s – that I first came across Chicken 65, that popular spicy dry chicken dish that is South India’s answer to the chicken tikka (and a lot tastier it is too).

Part of the folklore that surrounds Chicken 65 is the mystery about how it got its name. I have heard so many versions. Ac- cording to some people, it was invented just after that 1965 war with Pakistan and hence got called 65. Another more dubious story states that the perfect chicken for the dish has to be 65 days old. A third version is that it was the 65th item on the menu at the restaurant where it was invented.

But even the place of its invention remains the subject of end- less controversy. Bangalore claims it as a local dish – a local hotel restaurant insists it was created in its kitchen. Hyderabad makes similar claims and certainly the dish is reminiscent of Andhra cuisine. And one version that I have heard locates the moment of invention in Madras.

As usual I was wrong about Chicken 65. I predicted that it would sweep the country, appear on coffee shop menus at every hotel and become the ultimate bar snack. But, thirty years later, I have to concede that it is a dish that has resolutely failed to cross the Vindhyas. You will find it all over South India. But few North Indians have heard of it.

By 1983/4, another hotel had opened in Bangalore. Piem Hotels, part of the Taj group, bought the shell of an ugly, partly constructed property and turned it into the Taj Residency. In those days, the Taj was not a big chain so all of the company’s best resources were roped in to help the Residency rise about its environs.

One consequence was that – bizarrely enough – till the mid to late 1980s, it had the best food of any Indian hotel. It was, as far as I know, the first five star hotel to put appams on the coffee shop menu. Because nobody in Bangalore liked the traditional stew, they tended to serve them with a killer prawn balchao – Goan food was, after all, the Taj’s core competence. The chefs raided the Amaravathi menu and stole all the best dishes with shameless abandon. They looked at local Karnataka cuisine and settled on the Kore fish (fancified in English as ‘Ladyfish’) which appeared in a masala fried version.

They were keen on the French food. The Jockey Club predated the Zodiac Grill and it did the first hot savoury soufflé I ever ate in India (it was a spinach soufflé similar to the one that Langan’s Brasserie was then serving in London). The bar specialised in margaritas and pina coladas – it is a symbol of how out of things we were in India that both these cocktails were regarded as huge novelties – and yes, Chicken 65 was a popular bar snack.

In a few months or so, however, Ajit Kerkar tied up with RP Goenka to manage his Spencer’s Hotels, so the Taj’s focus shifted to the West End and the Residency became just another mid-price hotel (and then, of course, they opened the Gateway where the Karavalli restaurant transformed the way in which hotels looked at South Indian fish dishes) but during the time it was the laboratory for new styles of cuisine, it had truly amazing food.

Bangalore continued to be at the forefront of culinary adventure. A Co conut Grove (part of the chain) became famous for a pineapple halwa (not my favourite dish, I have to say) and for at least a decade after the Taj took over, the old Spencer’s cooks still produced amazing kababs by the poolside of the West End. (They are all gone now, alas.) The West End also opened India’s big gest Thai restaurant – Paradise Island – long before the cuisine become trendy (it is now the site of the fashionable Blue Ginger Vietnamese restaurant) and nearly everywhere you went in Bangalore you would either find charming places – the specialties of the city (places like Koshy’s) or restaurants where you could get a reasonable steak.

Of course today’s Bangalore is packed out with fancy restaurants – excellent Italian at the Park, brilliant Thai at the Oberoi; ITC’s trademark three-kinds-of-Indian at the Windsor Manor; plus lounges, bars, and spa-restaurants.

But my feeling is that Bangalore has lost its gastronomic edge. You can eat as well there as you could in Bombay or Delhi. But there’s nothing there that you won’t get elsewhere.

Clearly, the rest of India has caught up.