A taste for fine dining
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Mumbai’s big-gest food trend in the recent months has been the emergence of restaurant chains. Not commercial fast food joints or mall-food-court chains — these are proper restaurants that offer a variety of cuisines at reasonable rates and a standard maintained at all outlets across the country.
People like Anjan Chatterjee (Oh! Calcutta, Mainland China, Sigree…) led this trend. Riyaz Amlani (Impressario, Tasting Room, Salt Water Café) and Rohit Agarwal (Fres Co, Punjab Grill) have in the last few years made an impression with their own brands. The downside is that this is the death knell for the standalone mom and pop eateries we used to know and love when Mumbai was Bombay. I hope they don’t die out, but with no investors this is the way the cookie crumbles. This is a trend peculiar only to India, as throughout Europe and even South Africa standalones are bustling. In fact, in South Africa, one hardly sees any multinational chains. Even the five-star hotels there are all indigenous.
Credit the booming economy or our tendency to follow the Americans but the business of food is really taking shape in Mumbai. Mumbaikars have been exposed to a huge palette of flavours across cuisines and within them as well. For instance, Italian cuisine is the new Chinese — it’s the next big thing. Mostly because there are so many exciting vegetarian options, Indians are realising that Italian food is not bland and tasteless.
But it’s the emergence of global food that the coming months will be known for. It’s not that we Indians weren’t experimental enough in the past decades — but we had no exposure to quality global cuisine. Lebanese food is already big, Moroccan and Vietnamese cuisines are catching up.
The concept of eating out is now taking precedence over eating in or cooking your own meals. You could blame it on our busy lives or laziness but Indians are eating out like never before. Health food is another big trend — olive oil, multi-grain bread, wine over spirits — Mumbai is going healthy. We do it mostly to look good but as long as it leads to a healthier population it’s a welcome trend.
The development of a wine culture is growing but not as quickly as it should. It’s still steeped in bureaucracy making it difficult for foreign companies to enter the Indian market. It should be opened up so we can be exposed to a wider variety of good quality wines. The Good Earth Winery, a small boutique brand from Nashik have an interesting marketing strategy of “small production and quality wines” rather than going the volume route. This is brave and commendable. There are only six or seven premium Indian manufacturers who produce good wines — the rest are quite bad and the worry is that these badly made wines will put us off wine forever.
By allowing foreign wines to enter freely, it will herald a change in our habits. To cite an example, allowing Dominos to set up shop introduced India to pizza readying us for Italian food, which today, is the biggest thing around.
Karen Anand is a chef,
food writer and food &
wine consultant
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