Gluttony-II: Mocambo

Mocambo,
25-B Park Street, Kolkata, 700016
033 22172934


Chateaubriand steak for two. Sizzlers. Baked Alaska. Grilled Bekti. Prawn cocktail. Devils on horseback. What I love about Mocambo is that you can enjoy its impossibly recherche menu with no sense of irony: it's days of the Raj with a vengeance, from the smudgy paintings to the red leather couches in those trademark booths. You still find an odd assortment of characters here, from dedicated gluttons' clubs to jazz musicians who still sport the Dylan look.

Here are a few things to order at Mocambo's, just because you can.

1) Hors d'oeuvres for two: Though some of what's on offer comes perilously close to MFK Fisher's "disgusting vision... of soggy vegetables glued together with cheap mayonnaise", ask for this anyway. The asparagus--tinned, limp, a dubious shade of green, served with ersatz Edam--is dispiriting. But the Russian salad, tuna salad and prawn cocktail are grandly old-world, and very good--if heavy on the cream. And the slices of ham with hard boiled eggs and pickles are simple but excellent--there's enough here to make a filling meal on its own.

2) The steaks: If these were good enough for my late grandmother, who liked her beef but was picky about the quality of her steak, they're good enough for me. The waiter looks dourly at those who order their steaks well-done, and fetches off with the air of a man who will now ask the chef to pick out and broil a suitable shoe. Order yours medium-rare, though, and he will make sure you get a good bit of meat. The mushroom/ black pepper sauces are splendidly old-world, and in our beef-and-pork starved country, the ham steaks are suitably juicy, though I wish Mocambo's would run to an onion marmalade or a sharp mustard sauce instead of the tiresome Hawaiian sludge on offer.

3) The baked, devilled crab: Cholesterol unfriendly, but gloriously redolent of the days when pukka sahibs sacrificed their arteries in a good cause. Mocambo's has been known to eke out the crab with a pasty white sauce on days when they're full up, but arrive and order early, and you should get the real thing--heavy with cheese and cream, but generous with the crabmeat, and utterly irresistible.

4) The orange crepes/ the Baked Alaska: Like ghosts from the past, these two dishes come straight from nursery memories, and Raj-era cookbooks. Mocambo's Baked Alaska is huge, satisfyingly cold and not oversweet; the orange crepes have an uncompromising slice of generic vanilla ice cream fattening the middle, but offer a sharp, delectable sauce with classic pancakes.

One of these days, I fear that the Mocambos and Olympias of venerable Calcutta will have given way to new-wave restaurants with less gloom and more sharply contemporary menus. Before that dark day arrives, I hope to eat my way through the Mocambo menu, savouring each bite of nostalgia. The accompanying vegetables may be boiled to within an inch of their lives, the sizzlers might cremate whatever's on the platter, but stick to the old-fashioned stuff and you can't go wrong. Besides, where else would a four-course meal for six, drinks included, run to the risible sum of Rs 3,000?

Gluttony-I: Varq

Varq, Taj Mahal Hotel
1 Mansingh Road
Tel: 91-2302-6162
Category: Expensive

Having suffered too many bad renditions of Indian nouvelle cuisine--a rose petal and marigold salad with paneer tikka chunks stands out as a particularly horrifying experience--my husband and I approach Varq with some nervousness. To my mind, too many bad meals--Scrooge-like portions, pretentious service and no real understanding of the culinary tradition--have been passed off as fine dining under the nouvelle-fusion banner.

But Varq drew rave reviews when it opened a while back, and I like Chef Hemant Oberoi's reputation. He's the wizard behind The Bombay Brasserie, and his work sounds intelligent--a corn soup poured over turmeric-flavoured popcorn, a reinvented crab that uses classic Indian spices, cleverly layered on thin filo leaves. And besides, this is impulse dining--I refuse to order home delivery any more, on the grounds that I can cook better, cheaper and faster in my kitchen, and that allows me more space for the occasional indulgence.

Neither of us is suitably dressed, unless you count black T-shirts as high style, and we don't have a reservation, but that doesn't prevent Varq's staff from treating us with great courtesy. We're early and good tables are available--we get one with a view of the refurbished Anjolie Ela Menon murals on one hand, and the quiet garden on the other. The decor's contemporary, with beaded chandeliers, and restful without being extraordinary--it signals comfortable rather than quirky.

Our waiter is ready to explain the concept of Varq, and we sense he's had to do this several times before for the benefit of baffled Indians wanting to know where the kabab platter went. Varq offers a Western rather than Eastern way of dining--you order separate appetisers and main courses instead of shared dishes and thali-style meals--and has sensibly included a selection of vegetable dishes and daals, priced differently if ordered as accompaniments and if ordered as main courses.

The amuse-bouche arrives at high speed and for a second, I wonder whether we've made a mistake. It's a nice idea--a tiny bonda lifted from the chaat trolley, with a smear of chutney--but the bonda is cold and slightly soggy, the chutney too sharp. My husband grimly orders a pepper vodka, and I take comfort in the excellent date-tamarind sherbet.

Our fears were unfounded. The first appetizer to arrive is the Varqi crab--South Indian spices, generous helpings, and the combination of the silky, spicy crab with the melt-in-your-mouth filo pastry leaf (studded with black mustard seeds) is incredible--rich, textured and light. The prawn on top is big enough to be shared by two, which we do, forgetting our manners, and--this is always a good sign--I see the staff beaming at our obvious delight. The second appetizer, liver three ways, is a clever concept, but I'm not so sure it works for me. The mutton liver is mildly over-cooked; the chicken liver in a potato wafer basket, drizzled with an orange juice reduction, is not mind-blowing, and the foie gras with a mango salsa is good, but nowhere as brilliant as it could be. Good, but not great, I think, idly admiring the silver varq-inspired etchings on the ceiling, and I realise that Varq has already raised my expectations--in most of Delhi's Indian restaurants, this dish would have been a spectacular success, not a "show me more".

At a table near us, I hear gasps of happy surprise as the diners try their main course, the brilliantly presented Lobster Hawa Mahal, and elsewhere, there's a lady spooning up her dessert, a Hot Chandni Varqi Jalebi, with an expression of absolute ecstasy on her face. And there it is again; from where I'm sitting, I can see how the waiters watch each table anxiously, how their faces brighten when a course goes down well and sink a little when diners seem baffled.

A tamarind sorbet, insistently sharp, clears our palate for the main course. The Martabaan ki Meat arrives in a miniature pickle jar--the gravy at the bottom of the jar is spectacularly rich, by the way, so dig in--and is delicately good. I like the tenderness of the meat, the texture and the contrast between the red achaari pickle, but it's been toned down a bit--a classic Martabaan ki Meat can be far more spicy. This is a riff on the original rather than a faithful rendering--but it's an awesome riff, and once again, we forget our manners, dipping pizza-style Tomato-Olive Naans into the sauce. The baby potatoes are forgettable, and I wish I'd ordered the "bharta three ways" instead--baingan, tomato and pumpkin purees that look incredibly tempting. But the lasuni spinach is awesome, all the more so for being so simple: it's just spinach cooked with pearls of garlic, salt and pepper, and it manages to extract something of the flavour of a good aioli from ordinary lasun.

The real star of the show is the Calicut prawns, done with asparagus in a delicate, aromatic coconut sauce--this is really how to take classic spices and sauces and rework them ever so slightly. We've overdone it; there's no room for the desserts, and I need to come back some day to redress this. I also wish I'd ordered the Vedic tisanes along with the meal, rather than the sherbet--which is immensely tasty, but perhaps too rich as an accompaniment. And I want to try the khurmani kababs, the seafood soup--okay, fine, pretty much everything on the menu.

Too often, with an old school Indian meal, you leave with a sense of too much richness and the dismal awareness that Digene will be your aperitif of choice the next day. But Varq left us replete, not overstuffed. It's definitely expensive, even by Delhi's now exorbitant standards, but I'd argue that it's worth it--sometimes. (A meal for two, with tisanes/ drinks, could easily run from Rs 8,000 upwards.)

Part of the magic is Chef Hemant Oberoi's deep love for Indian food--he really knows his ingredients, and Varq, like Bombay Brasserie, reinvents without going over the top. Is it as good, or better than, Devi in the US? I'd like to know--Suvir and Hemant sound as though they bring a similar intelligence to their interpretations of Indian food. What made Varq work for me went beyond the menu, though. It was the sense of well-being we were wrapped in, and the staff's open pleasure when they saw that their diners were, indeed, having a good time.

The BS Column: The Orange, juiced

(Published in the Business Standard, May 19, 2009)

Hiroshima, Alzheimer’s, a racist 1931 rape trial, an inventor on the verge of a love affair, a pastor on the verge of death. Nothing in these themes or these characters indicates the gender of the author of the novels in which they appear, and this is where the conundrum of the Orange Prize lies.

The winner of the “Bessie” will be announced in a few weeks time, marking the 13th year of the world’s only major prize for women. In its first few years, the Orange Prize generated more heat than light, with many arguing that a prize exclusively for women writers was discriminatory at worst, unnecessary at the very least, in this century.

Over time, the Orange proved its worth to thousands of readers, though, not by creating space for women’s writing as much by redressing the invisibility of women writers. A S Byatt called it a “sexist” prize, refusing to allow her publishers to enter her books for the Orange; other women writers, from Chimamanda Adichie to Ann Patchett, had a more nuanced view, celebrating the fact that the prize gave them a virtual room of their own.

If you go through the shortlists for every year, it becomes harder to argue that the Orange doesn’t serve a purpose. A certain kind of writer—talented, but not glamorous, intensely engaged, but not always fashionable—shows up in these shortlists, writers who would have been lost or overlooked without the Orange. And over its 13-year life span, the Orange may actually have begun redefining what we think of as “women’s writing”.

It’s a shift that publishers like Urvashi Butalia know well, as women’s publishing houses witness and encourage writing by women to grow beyond the fascinating but narrow confines of writing on gender. The more popular view of women’s writing is far more of a ghetto: yesterday’s Mills & Boons, today’s chicklit and arranged marriage bestsellers.

This year’s shortlist includes: Burnt Shadows (Kamila Shamsie), Scottsboro (Ellen Feldman), The Wilderness (Samantha Harvey), The Invention of Everything Else (Samantha Hunt), Molly Fox’s Birthday (Deirdre Madden) and Home (Marilynne Robinson). The range of themes, and the historical periods, explored in these novels is broad—and it is this breadth that really defines writing by women today.

Burnt Shadows finds a narrative arc between Hiroshima and Guantanamo Bay, and among its principal characters are a Japanese woman who survives Hiroshima, and a young Pakistani whose path leads him to prison in the US. Scottsboro examines the infamous 1931 rape trial in the Deep South, where the testimony of two white women put nine black men behind bars for several years on rape charges.

The Wilderness explores the confounding, unmoored, intense world of Alzheimer’s from the perspective of a male protagonist struggling to understand his life from a few scattered clues. The Invention of Everything Else is about the growing (and imagined) friendship between the exuberant scientist Nikola Tesla and a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. Marilynne Robinson’s eloquent, moving Home follows the stories of those we met in her previous novel, Gilead. Glory Boughton returns to look after her father, the pastor; the return of her brother Jack forces many questions for the two as they face the imminent death of their father. I haven’t read Molly Fox’s Birthday, but the blurb indicates that it’s about an Irish actress, as seen by the Shakespearean actor who borrows her house briefly.

If you read only these descriptions, you would have no way of knowing whether the authors of these books were male or female, and that is a tribute to the broader, limitless world of women’s writing today. Some critics of the Orange take this further, arguing that if the books are relatively genderless, there should be no need of a special prize for women.

The raison d’etre of the Orange Prize, however, was not to address an inequity of voice—from the earliest, most pioneering women writers onwards, women have often demanded the right to write about what pleases them. The founders of the Prize saw and addressed an essential inequity in the space that women writers were allocated—fewer column inches, fewer reviews, fewer soundbytes on TV shows, and most crucially, less space in the public memory.

Each year, the shortlist does what it did for me this year, and what it has for 13 years running—underlines the presence of one or two well-known women writers, and introduces us to several more who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Take women’s writing from the margins to the centre, says the Orange, and until women find themselves at the centre without need for special pleading, there will always, sadly, be a need for the prize.