Beijing's culinary Olympics

THE FOOD CLUB

I'm rather disappointed to know that not many Indians are heading to Beijing for the Olympic Games 2008. I'm not bothered about the sports themselves "" and I'm politically incorrect enough to say so loudly.

What bothers me is that too few of us will have the opportunity of enjoying the world's most popular cuisine the way it is meant to be.

Chinese food started out in this country the way it was meant to, in the early decades of the 20th century. That was when Chinese families, mainly from the province of Canton, as it was then known, migrated to Kolkata and, thence, to the rest of the country.

Every last Chinese restaurant in the era before 1970 was run by a Chinese family, just as most people took it for granted that custom-made shoes would be made by the Chinese community and good hair-dressers were from China.

The next wave of immigration that took place in the Chinese community took them out of India. That was when Chinese restaurants started becoming anything but Chinese. Between Nepalese cooks and Indian owners, the subtle flavours of Jade Chicken Soup and Shrimp Fu-yong lost out to curries that were red, redder or reddest.

Close on 10 years ago, deluxe hotels started hiring chefs from China. What was a trickle then has become a flood. Most executive chefs and general managers boast to me that their Chinese chefs understand so little English that attempts to get them to Indianise the food is met with incomprehension. I wish I could believe it. But, in fact, what happens is that all expatriate chefs, Chinese or otherwise, are taken on an induction around the city.

Chinese chefs talk to their counterparts in other hotels and restaurants and figure out soon enough that cold starters in India are a non-starter. What sells, instead, are crisply fried bits of spinach leaves and spring rolls. Plus, any ingredient soused in lashings of hot garlic sauce.

Change takes time and so the upgradation of menus in Chinese restaurants is happening. The most successful, high-profile restaurants in the country today like China House in Mumbai's Grand Hyatt, China Kitchen at Hyatt Regency Delhi, Hao Shi Nian Nian in Gurgaon and others, have not merely stopped at hiring a chef or six.

Chinese design elements, wood-work from China, spices from that country, even ovens for Peking duck made by experts from Beijing make up the Hyatt group's winning formula. It is almost as if the Chinese surroundings have made our palates adventurous.

The management of Hao Shi Nian Nian has settled on their own winning formula: a book about the chef, the cuisine of his province (Sichuan) and the whys and wherefores of the dishes that the restaurant showcases.

All this requires a certain amount of time and effort. The most attractive proposition would have been tens of thousands of us staying in China for the duration of the Olympics, and coming back aficionados of the cuisine.

(marryam08@gmail.com)