History of Bombay restaurants

[susruta]

Does anyone have any information about the oldest restaurants in Bombay? Are there any going back to the1920s or 1930s? Any equivalents to Firpos or the restaurants in the Great Eastern hotel that became centers of Calcutta social life?

[Vikram]

There's an excellent piece on the evolution of eating out habits in Bombay in 'Consuming Modernity' a collection of essays on Indian popular culture edited by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge. I can't remember who the author is and some evil person has stolen my copy so I can't supply the information at once, but if you cant get your hands on the book, I can look around for the information.

As I remember it the piece deals largely with Irani restaurants, as the original cosmopolitan eating places in Bombay, but I think there's some info on other places as well. I remember seeing a map of the Fort area in the 1920s sometime back and Wayside Inn is marked over there. Of course, really really really tragically, this wonderfully characterful place disappeared sometime back to be replaced by a southeast asian eating place of astounding characterlessness.

I suppose the real tragedy is that this change seems to have been inevitable, since for all its character, Wayside Inn didn't have much by way of clientele towards the end. I can't really blame the owners, since I know they resisted the change for as long as they could and the standards of its old, British style cooking - fish and chips, cutlets, fry-ups, etc - didn't change much, but people just weren't going, and finally they had to change to survive.

Since you seem to be from Cal you might appreciate - enjoy would be the wrong word since the essential subject is sad - a good piece by Jug Suraiya last Sunday on the end of a similar Calcutta institution. I ate there a couple of times and can confirm that the food was excellent, in a sort of heavy, cheesy sauce sort of way. And I realise its odd asking this on an India list, but does anyone have a recipe for chicken tetrazzini?

Vikram

A moveable sky

JUGULAR VEIN/JUG SURAIYA

[ SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 02, 2003 12:01:45 AM ]

Three years ago in Bangalore we chanced to have lunch in a small restaurant on Church Street . The menu was dedicated to the memory of the legendary Sky Room in Calcutta .

For Bunny and me, it opened the floodgates of nostalgia. As an eight-year-old, I was taken to the then newly opened Sky Room on Calcutta ’s Park Street . The dark blue ceiling was dotted with lights, a night-scape scattered with stars, a roomful of sky. I gazed at it, dazzled. It made even a small boy with scabby knees feel elegant, privileged to dine in such heaven-seat splendour.

Sky Room was much more than a place that served great food. It represented the cosmopolitanism, that sense of cultural crossroads, which made Calcutta unique. Everyone went to Sky Room. Communists and capitalists, old and young, shudh vegetarians and devoted steak eaters. It was a place for everyone under the sky. Including a little girl who would hoard her daily pocket money for a week to buy a single dinner roll which a benign genie disguised as a waiter would bring to her on a salver and which she’d wrap up in her handkerchief to eat on the walk home. Bunny — for that was the little girl’s name — told me the story when we first went to dinner at Sky Room. A magni-ficent repast of shrimp cocktail and chicken tetrazini (Bunny’s all-time favourite). And then, for old times sake, a dinner roll, packed up for future reference.

Every Calcuttan had a personal story to tell about Sky Room. And when the restaurant was forced to close in the 1980s because of labour problems, Bachi wrote a tribute to it which brought a tear to the tastebuds of every true Calcuttawalla. And then, more than 15 years later, by a random encounter in Bangalore , Bunny and I found Sky Room again. It was like opening a birthday present and discovering it contained your childhood. We ordered the chicken tetrazini. But instead of packing up a dinner roll to take away, we put down a deposit for a house in a Bangalore suburb where, inshallah, one day we’ll settle.

You’re daft, people told us. Buying a house in a city just because it has a restaurant which reminds you of a restaurant in quite another city where you once lived.

Totally daft. And anyway, Bangalore ’s no bed of roses any more. It’s overcrowded, the pollution’s much worse than in Delhi , there’s no water, frequent power cuts, they’re pulling down all the beautiful old buildings and cutting down the lovely rain trees to put up multi-storeyed mons-trosities of glass and concrete. True, all of it. But still, Bangalore reminded us of what Calcutta once was and might have continued to be had it not misplaced its once eclectic embrace, its sheltering sky strewn with stars.

So we went back to Bangalore to take possession of our house (does one possess a house, or is one possessed by it?) and look for the restaurant on Church Street . And we couldn’t find it. Not our house, the restaurant. Worse, we couldn’t remember its name. Dafter and dafter, said people. You want to move to a city because of some place you ate in once, and now you can’t even remember its name?

Undeterred, Bunny and I questioned Bangaloreans about the place whose name we couldn’t remember. It used to do a fantastic chicken tetrazini, said Bunny. And a friend said: You must be talking about Vicky’s; it shifted from Church Street to a farmhouse outside Bangalore . We rang up Vicky’s. To discover they were open only on weekends. And we didn’t have a weekend left in Bangalore . Then Bunny mentioned Sky Room to them, that we were visitors not just from far away, but also long ago.

So what’s the end of story? Did we ever get to Vicky’s? Are we really going to go live in Bangalore one day? That’s another story. For the moment, let’s put it this way: The tetrazini tasted even better the second time round.

[susruta]

Thanks so much, Vikram. I will track down the Appuradai article.

[easyguru]

Vikram- Dining Out In Bombay By Frank F Conlon is the article you are refering to in Consuming Modernity.

[Monica Bhide]

Easyguru -- welcome to eGullet! Glad to have you here. Tell us a bit aboutyourself -- where are you posting from?

[easyguru]

Hi Monica

I am currently based in New Jersey. Previously spent years in Bombay, Delhi, Pune. I like cooking and eating out.