We’re a democratic lot at the Nirvana Restaurant. We let everyone have a say. Particularly when it comes to important matters like what goes into our club menus. Our team meetings are long and laborious affairs due to language challenges. Our Head Chef barks out instructions in Hindi and English which he calls Hinglish. Our kitchen linecooks speak a mixture of Tamil, Arabic and Punjabi. The senior kitchen porter speaks Nepali. Our Tandoori Chef insists on speaking only Bengali, in the Syleti dialect. Our delivery drivers are native English speakers. Our resident beer expert pretends he knows no other languages apart from Konkani and Telugu. Our butcher speaks Marathi. And our spice guru speaks only Urdu.
In the end it took us over four hours to decide if chips were to feature on Nirvana menus. It originally took us four and half minutes to decide there would be no chips when our Tandoori Chef lurched into the room in an ungainly manner. He was pissed, which means he did not have a winning hand during the previous nights poker game. We told him of our decision to ban chips from our menus. Glaring at us like a wounded boar he immediately accused us of being elitist and anti-working class. ‘Shame on you,’ he screamed stabbing the air with his masala-stained forefinger. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ I said mustering as much serenity as I possibly could, which wasn’t much. ‘We’re not doing chips because by the time they reach the customer it will become a soft mass of potato. The linecooks don’t want to do it.’
‘Screw the cooks,’ he snapped at me. ‘Morons! Morons all of you! The whole idea behind our restaurant is curry – or have we forgotten that?’ he said popping a handful of painkillers into his mouth. At least I think they were painkillers, I can never tell with our Tandoori Chef. ‘You can’t talk about contemporary curryhouse culture without making some references – however oblique – to the humble fodder of the British working class, called chips’ he said loftily. ‘Why are you so late for the team meeting? You’re always late,’ asked Maschili, our resident spice expert at the restaurant.
‘Obviously I’ve arrived just in time to prevent a catastrophe,’ said our Tandoori Chef. ‘Without chips – and its chips by the way, not French fries - British curryhouse culture would be very different. Let me explain,’ he said putting his feet up on the table.And he did. For two long hours. This is what he had to say.
By the end of World War II Britain had plenty of bombed-out cafe’s and chip shops. These derelict cafes were purchased by Indian sailors. Britain’s ethnic minorities were already well established in the fish & chip trade. The earliest fish fryers had been Jewish immigrants in London’s East End, and virtually all chip shops in Ireland and Scotland were owned by Italian immigrants. In the 1950’s and 60’s, Chinese and Greek Cypriot immigrants, as well as Indians, began buying them up.Our Tandoori Chef explained that when fish and chips were first sold in the nineteenth century, it was seen as ‘slum food, the sort of grub that whores and hustlers ate as they came off the beat’. I notice a few of the Nirvana crew roll their eyes in resignation. Our baker, in charge of creating the naan bread, parathas, puri’s and pakoras, whispered to one of the delivery drivers. ‘I knew whores, hustlers, deviants and drunks had to come into the story somehow’ he said. ‘That little pervert could be talking about Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa of Calcutta and somehow whores, hustlers, deviants and drunks would miraculously appear.’
‘Hey, dipshit,’ screamed our Tandoori Chef. ‘Why don’t you take the cotton wool out of your ear and stick it in your mouth. You buddy need to remember what Oscar Wilde said.’ ‘What did good old Oscar say?’ asked our baker. He, like the rest of us, had long given up trying to teach our Tandoori Chef the rudiments of civilised manner.
‘Ignorance is a strange bloom. Once lost it can never be recovered. I’m trying to help you man, with your distinctly pathetic lack of understanding.’ We watched as he popped another handful of painkillers into his mouth.Our Tandoori Chef explained that fish and chips was gradually taken up by the British working class and by the 1950’s it made a welcome change for many families from the sheer boredom of roast on Sunday, hash on Monday, cottage pie on Tuesday, hotpot on Thursday and stewed steak on Friday. In working class towns there would be a mad rush for the fish and chip shop after eleven o’clock as the blokes made their way home after a couple of pints in the pub, after a hard day in the fields, coalmines and factories. At the weekends the chip shop would be full of working men buying a quick lunch on their way to the football game or dog tracks.
The ex-Indian sailors would give these fish and chip shops a lick of paint and set about building custom. The continued the tradition of selling fish and chips, pies and tea. They simply tacked curry on to the old menu. Gradually customers became more adventurous and started to try curries. ‘In this way the British working class discovered that a good hot vindaloo went down well on a stomach full of beer, and so began the tradition of eating curry after a night out in the pub.’ As the working class became increasingly fond of curry, these small chip shops threw out the British dishes from their menus and turned into the first curryhouses and inexpensive Indian restaurants. ‘So you see my dears. Without chips there would be no curry culture in Britain,’ said our Tandoori Chef triumphantly. ‘There is nothing more satisfying than chips and curry. It’s sublime actually. Not that any of you philistines would know’ he added cattily.
So, in the end we all voted, again, to keep chips on the Nirvana menus. Our chips are cooked in spiced sesame seed oil, known in India as gingelly oil. You can find chips in the sundries section of the menus.
You can download all Nirvana menus from our website www.nirvanrestaurant.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment