Dressing up the dish

Dressing up the dish

Bangaloreans have always been fond of eating out what with the place being the home of inexpensive restaurant chains like the Udupis and Kamats and of course MTR , which used to be a tourist attraction along with Lalbagh and the Bull temple. But for the young people in bangalore, the scene has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and a lot of places have sprung up serving continental and exotic cuisine - an offshoot of the IT boom and the fantastic salaries and increase in the population of Yuppie singles. So "exotic" is no longer Chinese as it was 10 years ago but Thai and Japanese and Meditteranean and Italian and Greek and Mexican and what have you.

The total experience of eating out starts with the description of the fare on the menu card. Apart from the wonderful names that you see like "devilled something" and "some delight" and "some surprise", almost half of the recipe finds its way there. There are ingredients with names like basil and oregano that sound so wonderful,and cooking methods employed like "basting" and "sauteed" and then the accompaniments with which it is served – enough to make you salivate right there.The expectation begins to build up from the time you read the description.The number and names of ingredients alleged to be part of the dish entice you into trying the dish out at least once , never mind the price tag. It is all about packaging the product.

When he was about eight or nine, my son developed a great passion for eating out. We usually went to the restaurants nearby and ate pretty much the same kind of dishes that I made at home and the qulaity was not really very different from my preparations. But still he loved the experience. It seemed that he loved being served by men in uniforms, ordering from a menu, and if they brought caramalised fennel and toothpicks with the bill, he declared that the hotel had class! I even used to joke that I could dress like waitress and give him a menu card and even give him a bill if that is what he wanted(and of course,the saunf and toothpick!)

Recently my aunt had forwarded a nice mail about the factors at play and the dynamics involved in the making of the menu cards of different genre of restaurants.
"'Menus are the Pavlov's bell of eating out. They are a literature of control. Menu language, with its hyphens, quotation marks, and random outbursts of foreign words, serves less to describe food than to manage your expectations. Take the description of my dish above: It promises the unconventional—crosnes!—while reassuring the unadventurous with familiar comforts—risotto, peas—then slaps a thin veneer of glamour on the enterprise with the pizazz of "black truffle vinaigrette." This menu
entry doesn't merely entice, it justifies the cost of dining out. "
While signing off the same my aunt had added:
"My today's evening menu is :
long grain rice seasoned with cumin seeds fried and boiled , tamarind sauce with special spices and lentil dumplings, pureed tomatoes with special spices made into a thin sauce garnished with cilantro.Potatoes braised with onions in a chilli base, tomatoes and onions in a yogurt surprise, fried round lentil drieds, grated carrots with lemon.!!”
My mouth started watering and I wondered where she had learnt these complicated culinary delights until it dawned on me that what she was referring to is a standard Sunday lunch menu in a Tamil household which would have been causally dismissed as jeera rice, sambar ,rasam ,potato curry, raitha and carrot salad.
After all it is all about making the ordinary sound unusual - the power of words in dressing up the mundane much like what presentation and garnishing does to the dish itself!

I think I'll print a menu card describing the daily menu in words aimed to make the taste buds go berserk. May be that will increase the appreciation for the food. Who knows they may even leave me a fat tip!