The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: The art of Indian dining; thali vs. plated courses

How do you like your food? All together? Or one by one? It may seem like a stupid question but, in many ways, it holds the key to a country’s cuisine. In the West, they tend to eat their food one by one. They start with a soup or a starter then a main course and finally a dessert. (In such countries as France, a cheese course is added.) In India, on the other hand, we rarely eat any single dish on its own. The traditional Indian meal comes all at once in a thali. There is no concept of a starter or a first course. And the dessert is on the same thali as everything else. You will get refills of everything but generally, whatever you get in the thali is what the whole meal will be like.
This is how Indians like to eat; If not on a thali then certainly not course by course. When we go to restaurants, we order sabzi or meats along with dal, rotis and perhaps some form of rice and eat them all together. Nobody will eat, say, a rogan josh on its own or even only with rice or rotis. For us, a meal built around a single course is incomplete. (Also read: The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: From tandoori chicken to kebabs; the evolution of Indian cuisine )
When we eat Chinese food, we eat it the same way. We order three or four dishes and rice (and often, noodles because we like something wheaty with our meals) and put a little of each dish on our plates happy to let the gravies (and in India, Chinese food nearly always has gravies) mingle.
In China, they would never do this. (Nor would the food necessarily have gravies.) Chinese people keep their flavours distinct and often, they pick and eat the food directly from the serving bowls with their chopsticks.
I mention all this to illustrate the key difference between fancy Indian food and traditional Indian food. If you go to an upmarket restaurant (say Masque or Indian Accent or Avartana), the food will come to the table already plated from the kitchen. Each portion will be for one person. The sense of sharing that is traditional at meal times in India will be absent. Instead, the food will be served rather as it is in western restaurants and chefs may expend a lot of effort in trying to make their plates look pretty.
I have no problem with this. Chefs have a right to want you to focus on each dish. And while the food that goes into a thali is usually made in advance, at fancy Indian restaurants, they will try and make at least some of the individually-plated courses fresh.
But I do sometimes wonder: Is this how Indian food was meant to be eaten?
Let’s take a counter-example. Supposing you went a fancy French restaurant and ate your food the Indian way: On a large plate that had a little coq au vin, a small steak in pepper sauce and six snails in garlic butter, what do you suppose the response would be?
Shock. Horror. Outrage.
So, why do we think it is okay to eat Indian food in the French way when any European would be horrified to eat European cuisine the Indian way?
There is no easy answer to that question. Over the last two decades or so, it has become an article of faith at fancy or ‘modern’ Indian restaurants that food must be individually plated and served in courses. Many of those restaurants will now only serve tasting menus which means that you will have to sit patiently while 12 or more individual courses are served (usually you are lucky if a six out of 12 are any good). The flavours may well be Indian. But the dishes themselves, like the way they are served, will not be particularly Indian.
This is, to be fair, not particularly unusual: After all, many top restaurants in the West also offer a tasting menu-only option. But here’s the thing: It is part of the western tradition to have a set meal of individually plated courses. It is not part of ours.
Is there a way out? There have been chefs like Ferran Adria at the hugely influential El Bulli who broke with the idea of a traditional tasting menu and instead sent out 40 different small, snack sized dishes. These were not supposed to mimic the traditional appetizers-main course-dessert formula (though desserts did come at the end) but were little bites, none of which was much more than a fraction of what a full course would normally be.
The only significant Indian chef who has successfully taken that principle and applied it to our food is Gaggan Anand. At his Bangkok restaurant, Indian food is only a starting point for the dishes: Once he starts creating them, they take on a life of their own without any clear national identity. But his plates are stark, and contain small, snack-size portions. Halfway through the meal, he serves some desserts before going back to savoury courses. It is a logic of Gaggan’s own making, neither a traditional Indian style of eating nor a western tasting menu.
And when he does serve (more or less) normal Indian food (at his restaurant above Gaggan), he serves it family style, for sharing.
It is not my case that Gaggan’s is the way forward. For a start, I can’t think of many chefs who have the talent to pull off what Gaggan does. Nor do I think that all restaurant meals should necessarily take as long as dinner at Gaggan does. But what I like is that he accepts that the French style approach to Indian restaurant food — starter, main course, dessert —does not always work. Nor does he find it necessary to spend time on beautiful plating only because chefs in the West do that.
Perhaps it is time for other Indian chefs to think out of the box. If you don’t want to serve the food like we eat it at home, that’s fine. But why serve it like French people do? Why not create an Indian idea of restaurant service?
These are questions to which we have had no answers so far, alas. Not enough chefs are asking the basic question: Why are we doing this? Why not have a style of service that is rooted in our traditions, not those of the West?