Just when people had started believing that the restaurant sector was licking its Covid-19 wounds in one dark corner, the ever-creative Zorawar Kalra, throwing the collective wisdom of diet gurus out of the window, is celebrating our love for all things buttery. The baby Lord Krishna’s love for freshly made butter has not only inspired poets, but also written itself into North India’s collective DNA.
Ours is the land where ‘buttering up’ has been uplifted to an art form, where ‘Utterly Butterly Delicious’ is the best-known and longest-lasting advertising tagline, and ‘bun maska’—a neighhourhood bakery-produced bun slathered with butter—has slowly and steadily been acquiring new followers outside the Irani cafes of Mumbai. We love salted butter, the way Amul has been making it, and it is one reason why we’ll never forget Verghese Kurien, father of the country’s White Revolution, whose 99th birth anniversary fell last week on November 26. “Our country is in love with buttery food; butter flows in our blood stream,” says Kalra, who’s otherwise famous for his Masala Art (Modern Indian) and Farzi Cafe (Fun Fine Dining) restaurants. “I have therefore launched a cloud kitchen-based home delivery brand—Butter Delivery— that revolves unapologetically around buttery food. It is an ode to all things buttery.” It is also an ode to his father Jiggs Kalra’s butter chicken recipe, which is what we’ll get to taste. Butter Delivery has just been launched in Gurgaon in partnership with Swiggy, but this is just the beginning. Eight more cities are within Kalra’s sight in the immediate future. His plan is to get the processes and back-end systems right and standardise the recipes before he flags off the expansion—his vision is to make Butter Delivery to Butter Chicken and Dal Makhni (“the two most ubiquitous Indian dishes globally”) like what McDonald’s is to burgers and Dominos is to pizzas. Even the Tandoori Chicken, my personal favourite, is cooked in dollops of butter. There’ll be three critical differences, though. The menu will have just ten dishes, no frozen food will be allowed, nor are preservatives used. “We will serve you food cooked not more than a few hours before you place your order,” Kalra assures us. And you can get a butter chicken combo meal for Rs 120 as well a quarter butter chicken, which no one has attempted before. Butter Delivery is definitely going to transform the way India thinks about its favourite foods. For Kalra this is not an idle boast. His track record being what it is—in a little over five years, he has created a transnational empire of 26 restaurants—Kalra will definitely deliver on his promise to make Indians fall in love with all things fattening and sinful.
INDIA’S SOUTHERN CHARM OFFENSIVE IN USA
After Kamala Harris, and Gitanjali Rao, a 15-year-old inventor celebrated as the Kid of the Year by Time magazine and interviewed by none other than Angelina Jolie for the magazine’s cover story, it is the turn of rasam to bask in the multicultural sun that is shining bright over America. Why rasam, you’d wonder! But if you note that it has three immunity boosters—turmeric, ginger and garlic— and the superfood moringa (or drumsticks), when they are in season, what more can you ask for in a country struggling against Covid-19? A bowl of rasam a day should keep the Covid-19 doctor away. When Arjun Rajadurai introduced rasam in the three hospitals being served by Anjappar, the Princeton restaurant where he works, it became an instant hit as the “immunity-boosting soup” from India. According to media reports, 500- 600 portions of rasam are now being ordered daily by guests at the three Anjappar restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. With an Indian, former U.S. surgeon-general Vivek Murthy, heading President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid-19 task force, it’s heartening to see an Indian comfort dish being drafted into the fight against the pandemic.
HELP IS NEAR IF YOUR RESTAURANT LOST STAFF TO MIGRATION
If you go around asking restaurateurs what’s ailing their business today, more than diminishing footfalls, they are more likely to point to their reduced bench strength, especially in the kitchen. In the migration induced by the lockdown, a large number of restaurant cooks and helpers moved back to their native villages in Uttarakhand and the North-East. Most of them found jobs locally, and they also discovered that it is cheaper to restart living with their parents, or in their native villages, leaving their former employers literally at the deep end of the sea in ships without fuel to get them moving. The crisis of some presents an opportunity to others, especially those of the entrepreneurial kind. Being of the latter kind, Jaiswal was quick to scent a business opportunity in staff-strapped restaurants—he would deliver the food they needed from his cloud kitchen at Shahpur Jat so that they could run their establishments without their missing employees. The same cloud kitchen, named La Marinate, also serves the upmarket visitors to Shahpur Jat’s Design Street and delivers DIY meals to people who like to work on the food they eat. Here’s a cloud kitchen model that promises to stay and thrive.