Culture Club
Anjum Hasan on the latest phenomenon in trendy Bangalore—ethnic food restaurants

Photographs by Srikanth Kolari

Crab masala fry?” the headwaiter at my neighbourhood restaurant asks each and every time, and so eagerly, I fear my face has begun to remind him of the dish. Despite this ignominy, I cannot but order my hundredth plate, reflecting droolingly once again on the joyous union—Mangalorean-style—between the crab’s tender, moist flesh and the explosive red masala.

In the chronology of restaurant history, first there was Eating Out—sophisticated by definition. Glutinous Chinese evoked foreign glamour and no one had heard of MSG. Then came Multi-Cuisine when the same menu could offer, with the heart-breaking innocence of the late 1980s, both minestrone soup and tandoori ‘items’. Today a good restaurant is often one where the food tastes like home. This idea has about it a whiff of the mythical—every home hides a genius chef—as well as the paradoxical—I need to eat in a restaurant in order to imagine I’m eating at home. Nevertheless, ethnic food is all the rage now in Bangalore, and which city better than this one to accommodate yet another cosmopolitan whim?

But while popular interest in such cuisines may be a new thing, they’ve always been around in some form. The Kerala messes tucked away in by-lanes from Guwahati to Bangalore signal the great diffusion of Malayalis through this country, for example. Andhra restaurants in this city fall into the old-time-settler category as well. Their dim-interior, heavy-décor, male-dominated, bar-attached ambience seems to be some kind of natural consequence of the spiced-to-kill food. On the other hand, attesting to their popularity, we also have Andhra restaurants with lounges built to hold scores of waiting families. Nandini’s (at least 10 branches) falls into this bracket, as do the restaurants in the Nagarjuna chain. In both of these you can still get ‘drinks’ with your food, of course, but then that’s Bangalore.

At some remove on the taste spectrum, and newer to the city, are a range of coastal food restaurants. One of my favourites is the jauntily named Anupam’s Coastaal Express located next to the famous Shivananda Stores, off Kumara Krupa Road. Anupam’s has the quiet brilliance that inexpensive places with overflowing bars can sometimes have. I keep wishing the place was better known and hoping it doesn’t get better known and change in some tragic and irrevocable way. Anupam’s is adept at coastal specialities like marvai sukha (tiny shellfish cooked in a juicy, coconut-heavy masala) or pundi (tightly packed balls of steamed rice flour and desiccated coconut). Its more regular-sounding fish curry, squid butter garlic and prawns tawa fry are excellent too, and its chefs wield transformative powers over things like bhindi and bamboo shoot.

Two minutes away is Harbour Market. This is film-actor Mohanlal’s baby—a recent, very snazzy addition to the city’s coastal restaurants. Some penne and lobster thermidor has been thrown in to lend weight to the claim of ‘coastal fusion cuisine’, but it’s the Kerala spice that’s drawing the crowds. The menu seeks, interestingly, to distinguish between foods from different parts of Kerala, so you have things like Alleppey fish curry, Calicut mussels and Travancore chicken mappas. These claims to authenticity are not unfounded. The crab roast—from Kottayam, we were told as soon as we complimented it—distinctly reminded my companion of an egg roast he’d had in a Kottayam dive. It’s clear that the chefs here know what they’re doing and the service is of the quality where people leap out from implausible distances to open doors for you.

Another notable is Unicorn on Infantry Road, which has been around for nearly 20 years. It has nothing to offer by way of décor or ambience (the countless glass paintings of flying dolphins are not amusing) but the seafood is fantastic. I have diligently compared its kaane masala fry with that of Anupam’s and must admit that Unicorn’s way of treating this delicate-tasting estuary fish is better. So if you don’t mind paying Rs 180 for a slice of seer fish, for instance, and want spices to enhance the natural flavour of your seafood, head for Unicorn.