The restaurant we’ll call Taste of Andhra did not have a good vibe. But I was hungry and crabby, and in no mood to discuss lunch options.
The slightly dismal, mostly empty place featured a waiter who mumbled something and waved his hand in the general direction of the menu. I deciphered that he was telling me only the dishes listed on the front of it were available. I was in the mood for prawns, but they were on the wrong menu face, so I ordered a mutton dish, only to be told five minutes later that none of the mutton dishes were ready.
“Why don’t you have prawns sir?” said the head waiter.
“I thought the all the dishes on the back weren’t available?” I asked.
“No sir, prawns are available.”
By now, a couple of fuses were readying to blow and most of the warning lights on my restaurant radar screen were flashing. “Let’s just get this over with,” said the voice of reason who was my dining (and life) partner.
So I ordered prawns and carefully verified what fish was used in the fish biryani (“seer fish, sir”). I ordered one. I like seer fish. Its dense meatiness suits a dish like biryani.
After nibbling on overcooked, overspiced prawns that came too early, the biryani arrived; a pile of rice strewn with four fillets of what looked suspiciously like basa.
Let me tell you about basa. I’d never even heard of it until two years ago, and it’s everywhere now, being cheap and sold as prepackaged fillets.
It has a slightly slippery texture that makes it seem perfectly cooked, even in the hands of the most amateur chef. I’ve heard it described as “the paneer [cottage cheese] of fish”, a vehicle for other flavours, having little flavour of its own.
Two bites convinced me I had the wrong fish, so I called the head waiter over and informed him of the “error”. With huge confidence he told me it couldn’t possibly be basa because the kitchen stocked no other fish but seer.
I’m a foolishly trusting human being, so I accepted this... for another two bites. It’s hard to confuse seer with basa. I called the head waiter back. He was starting to look irritated, and left our table to return with a marinated slice of seer fish on a plate, immediately recognisable with its diamond shape and round central bone. “See sir? Seer!”
Reckless attitude
I looked at it, then at him, wondering if I was going mad. “Yes that’s seer,” I said pointing at his plate, “but this isn’t”, pointing at the biryani. But he missed the last bit as he walked away, bearing his plate triumphantly. Against every screaming nerve in me, the wife talked me down and asked me to let it go. Looking back now, I think she was right about it being a slightly thuggish place that wouldn’t think too much about beating up a customer. An attitude like the head waiter’s is reckless in the brutal world of restaurants.
Once a place starts to go bad, a fog seems to hang over it, and almost every move reeks of desperation.
A bad restaurant can infect a building, damning every business that follows. I’ve seen it over and over, where a location that has everything going for it—easy parking, good visibility and nearby businesses—yet gets a new empty restaurant every few months. Then someone will try something different and open a cake shop, but the fog doesn’t dissipate. Hundreds of thousands of rupees of damage are done, sometimes by something as cheap as four fish fillets.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Bengaluru, India.
