Chapter 15

What's your Naatu?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you’re aware that RRR’s Naatu Naatu made history at the 95th Academy Awards by winning the Oscar for Best Original Song. To everyone watching, it felt like India had arrived.

When asked about the inspiration for his big hit, the composer M. M. Keeravani said that naatu means “Ethnicity, my own way of expression…my words, this is my style, look at me, this is who I am. It’s a word that says, ‘something of our own’…our own culture”.

In the movie, when the protagonists are insulted by a British man who ridicules them for not knowing anything about art, finesse, tango, swing or flamenco, they reply,” Do you know naatu?” and promptly break into ‘the dance’.

No, this is not an essay on the song or the Oscars or the singers or even the dance choreography (which would accelerate my knee replacement surgery if I even tried one step of it). But it is about naatu.

When I learnt the meaning of naatu, I immediately thought about how well it chimes with our culinary heritage in India. Just like the complexity of dance moves enthrall us on screen, so does the drama of intricate steps in the kitchen. It is the magic of the creative process.

You experience it when we you add some molten tadka to a kadhai full of boiling dal. The pop and crackle of mustard seeds, the hiss of hing, the roar of curry leaves, the fiery chillies dancing and rolling in the hot ghee like a four year old on a moonwalker. You can almost feel the glee of the dal when it welcomes this heady, fragrant tadka and you know something beautiful is about to cause a stir in your soul (for me anyway).

Simple ingredients marry together to take your palate on this journey full of twists, turns and nuances, in a way that is true to itself and to our culture.

That’s Indian food in a nutshell.

At PLENTY, every Diwali we planned a special menu that celebrated the different regional cuisines of India. We especially wanted to highlight culinary pockets of our country that didn’t always get their shine.

One of my favourites was our Maharashtrian Specials menu. A lot of our staff came from remote parts of the state, so we invited each of them to get a dish from their homes that had a special place in their hearts - something they loved and ate regularly with their families. We were touched by how much pride and enthusiasm they put into the task, eager to show off the dishes that they grew up eating - some cooked by their mothers and wives, some cooked by them after their shifts.

Each dish was an example of delicious, deceptively simple flavours from their villages. Like simple clams cooked in just 4-5 ingredients of onions, coconut, coriander and chillies that created a riot on your palate, or fiery thecha with a ton of green chillies, garlic and peanuts…food that teared you up but you just couldn’t stop eating it!

You could hear the pride and the sadness they felt when they talked about their food. In many cases these dishes were a hit of nostalgia, a way to remain tied to their childhoods and to the hometowns they had swapped in order to search for opportunities in the chaos of Mumbai.

Our staff created ‘formal’ recipes of all their dishes (which we tried to replicate as best as we could) to come up with the menu. Unsurprisingly it was one of our most popular specials and we had to keep it on the cards for two more weekends after Diwali :)

One year, on Republic Day we did a menu designed to celebrate regional favourites. It featured mix of various Indian cuisines and cultures - Bengali, Sindhi, Mangalorean, Awadhi and so much more. 

What is complex about a piece of potato deep fried till crisp? Nothing. But try covering it with sweet chutney, spicy chutney, chilled yoghurt and sprinkle amchur and chaat masala, throw in some fresh mint, and you have in your hands the soul of the streets of India.

Our beloved aloo tuk chaat

When we floated the idea for a Bengali menu, all our cooks who were from that region vied with each other trying to make their favourite Bengali dishes. We were hard pressed to find fault in anything, and eventually decided to bring them all together on a single plate. They do say the more the merrier. That’s how our Bengali Thali was born.

Do you know what the simplest combination of mustard seeds and panchphoran spice can do to your palate? It can cause havoc (in a good way, obviously). That was their naatu. They took simple ingredients and made something of their own that reminded them of their childhood and their families. Just like the songwriter Chandrabose said about his interpretation of the word, ”Naatu means raw and rustic. Everything I wrote in the song is from my childhood memories of my life and my parents. That’s why I created it very fast.”

When our first head chef listed a sous vide machine, xantham gum, and cake gel as some of the “essentials” required in my kitchen at PLENTY, I knew in my mind that that list ain’t happening. That’s just not what I think of when I think of good food. On the other hand, long lines of customers coming to eat our Dal Baati Bowl, Misal Pav, Sindhi Koki, Keema Pav and Railway Mutton Curry...yeah, that’s the stuff.

At Food for Thought, we literally had a Vada Pav Sandwich and a Bhel Puri Sandwich as cornerstones of our menu for 11 years. As Keeravani said, “my culture in my style”.

Anyway, I’d say us “Brown Buggers” have done pretty well for ourselves, what say?