Chapter 22

An Ode To Fried Rice

If you don’t like love stories, please skip this piece.

This is the story of a romance between me and fried rice.

Picture a very skinny 18 year old girl standing on a dirty sidewalk in Nariman point, Bombay, next to an equally dirty food truck. The truck looked like it had had a mud bath that some people pay good money for nowadays.

Someone—let’s call him an artist, because he’d probably call himself one—had spray-painted dragons on both sides. Not majestic dragons. Not even threatening dragons. These were ‘dragons’ that looked like iguanas on a diet. One dragon appeared to be breathing fire, or possibly vomiting, we couldn’t tell. The paint was flaking off in chunks. One of them, let’s call it oompa, looked like it needed to see a dermatologist urgently and the other, let’s call it loompa, looked like it needed to see an eye doctor.

The truck was parked in the middle of the concrete jungle that is Nariman point, a buzzing commercial area with hundreds of office buildings. By noon every day, the area would turn into an open food court of sorts. Every state of India was covered by the vendors. Dosa, vada pav, chaat, pulao, biryani, dal rice, sabzi roti, parathas, fresh fruit juices, fruit plates - you name it and you got it.

Nariman Point, much like my college life, was one big food fest. I don’t know what the scene is now but back then if you attended lectures in college you were considered a loser. To a simple girl from Delhi, this was most unexpected and a happy life choice. I quickly got into the cool crowd that looked down on kids that attended college. Hey, don’t judge me. I didn’t know another human my age in Bombay. If my new friends said no to studies, I wasn’t going to say yes. Far be it for me to break any norms.

So we would go to college at 7 am, attend one lecture (or maybe two if we liked the teacher) and then onward to more important things. Tea and cutlets in the canteen, movie at Sterling theatre, chicken roll at New Empire café, lunch at Nariman point.

This was no normal lunch, mind you. Lunch at Nariman point was ‘Rice and Gravy’. Rs. 14. ‘Rice’ meant the most smoky, delicious fried rice you would ever have, with chunks of chicken innards that didn’t look like actual chicken pieces but boy did it taste amazing! ‘Gravy’ meant manchurian sauce with chicken in it (that most definitely had nothing to do with the traditions of Manchuria). Chicken meant a deep fried gluggy batter of cornflour and flour with a dot of chicken in it the size of Cadbury gems. The chicken bhajias - or as the cool kids say ~fritters - were tossed in the aggressively brown manchurian gravy that was flavoured with enough MSG that would have made the great Nelson Wang nervous as heck. The bhajias transformed into an amoebic looking sponge as soon as it hit the sauce. I know what you’re thinking - this sounds like an incredible deal.

The smell was what drew us to the truck in the first place. Wok smoked, burnt garlic, and aji no moto—that glorious, controversial flavor enhancer that has got a bad rap that’s worse than Gully Boy’s rap. What the hell is “mere gully me, gully gully gully me”. Say something more after that, dude.

I digress.

The aroma of fried rice filled the air like a cloud. You’d smell it from fifty feet away and your mouth would start watering in anticipation. The food was cooked in these huge woks perched precariously over huge burners with flames shooting up like they were trying to contact aliens.

The artisans in charge would swirl the Manchurian gravy with giant ladles, throw in the deep-fried “chicken,” let it swim around for exactly the right amount of time—which seemed to be based on mood, not any actual measurement—then dump it onto your plate with the confidence of someone who had done this 1000 times and would do it 1000 times more.

The ‘dish’ was served in a brown melamine plate that was the go-to serving apparatus of most vendors in those days. Plates that had been scratched, thrown about, tossed, scrubbed (that’s a joke - no vendor was going to scrub your plate clean before they served you food in it. Grow up!). The USP of these plates was their indestructibility, much like the nokia phones of yore.

My friend Sanjay and I would eat this at least twice a week. I became known as the girl who would finish her plate and then go on to finish any friends’ leftovers - AKA the trash can. Who had heard of diet, exercise, portion control, Glucose Goddess or any other Huberman protocol in those days. I was skinny and continued to remain so, much to the disgust of everyone in the group.

To this day, fried rice and manchurian remains my favourite meal. My love for this filtered into the menus at both my restaurants. In Food For Thought, I started a Chinese thali that was very popular with the office crowd. No wok, no ajino but still wholesome Chinese (or Chindian) food that tasted not at all like the ‘rasta’ Chinese but something you could eat for lunch and feel full and satisfied. It had rice and gravy of course and sometimes we would add chinese bhel and spring roll to it. Stir fried greens completed the meal.

At my second restaurant PLENTY, I started a vertical called PLENTY WOK which had classics like rice and gravy, triple schezwan, haka noodles and much more.

Many of those dishes - the fried rice in particular - came from years of crawling through cookbooks, cooking shows and cooking classes. For instance many years ago I went for a Chinese cooking class at a lady’s house in Mahim who allegedly had the secret code to Chinese cuisine (no Youtube in those days kids). I went to learn how to make the very-exotic-sounding Seven Jewel Rice. The ‘jewels’ in that would put Popley & Sons to shame.

I have zero interest in jewelry but because I am not colour blind, I am guessing the name came from the fact that each of the ingredients shone bright inside the wok. Babycorn was the topaz, red cabbage the sapphire, green capsicum is emerald, red capsicum is ruby. Mushroom was something else, and chicken and prawn rounded out the set. That’s still the extent of my jewellery knowledge today.

When I make the veg version, it becomes Five Jewel Rice. You can thank me later for that useless bit of trivia.

Anyway, adult life and the dreaded BMC took away my rice and gravy vendors and the dragons with it. In its place are the air-conditioned fancy oriental restaurants where the dragons are Golden (wink wink), that serve proper fried rice that tastes like plain rice with green stuff in it or some that think blue fried rice is foo..d. Manchurian is no longer the go to dish. Its black bean, hoisin, oyster, ginger and what not.

Rs. 14 gets you nowhere and nothing. Crockery and cutlery is called tableware. Porcelain, bone china, stoneware, earthenware and many more wares. I wasn’t a...ware of these names till I started my restaurants.

I still love my fried rice, still enjoy it but it’s never going to be that fried rice. The kind you ate out of a dirty truck called HUNGRY EYES with your best friends, playing hooky from college, looking forward to watching Grease at Sterling cinema, with not a care in the world except whether the truck wala will give you back your 1 rupee change.