A couple of year after hobby chef-turned-restaurateur Ritu Dalmia opened her popular Italian restaurant, Diva, in the early 2000s in an affluent corner of South Delhi, she decided to push the envelope of taste by hand-carrying a chunky white truffle from Umbria. It cost her a fortune but she was confident that her clientele would pay for the pleasure of savouring the ingredient that was reputed to taste like sex. To Dalmia’s horror, there were no takers for the solitary truffle, so she converted it into a marketing opportunity by throwing a party for her favoured regulars where every dish was spiked with shaving of the unwanted truffle.

Dalmia may not have set off a truffle boom, but as kitchens in India’s Big Three – Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore – started mirroring the globalization of society, what was once luxe food became accessible, almost magically, to a wider market. It had to happen. For, in the first decade of the new century, urban, middle class Indians were not only travelling more and establishing their collective reputation as high spenders, but also spending a significant fraction of their higher disposable incomes on life’s transient pleasures.

An entire generation of Indians had started living in the here and the now – and good food was no longer synonymous with cheesy macaroni and Domino’s pizza. As the Net democratized the knowledge of global trends, Indian gastronomes no longer were satiated by what their parents considered luxuries. Nanosecond attention spans ensured food fashions changed as rapidly as they came. India’s integration into the new global economic order mandated by the WTO – its earliest sign was the inauguration of the new millennium with the lifting of the quantitative restrictions on the import of food items and alcoholic beverages. Suddenly, the marketplace was teeming with edible options from all corners of the world.

Historically, exotic food – from pepper to potatoes – has metamorphosed from an indulgence of the wealthy to an obsession of the middle class, and finally to an everyday part of the mass diet. In the case of contemporary India, the classic example of this transformation is the ease with which pizzas have become a part of the country’s gastronomic repertoire – so much so that it looks like the pizza, after cinema and cricket, is the great unifier. India today is one of Domino’s fastest-growing markets – the pizza behemoth’s new CEO, Patrick Doyle, spent a significant part of his first week in the new job here to reaffirm his belief that India would emerge as one of the corporation’s top five markets in the next three years.

 

If Domino’s eludes the mass table, Amul’s Utterly Delicious Pizza, piggybacking on its Rs 20 price tag, has reached the farthest markets in the country. What was once seen as just a vehicle to bolster Amul’s cheese sales, has become an independent product category in itself. The Indian Agri-Commodity Federation estimates that the country’s cheese market is growing at 20 per cent year-on-year and that we consume 7,000 tons of cheese – though principally in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai – in a year. This may explain why Amul, which lords over 65 per cent of the market, now has Emmental, Gouda and Mozzarella on its menu.

Sushi is at the other end of the taste spectrum, but the speed with which it has progressed from fashionable to mall food will make even Tokyo’s Shinkansen (the ‘bullet train’) pause a while for inspiration. It was the construction of the Delhi Metro that brought sushi to the city. Around the time when Japanese engineers working on the Metro started developing a craving for sushi, the Capital’s first Japanese hotel, The Metropolitan, set up in collaboration with Nikko – a Japan Airlines (JAL) subsidiary. As any hotel with its lineage was expected to do, it opened Delhi’s first and finest Japanese restaurant named Sakura. Within days of its opening, sushi got elevated as the fashion benchmark of Delhi’s Pretty People.

In a society where eating raw fish finds no part in any gastronomic tradition, the early movers started digging sushi and sashimi as if they were going out of fashion. Sakura’s links with Japan’s premier airline, which operated three flights a week to Delhi, meant that pilots could hand-carry blast-frozen fresh fish from Tokyo’s Tsukiji market – the Wall Street of the world’s fish economy – for consumption in Delhi. Like a long-lost child rediscovered by the family after years of separation, maguro entered the Capital’s vocabulary with much heraldry and fanfare.

 

As Sakura established that there was an untapped hunger for exotic food in India’s globalizing food marketplace, hotels jumped into a race to cash in on the new fashion. The Oberoi’s new all-day dining restaurant, 360, opened a sushi counter and held daily classes for the Capital’s high-society women to learn how to roll nigiri. The Taj tied up with the former Iron Chef and Nobu protégé, Masaharu Morimoto, for the ultra-fashionable and uber-expensive Wasabi, where edamame (baby soyabeans in the pod) competed with miso-lashed black cod to grab people’s imagination, and wallets of course.

These restaurants got the retail business off to a great start, and Japanese stores sprouted in middle class neighbourhoods to cater to local residents as much as the big hotels. Supply created its own demand, and gave birth to an altogether new fashion statement. Middle India even started distinguishing between the industrial wasabi and the one that a sushi chef prepares on your table, fresh from a root, employing a sharkskin grater.

As Sasha Issenberg points out in The Sushi Economy: Globalisation and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, and he makes this observation immediately after describing the advent of sushi in urban India in his definitive account, ‘Consumption of sushi has become an indispensably conspicuous display of a modern economy.’

 

The malls, the other overt symbols of the country’s integration with the world economy, have taken sushi to a market that five-star hotels have regarded with supreme disdain. With sushi counters becoming de rigueur in food courts and home-delivered sushi become a viable business, Japan’s most visible culinary export after Top Ramen noodles are here to stay. Experiments with tandoori sushi never took off, because every new Japanese restaurant introduced something delectably different to tickle the imagination of diners – from the delicately marbled wagyu (Kobe beef) to meats grilled on the charcoal-fired robata in accordance with an ancient Japanese tradition.

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel’s bird’s eye view of ‘how aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture and consciousness,’ has a delectable story about Pierluigi Zappacosta, Italian-born founder of Logitech, the world leader in the computer mouse business. You’d expect Zappacosta to be holding forth on design in a book devoted to aesthetics, but he declaims instead about the state of food in Palo Alto when he arrived in America in 1976. America had ‘no good bread, no good cheese, no good coffee,’ Zappacosta adds with a dramatic flair that you’d associate with an innovator. ‘It seemed like something was fundamentally wrong.’

That could be said about metropolitan India even as late as the late 1990s. For the gourmand, the Indian table was as bleak as the plains of the north were to Babar. Even the burgers that Nirula’s sold came with crumbly bread and cole slaw in place of lettuce, and accompanying French fries were soggy. All it took was McDonald’s to turn a nondescript Ludhiana-based company named Cremica into the maker of buns of the finest quality and it got its iceberg lettuce from Trikaya Farms in Talegaon, Maharashtra, to redefine what went into a burger. McCain, a global leader in the business, has got farmers in Gujarat to produce potatoes appropriate for French fries – it has also set up India’s first French fry factory north of Ahmedabad.

 

As Indian taste buds get globalized, global fruits and vegetables are getting localized. Just like your local kirana store will have Kikkoman sauce and Ocean Spray juices, and your panwallah will stock Toblerone, you can expect to find shiitake and zucchini from your vegetable vendor. You don’t have to go far for turkey during Christmas, and farm-raised is a telephone call away. And if you’re invited to hotelier Shiv Jatia’s farm, which is within 30 minutes of driving from South Delhi – you’ll see strawberries and tomatillos surviving Delhi’s scorching summer.

Twenty years back, magazines wrote ecstatic features on broccoli; now, asparagus and rocket are everyday conversation material, and your neighbourhood store can get mozzarella from a pioneer such as Flanders Dairy on the outskirts of Delhi. And for your supply of fresh tofu, as opposed to the vacuum-packed, preservatives-laden variety, you don’t have to look farther than Patel Nagar in West Delhi, where a production unit makes 450 kilos of it daily with technical expertise from a Japanese company.

 

Each such step enhances the food basket of Middle India, bringing luxe food to a wider market. A creative chef, conversely, can raise mass food to the realm of a style statement. The burger has undergone a dramatic transformation in the hands of chefs such as Bakshish Dean of The Park, New Delhi. Dean caught on to a global fashion trend and lifted what’s essentially a mass consumption item to a different level of finesse with the foie gras burger. In another space, Varq, the Indian fine-dining restaurant at the Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi, has completely rewritten the rule of food presentation. Traditionally, Indian food was all about taste, not finesse, but under the charge of the Taj’s high-flying corporate chef, Hemant Oberoi, it’s acquired another dimension altogether. Oberoi has shown how Indian dishes, as in the European tradition, can be made to look like works of art without their taste being compromised.

From being fashionable to becoming freely available, exotic food has made the qualitative leap in just a decade in Middle India, whose taste for gastronomic adventure has alerted the global food business to the emergence of a new market with staggering potential. The increasing visibility of international brands – and the concomitant success of food trade exhibitions – establishes the obvious. Indians have tasted a new world, and to borrow from the famous McDonald’s line, we are just lovin’ it.

 

* Sourish Bhattacharyya reviews restaurants for Mail Today and writes a bi-weekly food and drink column for the op-ed page.