When "legendary" and "iconic" stop being that
Being a thoroughbred Mumbaikar, the references of eateries in today’s post are from my city. A large chunk of my subscribers are also from Mumbai (though many have fanned out in different parts of the world) and hence are familiar with many of the places I will be mentioning. For those few ones who don’t hail from Mumbai, I think the underlying theme behind this post is something that is fairly universal and I think you will be able to relate to it by replacing the names of the Mumbai establishments with those of the ones in your city.
A morning meeting in downtown Mumbai is something I have always looked forward to. Because then you can plan a good lunch at any of the countless joints that are peppered all over. Also especially when you have recently been to a fabulous place that you had been told to go to for many years but never came around to going, and are faced with the mouthwatering prospect of visiting it again. Cafe Military being that place. So me and a colleague had it all planned out - do the meeting for a couple of hours, hop into a cab, and go to Cafe Military for lunch. But there were other plans being cooked (peppered … mouthwatering … cooked … too many food related puns … sorry) by unknown forces. And if those forces were not at work, then today’s post would have been about something else. Let me explain.
Our meeting stretched on for an hour more than we had anticipated. It was around 1:45 - 2 pm that our meeting wrapped up and my colleague had an important con-call to take from office at 4 pm - office being the other end of town, a roughly hour long train ride. It meant that a beer lunch at Cafe Military was out of question. Being in Ballard Estate, and literally a stone’s throw from Britannia & Co, we had no choice but to quickly hop across over to the restaurant. Only to be greeted by a forbidding sign at the entrance that proudly declared:
This didn’t come across as a surprise - not being a first timer at Britannia I was aware of its quirks . There are still establishments who don’t want to let go of their tax evasive ways and hence insist only on cash. The most use one has of cash these days is to pay the kaali-peeli (black & yellow) cabs … many of whom have also migrated to cashless transactions. But not Britannia. Finding ourselves woefully short of any meaningful amount of cash between the two of us, we trudged across a few hundred meters to find the nearest ATM. It ate up another 20 odd minutes of the precious little time we had at our disposal. We were pleasantly surprised to find the restaurant half empty, though this was peak lunch time hours in the middle of a still bustling business district. The reason for that became apparent the moment we sat at a table and checked out the menu. Then we looked around, and then looked back at the prices. A meal at a fine dining restaurant in one of the nearby 5-star hotels would possibly be a little more expensive than the one that we were sitting in. And we were nowhere even in a 500 mile vicinity to what a fine dining restaurant looks or feels like. Proof below:
A restaurant that used to be bursting at its seams with packs of office goers for whom it was their go-to lunch spot, had as many patrons as are there in the picture above. Britannia, we realised, had out-priced themselves and over-milked the charm of eating in a ‘we are like this only’ quaint place littered with signboards that were once felt to be ‘cute’ but now reeked of rudeness and a care-a-damn attitude. A couple of examples:
Stories of the rudeness of the owner manning the counter and his high decibel and humiliating retorts to paying customers are legendary. It will make the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld look like a kindly old uncle.
Why would people who had tons of options to choose from at the swipe of a screen on food delivery apps subject themselves to such an ambience where walls had peeling paint, were black with a mix of dust and soot, the ceiling had exposed rusted bars, no air conditioning, no comfortable seating, semi-clean cutlery placed by semi-hygienic waiters wearing stained white shirts with bowties? And then to be served severely overpriced food whose reputation was clearly resting on its laurels, than living up to it. If Gordon Ramsay were to do an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, he would not take up the challenge of turning it around in a week. He would accept defeat even before trying.
We looked around at our fellow patrons and it was amply evident to us that many of them were the ‘touristy’ types or the prodigal daughters/sons/aunts/uncles returning home for their annual vacations and wanting to relive their experiences of the Mumbai of yore. So what if it meant sweating it out in a restaurant that now prides itself on its rudeness than its food (Vir Sanghvi must have been inspired to name his column Rude Food after a visit to Britannia), where there are crates of empty bottles and sacks of flour and rice are placed right adjacent to the tables, where there is every chance that a sooty, sticky lump of dirt might just fall off the slowly rotating fan that was last wiped in … or was it at all?
The place has been around a century or so. It was a place that many knew of, frequented by nearby office goers and sundry others who sauntered in when they were that side of town. Its claim to fame for many cinema lovers was thanks to an uproariously funny scene that was shot for the 1988 blockbuster Tezaab. (How the owner allowed a full fledged shoot when photography is not allowed is not clear to me!)
By the time the new millennium had dawned, the place had kind of fallen on hard times (self-inflicted thanks to family squabbles, I believe). Which is when they pulled off what I call one of the greatest marketing stunts I have seen in recent times. A single front page article in a leading afternoon daily with a headline that screamed “Britannia to shut down” with some stories of how the Queen had written to the owner, how the English royals were their fans, how they stopped serving their signature berry pulao during the first Gulf war as the imported berries they got from the middle east couldn’t be procured, etc etc. and how this great institution that defined the spirit and fabric of Mumbai was on the verge of shutting down.
Overnight, the ‘just another Irani joint that served good food’ suddenly saw long queues and a minimum 30 minutes waiting time. Celebrities started frequenting and the place was started getting written about. So what if it doesn’t have an AC, so what if its not as clean as what an eatery has to be, and so what if it is a little more expensive than what I would expect it to be? Patrons didn’t mind the less than ideal eating conditions as they saw themselves saviours of the last of the bastions of what Mumbai was all about.
Britannia had made its own lack of initiative and the resultant problems a virtue that it realised it could successfully milk.
My latest experience there coming off after a gap of more than 5 years tells me that it has reached the breaking point of the economic concept of price elasticity of demand. The stubbornness about not changing, the lack of quality of its core product – food, the lack of a regular clientele thanks to the ridiculous pricing are all contributors to the empty tables at peak lunch hours.
While I have singled out my most recent experience at Britannia (for me Britannia has become symbolic of the rot that has set in the hyped humble-restaurant business), on thinking a bit on the drive back home I realised that many of Mumbai’s famed food joints had all become different versions of Britannia. Below are some examples that come to mind …
Irani joints like Kayani, Sassanian, Stadium Restaurant to name a few. At least Café Mondegar and Café Leopold are unabashedly touristy, so we can give them that they haven’t strayed from their focus.
Street food joints like Bade Miya that now has brick and mortar presence in different parts of the city.
Proper sit down unlimited thali joints like Thakkar Bhojanalay and Rama Nayak’s are pale shadows of their glory days – good food, no doubt, but just not how it used to be.
Simple snack joints like Swati Snacks whose portions are more for diet enthusiasts than for patrons who want a sumptuous meal – the prices, though, are sumptuous for the owners.
Café Madras gets hordes of people who think they stand a chance to either meet or become Mr. Ambani just by eating at the restaurant that he has been known to have a fondness for.
The last two establishments probably suffer from massive ego bloating since the city’s most expensive address (Antilia, duh!!) still often orders from them, is what we are told.
Sardar Pav Bhaji and Elco Pani Puri now seem like distant cousins of the originals that made them in the first place.
And these are to just name a few. Every neighbourhood and every suburb of Mumbai will have their own versions of Britannia.
Superlatives like “legendary” and “iconic” are almost always used to describe these joints. Words that have increasingly come to stand for resting on past glory, laziness, lack of initiative and innovation, a rude attitude, frugality in spending on the basics, a declining slide in product quality, deliberate or faux or pseudo ‘old-world’ charm, but being way ahead of the times when it comes to ridiculously high pricing that is at odds with fulfilling basic expectations.
More than any of the surround elements of an eatery like ambience, décor, location, and even pricing to some extent, how is it that at the first whiff of fame the first thing to go out the window is the quality of food? It’s like these guys had one job to do. Just one job. Serve deliciously good food. You can’t … you shouldn’t … mess that up. There is a simple reason why establishments like Gallops, Gaylord (don’t snigger ye Gen Z’er), Pritam, Great Punjab, a Maharastrian food joint called Prakash, Highway Gomantak just to name a few … and that reason is that they haven’t compromised on their core product. I have been frequenting these joints for more than 3 decades and they still evoke the same sentiments that only a high level of culinary satiation can evoke.
At the other extreme there were the low key joints like Café Samovar which built its reputation not necessarily as an outstanding eatery, but as an outstanding venue to have an enriching time undisturbed by the waiting staff. Of course the food and the beer wasn’t too bad either. But that was more of an accompaniment to whatever else that you were doing. Or take the case of Café Naaz which charged you table fees for the location on which it was situated giving by far the best view of the city of blinding lights this side of the world. Unfortunately both shuttered due to some archaic legal problems. But give me them over any of the over-priced tourist traps whose reputations no longer match their by-now suboptimal fare.
Question is what causes this slide? Does undue media attention cause the decline in taste? Do the occasional visits by celebrities, or even the mere mentions by them make them think they can get away with anything only because some influential sort has vouched for them? It’s a problem, I think, of beginning to believe in their own myth – a subject that I had written about in one of my earlier posts about celebrityhood being a two-way street (read here).
In the case of restaurants isn’t their allegiance to their core product far more important than the surround sound of their stories and myths and celebrity patrons? Isn’t it their duty and obligation to keep their end of the bargain without compromising it at the altar of their (often new found) fame? Just the way it’s the job of food bloggers and vloggers to tell stories about “legendary” and “iconic” eating joints, so it is also their job to call them out when they don’t keep their end of the deal. Oftentimes it feels like many of the known journals and people can’t tell the truth for fear of losing their own followers. Even a cursory search for “articles critical of Britannia” doesn’t turn up any results from any reputed publications. For that you will have to go to some sub-Reddits. And man, are they brutal!
So how does one still unearth hidden gems if you don’t have a local source to guide you? The master of the game – Anthony Bourdain – has a solution that he calls provoking Nerd Fury. Bourdain suggests writing a fake post about how you “just got back from Rome!” and had the best food of your life there. Name drop a restaurant at random and wait for the comments to roll in. “The torrent of informative abuse that will come your way from people who want to tell you how stupid, witless, and uninformed you are will be very instructive,” he says. “It will, of course, mention the tiny little place, the tiny little trattoria ristorante that they experienced.” People will start to agree on certain places and, if 10 to 12 “nerds,” as Bourdain calls these impassioned experts, point to the same spot, it’s probably worth checking out. If you’re already on the road, Bourdain offers a simple test to narrow down the places that know what they’re doing from the ones that don’t. “My favourite restaurants are ones where they only do two or three things,” he says. “A place that does three things and it looks like they’ve been doing those same three things for a very long time — that’s a really healthy sign.”
So there you have it. Take a little bit of effort if you don’t want to encounter Britannia, or its types, in your city. And if you don’t have the luxury of time the way me and my colleague didn’t have, and don’t want to get confused by the ‘restaurants near me’ results dished out (I promise this is the last food-y pun) by Google, then check with the nearest cabbie on which is a nice place to grab a quick bite. You will be surprised by their unbiased recommendations. They could very well take you to Cafe Military or its equivalent in your city.
Be braver. Be kinder.
For Keep Watching this time I am sharing the review of a film that has a galaxy of “legendary” and “iconic” actors, helmed by the newbie son of a “legendary” and “iconic” director. And yet, the end product is anything but that.
Arjun Kapoor and Kumud Mishra are two corrupt cops (Mishra being the slightly reluctant one) who cross paths with an ageing don (Naseeruddin Shah, wasted), another corrupt cop (Tabu, saving grace), a Naxal leader (Konkona) and a whole bunch of other shady types. Basic plot is that Kapoor and Mishra find themselves between a rock and hard place and have to resort to plan a heist on a security van to be able to pay off to stay alive and retain their jobs. What ensues is a bloodfest in an increasingly convoluted plot. Directed by Aasmaan Bhardwaj, (Vishal Bhardwaj’s son - we now have nepotism in direction as well that has helped the son land the biggest names in the acting department to star in his debut outing) what is meant to be a dark, comic, thriller that is inspired by the Tarantino/Guy Ritchie/Sriram Raghavan schools of filmmaking, Kuttey is neither sufficiently dark, nor is it a thriller and, save for a few laughs, misses on the comedy quotient as well. It’s a try hard at best where instead of a bark it all ends in a whimper.
Kuttey | Netflix
Hi Shantanu , you have brought out a harsh reality of the once iconic restaurants in a very unbiased yet hard hitting way . On one side , all our fond memories make us go to these legendary places but most of them indeed take their success and customers for granted after a point . I also feel that like like any other business, these places also need to reinvent themselves while keeling the core intact . And I hope they will.