A taste of far, far away

Indian Continental cuisine is a genre unto itself. Restaurants would tweak global recipes for local palates. They stuck and now form our core memories

- VIR SANGHVI

Delhi's Connaught Place has recovered its mojo and the restaurants there are booming once again. It is pretty much the same story with most Indian metros. Kolkata's Park Street is booming too. In Mumbai, the Churchgate Street restaurants seem to be back to the 1960s/1970s heyday.

The restaurants had made their reputations on what was called Continental cuisine in those days. When I look back on the Continental dishes of that era, I wonder if the people who cooked them had any idea of what the original versions of these dishes were like. Certainly, I doubt if they knew how any of them had been created.

Let's take Chicken Tetrazzini, a great Calcutta dish, which owes its popularity to the legendary Sky Room restaurant which, if I remember correctly, closed in the early 1990s. It is a heavy combination of chicken, pasta, cream, and cheese. If that sounds terrifyingly fattening and rich, you are on the right track.

The dish was created for the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940) who epitomised the phrase, “it ain't over till the fat lady sings.”