I recall when new restaurants prided themselves on their fare: French, Italian, Middle-Eastern, Oriental.… The chefs would be carefully picked from native lands and then allowed months in their new workplace to develop their final menu. Today, sadly, a lot of those nuances seem lost as we find the rise of a new food style: The Rental Cuisine. Significant traits of this type of fare include food that alludes to a cuisine like a second cousin, showing resemblance but no strong characteristic traits of authenticity. It often hides behind words like ‘fusion’ or ‘nouveau’ and while it does have a chef with an authentic accent, its prime objective is to help the owner pay rent, make money and keep investors happy. Nothing wrong with those objectives but trouble is if you not just like food but know your food, you come away disappointed.
My recent meal at BoTai, I must share, was very different from what I had gathered from the grapevine. Well, BoTai got my goat because I loathe eateries trying to sound smug, deploying cheesy portmanteau (bow tie/Thai). But then the food, barring possibly two starters, was quite a let-down; it wasn’t authentic Thai and lacked the creative prowess to allow it to be truly modern Thai either. Yet, the place continues to pull in the crowd; rental cuisine at its best!
Another outlet that is working marvellously well with the swish set of the capital (but one that left me disappointed) was MKTCafe, from the same team behind the exceptional Perbacco eatery at The Lodhi. This is the latest outlet at New Delhi’s poshest new address but the service was deplorable, however, that can be attributed to basic teething issues. What left me more miffed was the fact that the food seemed a rather shoddy effort at recreating the respective cuisines.
We tried fare from their Asian and Mexican sections but nothing really stood out or was remotely memorable. (And who charges extra for sour cream with tacos? That’s akin to expecting me to pay for salt with my fries!) And yet the place was packed and the teeming luncheoning ladies didn’t seem half as perturbed as me, absolutely not.
It’s common for cuisines to adopt local flavours in foreign lands so as to appeal to the locals but places that pose as fine dining spaces should know better. Relegating their responsibility to educate patrons on what the cuisine should truly taste like, they instead focus on ensuring that their steady nouveau riche clientele can find enough cognisance with the fare to keep coming back; so much so that they start inventing food which alludes to the authentic but is too distorted (or doused) for (my) comfort. That’s rental cuisine.
I know I am the minority here who ranks these places among the sea of F&B mediocrity out there, exploiting the four (cornerstone) Cs of rental cuisine: Compromise, Cost-cutting, Cipolla (Onions), and Chilli. Smack these on any platter and chances are that your average luncheoning ladies crowd won’t mind shelling out a few K for the experience.Oh, as a caveat, I must add, I visited these places as a paying client with no special services being doled out for me (and I will certainly visit them again, second chances and all). But more than the money I wasted, it was the sacrifice of one good mealtime that ain’t never coming back which had me more riled up.
The writer is a sommelier. mail@magandeepsingh.com