Column

Gastro Gnome

With the opening of the Olive restaurant at the Amateur Rider’s Club Enclosure and the impending opening of the Indigo (although it won’t be called that) at the Turf Club, the introduction of the Quereshi’s Dum Phukt at the CCI and the Otters, Club land is pullulating with new restaurants and dining options, changing in a radical way what club food is perceived to be all about. Or is it?

Traditionally, club food, at least in the Indian clubs, continue in that Anglo-Indian cuisine which was infra dig at the time of the Raj - cutlets, fried fish with tartar sauce, salads sodden with mayonnaise (classically, the Currimbhoy) and occasionally, as a nodto the nativecuisine, a chicken curry and rice.

Over the years that has changed, with iconic British dishes such as the Shepherd’s Pie now hardly figuring on any menu except for the Yacht Club which does a particularly good one. Increasingly, Raj food was edged out by tandoori, Punjabi, Gujarati thalis and the omnipresent Chinese. The English members had gone home and the Indians wanted to eat their own food, or, at least food they were comfortable with. Historically, the only significant club, the Bombay Club which had refused to kow tow to local taste and even admit Indian members, the Byculla Club, closed down.Those who remember it do so for its famous pudding. A pudding gloriously calorific, with huge quantities of alcohol, is now prepared by a couple of Parsi caterers.

The interesting question though is whether quality cooking can survive in clubs, given the pricing structure. Traditionally, clubs were seen as respectable alternatives to five star hotels. Often, the excuse given for the differences in pricing were things such as taxes and, of course, infrastructure costs.

This is not the whole story. What is interesting is the experiment the Bombay Gymkhana had with the introduction of Moshe’s a couple of years ago in the Pavilion restaurant.Moshe revamped the menu and made it in his own image. Exotic ingredients like cous cous, sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar and other such hardy perennials of today’s cooking were introduced, but the restaurant closed down amidst some acrimony. From what I understand, club members were not willing to pay that extra for quality and Moshe was not willing to compromise on that.The problem is that quality food costs a lot — aborio rice is needed for risottos and parmesan cheese, quality cuts of meat, etc.
The examples I started this article with are, to put it crudely, real estate plays.At the Turf Club there was an abandoned tote office which is now being converted into a restaurant open to all, with club members getting a nominal reduction.

This seems a sensible model, particularly when you have the sprawling area which the Turf Club occupies.Similarly, the Olive next door at the amateur Rider’s Club is open to everyone. The difficulty is that clubs such as the Bombay Gymkhana, Willingdon and the CCI put a premium on their exclusivity and the question of allowing outsiders to come into the premises does not arise.

With many of the members now aged and retired, the matter of cost of dining is a big issue. It is for this reason that most club food is now stuck in a sixties time warp — sad, but true.
Email—javed.gaya@gmail.com