Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Insta made me eat it
There are more restaurants in India than ever before. There are more cuisines available than we have ever known. And , inevitably, there are more menu clichés (what we call 'food trends ' when we are being polite) than we have ever seen.
Call me a jaded old bore, but these are the current trends/clichés that I hate the most.
Dirty Sandwiches
There has always been a distinction between the European conception of a sandwich and its American counterpart. In Europe, sandwiches are clever combinations of ingredients that you can enjoy without feeling that a vat of ketchup has fallen on you.
The classic American sandwich has usually been a little fatter (the Reuben, the Hero, the hamburger etc) and has required you to open your mouth really wide while simultaneously ensuring that ingredients don't drop out of the sandwich as you are eating it.
That's fine with me, but what I object to is the trend to over-sauce sandwiches to create the so-called Dirty Sandwich. This kind of sandwich contains so much ketchup, mayo, melted cheese, hot sauce etc, that it is supposed to make your face dirty from all the sauce that will smear itself around your mouth or drip down to the front of your shirt.
We have imported this trend and I really don't see the point.
Loaded Fries
The French Fry is one of the world's great culinary inventions and its many variations (matchstick fries, steak fries, shoestring fries, triple-cooked chips, etc) are delicious when made fresh with the right kind of potato.
So, why do you need to dirty it?
It's the same phenomenon as the Dirty Sandwich. They pour melted cheese on the fries or douse them in truffle oil (more about which later) or drown them in some tomato-chilli sauce.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why they need to do this. Do these people not really like fries? Is that why they have to destroy their natural flavour and texture?
Matcha
Just as we mindlessly import trends from America, the Americans themselves have long abused Japanese cuisine by plundering its flavours, dishes and ingredients for rubbish variations.
One example is matcha, a specific kind of Japanese green tea powder, which has a distinctive flavour (if you use real matcha, which people outside Japan often don't) that I enjoy.
But now, bogus matcha is used to flavour everything, partly because the real matcha is expensive and, thanks to massive demand from America, in short supply.
You will get matcha versions of all kinds of food and drink now, from martinis to dumplings, and even when the Matcha flavour does not taste obviously fake, I have to say that I am fed up of the matcha overload and the extent to which people use it because it's trendy or they saw it on TikTok.
Fermentation and Foraging
Oriel Castro, who was head chef at El Bulli, and now owns the three-Michelin-star Disfrutar, held a super class (full disclosure: As Chairman of Culinary Culture I helped organise it) in Delhi last month and demonstrated how he had taken forward the techniques he had created with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli.
A fair number of India's great chefs flew in to attend it, and I think all of them had the same thought as me: It is a shame that the advances of El Bulli and Disfrutar have come to be represented by talentless imitators who spherify liquids and put foams on everything.
I feel the same way about the Noma legacy. If you talk to René Redzepi or eat at Noma, you realise that his food is about understanding the world around us and enjoying the best that the earth has to offer.
But like El Bulli (where Redzepi once worked) Noma has been ill-served by its imitators who think that the food is only about foraging and fermentation.
There is nothing I find more annoying than a chef who thinks that if he can pick up some dodgy-tasting leaves in a forest and ferment them for six weeks he can be the next René Redzepi.
Cheesecake
I love cheesecake, as I have often said on these pages. I am not snobbish about it; I grew up on frozen Birds Eye cheesecake not on some chefy version.
But now, as we are overwhelmed by an avalanche of cheesecake, all I can say is: Enough already!
My major problem with the cheesecakes I find at most places is that they are not very good. They are usually made by people who have no love of cheesecake but are simply replicating recipes they found on YouTube. Three years ago, they all made Biscoff cheesecake because the internet was full of videos that promoted a Belgian brand of Speculoo biscuits made by a company called Lotus. Because Speculoo is a ridiculous name, the biscuits were called Biscoff (short for 'biscuit with coffee' ) outside Belgium. The Biscoff cheesecake used a Speculoo base and (sometimes) Biscoff paste (a sort of Nutella for biscuit lovers). The people who made the cheesecake focused on the industrial Biscoff flavour rather than the cake.
Now, because the internet is full of recipes for Basque cheesecake, the same people have switched to making that. Basque cheesecake is not a traditional recipe, but is simply a cheesecake created by a restaurant in San Sebastián in 1988, which made a normal cheesecake but burnt the top. Nigella Lawson made it famous in 2020/2021 and now, people act like it's the only cheesecake that matters.
It's not. And I do wish people would go back to more interesting versions.
Truffle oil
It does not smell like truffles, but because of its low prices and ubiquity, people have actually begun to think that this is the aroma of truffles, having never smelled the real thing.
I don't mind that it's fake. I have no strong views on vanillin, for instance, the bogus vanilla that is usually used in India, because it costs next to nothing.
My problem with truffle oil is that it smells disgusting. To be in a restaurant that is serving truffle oil is like encountering a herd of farting goats. If you are unfortunate enough to consume it, the stink will stay with you: You will burp it up for hours afterwards!
And yet, all Indian chefs use truffle oil, claiming 'this is what the market demands'.
And finally
As you can tell from this rant, I have only just hit my stride. Expect another instalment soon!
From HT Brunch, June 21, 2025
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