Lifestyle: Asian Bistronomy

It’s a rainy tues-day evening, the kind when you’d rather be home, curled up with a book and some single malt. But there are enough people who have braved the water-filled streets. And while Delhi may not be a Bangkok yet — a city of water ways — a peep into Ping’s Cafe Orient may almost convince you otherwise. Bright red walls, dim lights, cheery cocktails, wafting aromas of garlic, chilli, fried curry paste, nam pla, laughter and camaderie, just the impossible energy of it all belies the cloudburst outside and the fact that this is supposed to be the dullest weekday for those in the business of F&B.

Ping’s is one of the newest cafes on the block in the country’s dining capital. It is also proving to be one of its most successful launches of the year even as it tries to recreate the hustle and bustle, informality and grunginess of Asian street marts with their array of appetising, bold flavours. Ping’s evident popularity underlines a big trend in restaurant retail: That the Asian bistro format is here to stay.

For decades, Indian-Chinese ruled. It was the single most selling cuisine in the Indian restaurantscape after the equally bastardised “Mughalai”. But if contemporarised Indian has spelt a death knell for the latter, with wannabe restaurateurs vying with each other to now sell such dodginess as deconstructed chaat and butter chicken baos, the cafeisation of Asian food is an equally dominant trend. Punjabi-Chinese is dead. It has been replaced by what we can only loosely call “Asian bistronomy”. But despite the free hand chefs have with sriracha, sichimi and chilli jams within these casual dining bistros or cafes, the standard of dining itself does seem to have been raised. At least in comparison with the good old days of Manchurian and Sweet Corn soup.

If deep fried and sauced stuff worked wonders with an earlier generation of Indian diners, the Millennials have their own pop dishes when it comes to eating at these Asian cafes that have sprouted across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and even Chennai in the last two years. Sushi and dim sum have of course, got democratised and you no longer need to go to pricey restaurant brands to get your fix of quality stuff. In fact, one reason why expensive restaurants within hotels or top brands like Yauatcha suffer is because the more reasonably priced standalones are beating them at the café game with inventive and credible pop dishes and a much better quality to price ratio. The kind of seafood used at many of these cafes may be of a lesser quality, there may be more rolls than top grade sashimi, and the dim sum wrappers may be a tad thicker, but the quality you now get at the standalones is reasonable enough to not split much hair.

There are also the other modern tropes that have arrived in our metros straight to these cafes, not from Canton or Hong Kong direct but only via New York and London. The popularity of the baos and ramen, for instance, is testimony to that. If American-Taiwanese food took off thanks to New York-based chefs like David Chang, in India, a younger, better travelled, social media savvy audience is now sampling these pop Asian-American dishes at our own desi cafés.

Chains like The Fatty Bao (in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) and The Bao Haus Co (in Mumbai) have been at the forefront, giving to metro diners the same bites that many of them lived on in America as students or young professionals. Naturally, these tropes, along with the likes of tuna pizza or even the uramaki (inside out sushi invented in the US) and maki rolls with mayo and batter-fried shellfish are now so pervasive as to be almost mandatory in any of the new pop Asian cafes.

A more recent strand of retail, on the other hand, is the increasing focus on legit pan-Asian street flavours from our Asian neighbourhood itself. Instead of trying to replicate American formats, restaurateurs are now trying to bring in what they see as more “authentic” attempts to serve up Asian street food. Thailand, of course, is one of the most popular tourist destinations for Indians, but equally, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia and even Myanmar are well known enough to the average Indian diner.

The bold flavours of these south-east Asian countries are thus at once exotic and familiar—ideal for restaurant retail. These regional Asian cuisines play up bold flavours, with an intermingling of ingredients and cooking methods assimilated from China and India, the two regional super cultures in this part of the world. Equally, Korea and Japan occupy the pop mindspace and cafes are also bringing lesser known street dishes from these regions into the mainstream.

At Ping’s, for instance, what takes centrestage is the freshness of salads—ranging from the Thai raw mango to the Indonesian gado gado to the Japanese gomae. In fact, the menu is pretty comprehensive and includes everything that you could possibly want from the “asian street food” category — from pho to laksa—along with some inventive cocktails.

At Yum Yum Cha, the Delhi brand that has recently added another outlet in Gurgaon, the extending of its otherwise sushi-dim sum menu is more apparent. With the inclusion of such street eats as tako yaki (the Japanese wheat and octopus fried balls) and mochi ice cream (a confection made with pounded sticky rice with ice cream filling), the attempt is clearly at bringing to the table street dishes that have been earlier unknown in India.

Burma Burma, which describes itself as a restaurant and tea room, and has just opened a second outlet in Gurgaon after completing around two years with its Mumbai original, too expands the “Asian space” with off-the-beaten path offerings, even if they be strictly vegetarian. In Chennai, Tuk Tuk Asian, a new café which tags on the idea of “healthy eating” to Asian bistronomy, also shows a similar informal-and-inventive streak. Lightly cooked dishes with flavours from Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia are vegetarian and competitively priced. Diners can lounge around with books while they bite into these. What can be better indeed?

The author writes on food trends and history