How Taj's Karavalli has romanced coastal India for 25 years
With middle India's palate rooting for local flavours, the glamourisation of the tastes and textures we have grown up with, the rise of regional specialities to national prominence was only to be expected. This wave of nostalgia for "my grandmother's kitchen" owes its origin to restaurants that have given a second life to local cuisines that were struggling to survive even in the communities that gave birth to them.
As it turns 25 on June 20 at the Taj Gateway Hotel on Residency Road, Bangalore, Karavalli can proudly proclaim that is one of those pioneering institutions that literally rescued Indian restaurants of five-star hotels from the basements that used to be assigned to them. Five-star hotels then used to seriously believe that Indian restaurants were too "smelly" to be positioned above the ground. The success of ITC Maurya's Bukhara, which celebrated its 35th birthday last year, gave other hotels the confidence to bring their Indian kitchens out of hiding, but it was not before 1989-90, with Dakshin at the Park Sheraton (till recently an ITC hotel in Chennai) opening a year before Karavalli, that Indian restaurants finally got their pride of place in five-star hotels. And as people flocked to them, it was clear that the disdain the five-star hotels had for these gems was just a legacy of the blinkered vision of their European general managers.
Karavalli showcases cuisines of the country's south-western coast, starting from Goa, moving on to Karwar and Mangalore in Karnataka, and ending in Kerala, where the Palghat, Moplah and Syrian Christian kitchens have centuries of culinary excellence behind them. This is the cuisine Trishna, Gajalee and Mahesh Lunch Home made popular in Mumbai - without Karavalli, they may not have found a market.
A conversation with Karavalli's celebrity guardian angel, executive chef Naren Thimmaiah, will lead you to realise that there's a universe of difference between "south Indian food" as we have grown up to understand the term and south India's smorgasbord of cuisines created by unique geographies. When fresh out of catering college, Thimmaiah joined Karavalli 24 years ago, the then mentor of the newborn restaurant - Camelia Panjabi, the brain behind the Taj group's most successful brands, including House of Ming, Thai Pavilion and Konkan Café, and now an international restaurateur - sent him to Mangalore, to master old recipes from families that were willing to invest time in teaching him.
On going back to Mangalore, the young chef, who's from Coorg, discovered that just this coastal district is home to five distinctive cuisines - those of the Kshatriya Bunts (Aishwarya Rai is their most famous face), who are passionately non-vegetarian, the devoutly vegetarian, Konkani-speaking Goud Saraswat Brahmins, the Shivali Brahmins of Udupi (who have given masala dosa to the world), the Havyakar Brahmins, and the Mangalorean Catholics. Extending his vision to both sides of the south-western coast, Thimmaiah came across seven different souring agents used in the kitchens of this region. Two of them, used in ethnically diverse parts of the south, are from the same ridge-skinned fruit from the Garcinia family. The juice of kachampuli (Garcinia cambogia or brindleberry) is used to make the tart Coorg vinegar, which has a long-lasting sweetish finish. When Masterchef Australia's Matt Preston took a bottle of it back home, the vinegar made headlines. When the same fruit is dried and turns dark-skinned, it becomes known askudampuli in Kerala, and it lends a tang to the state's famous fish curry (meen vevichathu). For the Mangalorean fish curry, however, nothing less than the hog plum would do.
If Mangalore's kozhi gassi (chicken curry) tastes best with neer dosa, the attirachy ularthu (griddle-cooked lamb cubes with an unmistakable taste of fennel) from Travancore pairs best with Malabar parotta. We are talking about three states here - Goa, Karanataka and Kerala - and see the wealth of food we have out there. We need more restaurants such as Karavalli to discover and romance this diversity.