After a long hot day, all I want is a
chilled drink and a nice snack, and today was one of those days. We visited a
small place that serves Goan snacks and what looked most appetising, or so we
thought, were these golden brown perfectly shaped beef potato chops. We ordered
some and my first bite was heavenly as my teeth cracked passed the fried
crumbs, into that soft potato layer and then into a delicious stuffing that
would have made it the perfect beef potato chop had there been an adequate
amount of beef in it. As a restaurateur, I do understand that urge to sometimes
cut a corner to keep people unaware of food costs, especially those whose
criteria for good food is its “reasonable price”. But cutting corners and
cutting out an ingredient entirely are two different things. I was reminded of
a time I had prawn rissois without prawns, chicken patties with no chicken.
When I worked on the cruise liners we would get these weird orders like
cheeseburgers without cheese, or a ham and cheese with no ham, but these were
people requesting for ingredients to be left out.
A little better than not having chicken in
my chicken soup is having very little sausage in my sausage bread. In the quest
to serve a dish to a very price-conscious customer, the chef reduces the most
expensive ingredient, normally the main one, so as to keep the cost low and, in
turn, the price of the dish low. Snacks, especially Goan snacks are very
popular yet are rarely of great quality for this very reason, and there are
only a handful of caterers who produce good quality and charge accordingly. On
the flipside, there are places that serve snacks devoid of its protein, at high
prices just to make more money at the cost of the consumer. I have had beef
croquettes with more breadcrumbs than beef, mussels chilly which were mussel
pakodas that had let the slimy mussels slip away, and chicken drums of heaven
that were actually floury drums of hell.
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Then there is the heavy handed restaurateur
or caterer that is heavy handed with the wrong ingredients like chillies and
ajinomoto. Some people feel the addition of extra cloves and cinnamon will make
a pulao tastier than if you actually made a chicken stock or used a cube. Then there is the tea served in most snack
joints that has so much sugar that it will give you instant diabetes. Oil is
one ingredient where the quantity used is inversely proportional to the quality
and price and directly proportional to the quickness in the clogging of
arteries.
A dish should always have a perfect balance
of ingredients as the excess or lack of any makes it unsavoury and
unappetising. There are two jokes that come to mind; in the case of less, there
was this man in a restaurant who complained that there was no ham in his ham
sandwich, to which the waiter replied that next he would expect horses in his
horse radish sauce. There was this other gentleman complaining that there was a
fly in his soup, only to be hushed up by the waiter who told him to keep his
voice down or all the customers would want one.
