01 November 2012, 11:40 AM IST
This week, I became the target of some serious envy from friends, family and even strangers when I revealed on Facebook that I had met Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris, stupendously popular judges from the TV show everyone, their grandmother, and their three-year-old-who-can-barely-talk, watches: Masterchef Australia.
It's no secret that the show is a huge cultural phenomenon, and has possibly transformed, for ever, the way Indians look at food. There are many reasons the show is such a staggering hit, and they are too well-known and well-thrashed out for me to list them here. But one reason is probably great timing: the show started airing at a time when new restaurants serving formerly alien cuisines began to open up in Indian metros and when the supermarket explosion helped you source ingredients that you'd have had to ask relatives returning from abroad to get even a few years earlier.
Actually, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: it can be argued that Masterchef Australia created a tremendous wave of awareness about food we previously had no clue of how to go about cooking; it also encouraged people who had never stepped into the kitchen earlier – or stepped into it to only make the daal-chawal kind of stuff – to go scouting around for ingredients, hoping to rustle up the fancy stuff they'd just seen coming out of the Masterchef kitchen.If I needed proof that this was indeed a show that had almost started a food revolution in India, I got it when I worked on a story on extremely young people in the kitchen (http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JQkcvMjAxMi8wNS8yMCNBcjAwODAw&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom). Without exception, all the children I spoke to, their parents, and those who conducted cooking workshops for kids said Masterchef Australia, in both its primary and 'Junior' versions, was responsible for this tremendous enthusiasm for cooking among children (and for the Masterchef-themed birthday parties that are now de rigueur for any self-respecting young fan of the show). Indeed, when I let slip on Facebook that I'd met the judges, the loudest wails came from parents of teens and pre-teens, who said Tina or Sneha or Vikram would have given an arm and a leg to be in my shoes.
I met Gary and George (who are so friendly and unpretentious that I can't bring myself to refer to them as Mr Mehigan and Mr Calombaris) at the Bangalore restaurant Caperberry, where chef and co-owner Abhijit Saha had pulled out all stops to make sure they had a memorable meal. So, over six courses of Saha's trademark artistically plated, refreshingly light and innovative European food, we chatted about Indian food, eating in Indian restaurants here and abroad and the discoveries the two Aussies had made on their tour of three Indian cities – Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.Gary and George's experiences with Indian cuisines dominated the conversation – and the overwhelming conclusion from it was that our food really needs some great marketing. George and Gary said, again and again, that they had had no idea of the variety and depth of our nation's food culture, and it had taken a trip to India for them to realize that there is, in fact, no such thing as "Indian food" (and that it is not defined by what the world calls 'curry' ). "Indian food is not Punjabi food," said Gary. "It's not all hot, red curries. Whew, who knew," he said, while George, who famously sweats when his palate is presented with anything spicier than a bell-pepper, pretended to wipe sweat off his brow. "I haven't been sweating that much, honestly," said George. "It's not like the food is overwhelmed with chilies. The flavours actually come through."
Both seemed to have loved south Indian food (and I would like to believe this was not just PR-speak because they happened to be in Bangalore). "I loved that flat bread, it's like string-hoppers, it's got a fermented taste… what IS it called," flailed a visibly excited Gary till someone on the table supplied him with the right term: appam. They claimed they plan to work with ingredients intrinsic to south Indian cooking, like tamarind and curry leaves. They also asked for restaurant recommendations for their blessedly unscheduled final day (going by Gary's Twitter feed, they ended up at Dakshin at ITC Windsor).
One of the most obvious questions was – is Masterchef ever coming to India for its country challenge round, when the top 10 finalists are taken to a location outside Australia for several days and cook its food? The idea had been discussed quite seriously, Gary revealed, but had fallen through because of budget constraints. "It's a huge exercise, you know, shooting on location. You need hundreds of people, tons of equipment… and seriously, can you imagine trying to film (episodes like those) in this village square," he added, waving towards the road where Bangalore's relentless traffic continued to trundle on.Someone on the table must have been thinking about khap panchayats, because we suddenly found ourselves talking about chowmein. Surprisingly, Gary didn't turn up his nose at it. "Indian Chinese? You know what, it exists. Chicken tikka masala? It exists. People have been cooking something for 50 years – no matter what the purists say, it exists. Some guys scoff at spaghetti bolognaise –say there's no such thing. I always tell them, my mum's been making it for 40 years – there's no way you can tell me it doesn't exist!"
Lunch over, the two trotted over to a nearby jewellery showroom, where Gary shocked us all by declaring he was going to haggle over prices. "No, no, you don't do that at these kind of places!" we cried, but he told us with a seraphic smile that he ALWAYS asks for a bargain. "I do it everywhere. I just tell people, is that the best you can do for me? And you know, it works!"
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