C arnival eats are no longer about soggy sandwiches and crummy cupcakes. Especially when it’s the International Food Carnival, the headliner here is the food. Over the weekend, 67 stalls, each serving a different cuisine, dotted the lush lawns of Amir Mahal, the Nawab of Arcot’s residence. Ethiopian, Japanese, Kashmiri, Parsi, Maharashtrian, Chinese, Fusion, French, Singaporean... it was like a quick culinary tour of the myriad platters the world has to offer.
An offshoot of the Cardia Life SuperChef Chennai event, this food fair in its second year bettered its previous numbers of 35 stalls and 2,500 footfalls. This year, nearly 4,000 people visited the event. The organisers (Madras Cosmopolitan Ladies Circle 38, Madras Cosmopolitan Round Table 94 and the Rotary Club of Anna Nagar, Dist 3230) were delighted, while the home chefs, bakers, and restaurants who put up stalls, went about doling out orders to the hungry and the curious (or should we say epicurious) attendees.
As one walked by the stall put up by the Nawab’s family, it was impossible to miss the aroma of biryani. Asif Ali, Dewan to the Prince of Arcot, says, “The whole family got together to prepare food for this event. The cooks who’ve made the food have been with us for ages; they are fourth or fifth-generation cooks. These are our old traditional recipes, some dating back to hundreds of years.” The menu included zafraani badam bura, murg malai kebab, kadai kheer, lamb tagine and a few Moroccan staples like baklava and ghoriba. The favourites, however, were the mutton biryani and the almond tart. “We made 50 kilos of biryani and everything was sold out,” he adds.
The well-planned lot reached the venue by 5 p.m. and spaced out their eating spree. The ones who made it in the last moment had to wait in queues. Some of the stalls were sold out as early as 8 p.m. Mano J. Padmanabhan, winner of the 2013 edition of SuperChef Chennai, took part in the pop-up for the first time with his stall Big Bandha, and had to sadly turn away clients as his food was all polished off by 9 p.m. “Dragon idli, Tex-Mex bhel, baked parotta, paya ramen... these are all my own recipes and are made from common ingredients like jackfruit and beeda,” says Padmanabhan, a 36-year-old businessman from the city who has a passion for food.
Other than enthusiastic cooks from the city, the carnival also had Bashir Choncha, who flew down from Kashmir to give Chennaiites a taste of Kashmiri wazwan. He brought in the ingredients with him and cooked in the kitchens of Amir Mahal. “My father was a well-known cook in Kashmir and I have been cooking for events back home for the last 17 years,” adds Choncha. The interest in wazwan (a multi course meal mostly synonymous with weddings and celebrations), along with its unusual flavours spiked with traditional spices, ensured all of the 200 pieces of gushtabhas and rista got sold out.
Additionally, there were stalls by Jar Code, Splendid Food Company, Key Lime, Bhuira Jams, Kase, Aki Bay, dessert and savoury counters by Overseas Women’s Club, among others. A band played in the background as children busied themselves playing on the bouncing castle in between many helpings of kulfi and cake. The token counters made it fun to keep track of the number of tokens one was left with and the number needed to buy, for instance, the next plate of chicken quiche.
The event, with an air of the 90s-style carnival, brought a sense of nostalgia. And perhaps, this is a great way of enjoying Chennai’s “winter” while there still is a slight nip in the air.
