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Cheeky Culinary Excursions

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Ravi Chander

There was never a need to dine out during my childhood days. My mother, Padmavathi, was adept at rustling up tasty treats, and my brothers four and I were content eating the simple homemade fare.
However, I began to pamper myself after joining the State Bank of India in June 1980. There were umpteen dining options in the vicinity of the branch where I worked. With many connoisseurs of good food for company, we made frequent trips to the nearby eateries, sampling the cuisine.
The evening badminton and table tennis rounds, which stretched late into the evening, left us famished. A dosa joint close to the bank became our favourite evening haunt, and overcome by hunger pangs, we sometimes devoured two dosas in one sitting. We watched in awe as the dosa maker skillfully used a clean broomstick to shape the dosas! Many of these dining experiences indeed had their lighter moments!
During the lunch-hour demonstrations (in the 80s) by members of the staff unions for a salary raise, my colleague GR Murthy and I would slip out of the branch and head to the iconic Koshy’s bar and restaurant.
Participating in demonstrations and strikes was not our cup of tea! So the forced ‘coffee break’ was timed to a nicety: we would exit before the slogan-shouting began and surreptitiously sneaked in via the back door soon after the demonstrations concluded! Nobody had any clue about our whereabouts during this time!
On another occasion, a close friend got his sums wrong while calculating the price relating to two plates of snacks at the famous KC Das outlet on Church Street, resulting in a bill that exceeded our purse. When the bill arrived, we discovered much to our embarrassment that we were agonizingly short by 25 paise (a sizeable amount then). We were in a real predicament with no one to bail us out.
Thankfully, the waiter, whom we had befriended, was a good samaritan and offered to make up the shortfall from his collection of tips. But only on the gentleman’s promise that we settle the amount the next day! But for him, we may have ended up doing chores in the restaurant’s kitchen!
A colleague (name not disclosed for obvious reasons) and I often frequented the popular Coffee House on M G Road – it has now moved to Church Street. The colleague had the knack of embezzling the tips money grateful patrons left behind for the waiters.
He would sneak up to a table that held them and wait for the server to disappear from view before zeroing in on the change and pocketing them. He was so adept at this daylight robbery that he never got caught red-handed!
I recall this tiny non-vegetarian hotel just off MG road run by a man always attired in white trousers and coat, earning him the nickname, ‘Doctor’. He was a one-person army, managing the kitchen and patrons all by himself. While the fare was sumptuous, many patrons were visibly upset with the size and quantity of the served meat cubes.
The ‘doctor’ also erred in charging steeply for the dishes and paid the price as patrons slowly kept away, leading to a drop in business and the subsequent downing of the eatery’s shutters. However, these memorable culinary excursions are hard to forget!
(The author is a former banker who has taken to writing as a past time. He is a regular contributor to Kashmir Vision besides writing for other regional and national publications)


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