Whenever I read about the big fat Indian wedding spectacle on foreign shores, I am left wondering how you can have a vegetarian feast in countries where chefs swoon over all forms of edible life. The families who host such weddings seem to have figured out how you can indulge your taste buds without harming a living organism.
As they have all the money in the world, they have invested in an ecosystem of caterers who know exactly how to cater to their whims. Today, the work at blockbuster weddings that make international headlines is more or less parcelled out to Ritu Dalmia, who manages the logistics with Marut Sikka, who’s a great one at discovering forgotten cooks and their classics across India, and Indian Accent at Home, which is the upper-crust catering division of Old World Hospitality steered by Manish Mehrotra and his two exceptionally bright colleagues, Vivek Rana and Shantanu Mehrotra.
Marwaris insist additionally on the services of either Munna Maharaj or Surja Maharaj, traditional caterers who connect their jet-set clients to their cultural roots; for Thai food, the choice is always the temperamental Tukta; and for the Ambanis, no party is complete without the presence of the Surat-based cater, Tapan Choksi, whose mother is the favourite cook of the family’s matriarch, Kokilaben.
With so much money riding on all-vegetarian extravaganzas, no catering company can afford to come up with pedestrian menu. For the Kristal-and-caviar set, or the "Bollygarchs", as London’s lifestyle writers call them, there’s no getting away with gobhi Manchurian and shahi paneer.
I asked Rana, the son of an Army lieutenant colonel who chose to pursue his passion to become a chef, about the touches that make a vegetarian wedding spread special. He started with the example of the masala papad bar he had set up on a reconditioned boat for the Puglia wedding of Pramod Agarwal’s daughter.
All of us love masala papad with our whisky-soda, but what Rana’s boys did was turn papad cones into gourmet statements. The challenge, though, was to make sure each cone got consumed within 50 seconds of it being made, otherwise it would turn into a soggy mess because of the constant sea breeze, and the young man who volunteered to squeeze himself into the boat could barely move his limbs after the party got over.
He had spent more than four hours serving the guests from his inhospitable perch, without getting a moment to stand up and stretch. Next to him, Manish Mehrotra’s invention, phulka tacos, were flying out of the counter with toppings such as soya keema, paneer bhurji and kathal (jackfruit).
Papad may be commonplace, or so may be the other rich-and-famous favourite — dal Moradabadi with chur chur naan or paranthas made with the Bihari horse gram staple, sattu, but truffles, which cost a fortune, certainly are not. At these weddings you’d get the feeling that truffles were going out of business.
After the bhel bar, the latest fashion is to lay out a truffle bar, serving beauties such as wild mushroom sliders with blue cheese and a topping of truffles and Himalayan morels tossed with truffles. As a guest at one of these weddings later told me, “The aroma of truffles is the first thing that strikes you as you’re led into the grand settings where these multi-million-euro weddings are staged”.
The trick is to let your creativity do the talking. Replace spinach in the commonplace palak patta chaat with shiso, or Japanese perilla leaves, whose function in a sushi bar is to hold grated wasabi. Give the aloo tikki a crunch by crusting it with panko, or Japanese bread crumbs. Both were hits at the sit-down dinner for 650 in Bangkok at the silver jubilee celebrations of Aloke Lohia’s Indorama conglomerate.
Sex up the everyday pyaaz ki kachori with parmesan foam. And, for a fitting finale, give the guests mithai served in the tak-a-tak style, topped up with rabri, with a Bailey’s ice gola at the end to open up their doors of perception.
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