Food for Thought

The following post was published in an internal magazine released at my workplace

Being someone who enjoys food & also being someone who works in a Telecom related service, I got thinking about how the two can be related. No one really gives much thought to how technology can be used along with food. I decided to.

Food is an essential component of one’s life, and with the advent of telecom technology and plunging call-rates, so is the mobile phone & the Internet. How can the two possibly be related? Or how can the two be used together?

One of the earliest systems in place, and one which is very common is the Home Delivery option. A hungry chap calls the nearest takeaway counter from his telephone & he gets his order. Or, he can call up and make a reservation at a restaurant. That, in today’s world is considerably low tech.

RFIDs are making their appearance slowly in Inventory control & though not very prevalent in India, large supermarket chains like Tesco & Walmart in the US are already using them. Supermarkets mainly use them to update their servers to notify managers about stock shortages. Slightly building upon this premise, we can have the same piece of technology benefit the consumer too. This can be accomplished by having the Inventory server send out an SMS to the consumer informing him when something he was looking to buy, has reached the shelves. Taking it a notch higher, it can be updated in the form of a RSS feed on the Internet & the consumer can access it from the RSS reader on his mobile.

Closer to home, people trying out Mum’s recipes usually turn to Mum for advice. When Mum stays far away, a phone call does the trick. But what if Mum isn’t always available? The Internet may give you a recipe, but not the way Mum made it. Well, a possible alternative is to have Mum make podcasts when she’s free, and listen in to podcasts as and when required. Or Mum can upload videos on Youtube which can be accessed to give a visual. Obviously this suffers from the flaw that Mum should already have uploaded the content. Otherwise you can always wait for Mum to pick up the phone.

What do we do when we like a restaurant? We tell others. Well, now it is possible to share it with the whole world. Blogging about the experience and reviewing the place on a number of websites has become quite the norm with the tech savvy. If you can’t wait to tell your friends when you’re biting into a yummy chocolate brownie, and you don’t have the patience to blog from your mobile, then Twitter feeds can let subscribers to your feed know you’re indulging in some sinful pleasure.

We can expect in the foreseeable future, location based updates informing the user on his mobile about where the nearest diner is around lunchtime or about a special offer on eggs at the nearby supermarket. Thinking of something much simpler, SMS updates can tell a kid when an ice-cream cart is in the locality.

Google & Yahoo maps already offer directions to nearby eateries. Mobile phones have started shipping with GPS technology. Borrowing a theme from voice guided GPS systems that are offered by Mercedes & BMW, mobile phones will actually be able to guide a person to the nearest McDonalds soon. Obviously, it can be used to find directions to other places as well, such as a library for instance.

The above ideas are not exhaustive and are just thoughts on how technology can be combined with food to live a more convenient life and to illustrate that there is more to food & tech than toasters & microwaves. The possibilities are endless. As techies, we can definitely contribute to this scenario by innovating or implementing these ideas. Till we can actually use all this technology, let us stick to calling up Dominos for now

Cheers!

Bay Leaf

It was my turn to give a birthday treat and my friends had picked a restaurant in Egmore near the Museum. However a last minute check on burrp! Informed us that the place gets quite secluded after 8PM. So we had to find another alternative and browsing through burrp! gave me Bay Leaf in Nungambakkam. Reviews were fairly decent and burrp! said it served Bengali and North-West frontier cuisine. That was good enough for me.

We called and made reservations and were glad for the tip from burrp! The place is very small and can seat only about 5-6 groups. We reached by about 8PM and were warmly welcomed. We chose a cosy corner by the wall. One side of the table had a kind of diwan with bolsters and the other side had chairs. Chinese festoons hung from the ceiling.

The menu was quite extensive and had innumerable pages. We were rather confused on what to try, but I finally gave some Tastemasterly advice. Try Everything! So we ended up tasting Lucknowi, Kashmiri and Bengali cuisine.

We ordered a Chicken Reshmiya Katti Roll which tasted alright. The Katti roll, also called a Frankie usually has meat, egg or paneer or such filling rolled up in a Chapatti. We wanted to try Kebabs, so we went for the Kashmiri Kebab which tasted quite good. It had a crumby buttery coating outside and the meat was tender. We were licking our fingers with this one. Lucknowi Mutton biryani was chosen for the main course. Now, Lucknowi biryani is known for its aroma, but in this department, our biryani, when it arrived, was lacking. It tasted quite normal and there wasn’t anything to differentiate it from a biryani you could find in, say, Tiruvanmayur. I can pass better judgment when I visit Lucknow someday and have the real stuff.

For the Bengali stuff, we went for Bhetki fish fry which was delicious. It had Bhetki fish minced & mixed with coriander and bread crumbs to form large cutlets. We dug in with great relish. I had asked the waiter for Ileesh or Hilsa, but he sadly said that it was unavailable. After all this, I made a very logical argument that we had tried Chicken, fish and mutton and the poor prawns on the menu were feeling left out. So we ended up ordering Tandoori prawns. They arrived soon enough. Though they tasted fairly alright, an observation that I’ve made is that prawns are not Tandoori material. Being flimsy and delicate things which absorb flavour very fast, putting prawns in the Tandoor ruins their taste. You can only taste the masala and the carbon. You might be eating prawns or a piece of wood. Prawns belong in curries and soups where they are not exposed to direct flame However, we cleaned up the plate which is always the case when Tastemaster is around.
The service was excellent and our waiter was a very charming fellow who attended to us very well. Though he did not make any suggestions of his own, he enthusiastically responded for all our choices. He was crestfallen when we refused the rasgollas for dessert. But of course, he had not offered to pay for them. The bill came to around Rs 700 for three of us. An average dish costs about Rs 120. We left after a very satisfying experience and went home happy.

For the rating:

Ambience: 4
Taste: 4
Value for Money: 3
Service: 5
Overall: 4
Verdict: Must try!

Sree Annapoorna of Calcutta on Pantheon road is reputed to serve better Bengali food, but I haven’t been there yet. That’s on the cards soon. Till then,

Cheers!

Kattumaram

A friend owed a birthday treat and we ended up picking Kattumaram, a seafood specialty restaurant that specialized in cuisine from coastal Tamil Nadu. The place is located near the Park Sheraton in Alwarpet.

A train ride and short walk got us there. It is a small place with a narrow stairway and a seating capacity of about 30. The place was deserted when we reached and we picked a table under the AC. Soon we were feeling cold, but placed our order. We saw a few guests passing our level and going somewhere upstairs. Our waiter stared at their backs as if they were aliens and we were pretty sure they would be back in no time after finding an attic with old stuff at the top level. However, they didn’t return and that piqued our curiosity. We enquired and found that there was a roof top. We asked the waiter if we could also sit up and asked him to have the order delivered upstairs.

The rooftop was a mass of bamboo and looked very warm and welcoming. A kattumaram or Catamaran was placed over the stairway, but I managed to spot it only after a while. One would have guessed that the artifact which gives the place its name will deserve a more central location. But obviously, they were hard pressed for space.

Coming to the food, we ordered Yeral Thengai Soup (Prawn & Coconut soup). When it arrived, it tasted disgusting and I still have strong suspicions that they just heated up some water used to wash the dishes and served it to us.

For the main course, we chose Sigappi Nandu Biryani (Crab Biryani) over Vimalakka’s Kozhi Biryani (Chicken Biryani). Though Sigappi was mentioned to be one of the great Tamil cooks on the menu, a search on Google throws up few results and it takes a time to actually find a plausible reference to Sigappi being a cook.

We ordered a Moonru Meen Kuzhambu ( Fish curry with 3 varieties of fish) which claimed to have three varieties of the most delicious fish or something to that effect. A Kolachel Yeral Varuval ( Fried prawns) made up for accompaniment.

Food arrived and the portions were disappointingly small for the price they charge. A dish on average costs about Rs 120. The biryani is enough for one. But we shared. The biryani was alright and no great influence of Sigappi could be felt. The Moonru Meen Kuzhambu was delicious and we ended up licking the gravy off our fingers.

My Tastemasterly instincts had been pricked by the King fish advertised in the menu, and after seeking permission from the Treat-giver, we ordered the Kanyakumari Vanjiram Varuval ( Fried King fish). They serve a decent sized portion of fish-steak. The fish had a different taste to it, and though it was delicious, I have had better. Pick of the day remained the the Yeral Varuval followed by the Moonru Meen Kuzhambu. The soup is something I’m trying to forget.

The bill came to about Rs 600 and we skipped dessert. They don’t offer much. One thing I found attractive about this place is that as after-meal refreshment, they serve Supari (flavoured betel nut) and Kalkand (sugar crystals) along with the sweetened Saunf (Fennel) that is usually served in restaurants. It had been a long while since I’ve seen this offered and I was glad. We made our way down the narrow stairway and caught a bus back home.

For the rating:

Ambience: 4
Taste: 3
Value for Money: 2
Service: 3
Overall: 3
Verdict: Can try once.

Though it is advertised as serving some of the best seafood from all over Tamil Nadu, if I want really delicious fish, I’d rather go to Besant Nagar beach.

Cheers!