At a time when Indian cuisine is becoming increasingly popular all over the world, India too is opening up its doors to world food. One of the biggest gifts of globalisation, apart from a shrinking world, is perhaps that of food explosion across the globe.
With India quickly becoming a favourite among foreign travellers and the Indian market attracting more and more foreign delegates, adapting Indian menus to global tastes has become a necessity now.
Chinese cuisine had already made deep penetration into Indian market and is now a favourite among the new age Indian people. Almost every second restaurant in India now serves Chinese food. Not only that many food joints have also kept Chinese cooks keeping in mind the rising demand of such food.
But the latest food trend that seems to be taking urban India by storm is food from Africa.
Dishes from Nigeria, Morocco, Mozambique, East Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa are now finding their way across cafê menus, standalone restaurants and even private catered events. Moroccan staples like couscous, tagines and lamb stews now are as commonplace as pasta primavera.
According to food experts, the spices in North African cuisines are easily acceptable to the Indian palette. Tagine, a north-African stew typically cooked in a covered earthenware dish, is cooked in broth and a special spice mix that contains pepper, chillies and star anise and is garnished with apricots, almonds and olives. It is now a favourite on many restaurants’ menu cards.
And the interesting trend is that those foods which used to be once restricted to the menu cards of five-star hotels, today are available in smaller and smaller food joints too.
A popular African dish Photo courtesy uktv.co.uk
Boombox Cafê in the country’s capital New Delhi’s Khan Market that offers the street vibe with its graffiti-strewn walls along with the compulsive teenage accessory, sheeshas, has one page of their menu dedicated to street food from Africa. So there’s South African bunny chow fighting for one’s attention along with the East African version of the sheesh kebab and Moroccan stew.
The Gatsby sandwich and Bunny Chow are some of our most popular dishes there.
Some catering services say they are getting orders for different types of food to be served at private parties too. So along with local favourites butter chicken, daal makhni and murg malai tikka, demands are rising for South African street food and Ethiopian community meal too.
The Ethiopian community meal includes aabata (a traditional salad), injera (a large sourdough flat bread), wat (legume stew), fasola (sautêed Kenyan beans and carrots), yebet alitcha (lamb stew), doro wot (chicken stew with red peppers), aterkik (split peas cooked in a mild sauce) and an African-style pineapple cooked in red wine for dessert.
One African food that millions of people chomp down on happily everyday is peri peri chicken, a mix of Portuguese and Mozambique flavours. There are a number of restaurants now in various India cities which offer cuisine that can properly be said to originate from the Mozambican Portuguese community in South Africa.
These restaurants are serving the food with proper sauces too to add to the flavor. The Peri-Peri sauce, made with African birds eye chillies, have also made inroads into Indian restaurants.
No wonder the Generation Next in India are growing up as true world citizens. They are not only using foreign made gadgets, but they are developing a taste bud for different types of food too.
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