Coming of age in Pondicheri

I have been composing this post in my mind for as long as I can remember, finally prompted by the 2011 opening of a stylishly industrial new Indian restaurant in the upper Kirby district of Houston to sit at last with my thoughts. The restaurant is the second initiative of Anita Jaisinghani, who worked as pastry chef at Café Annie [now RDG] for some years before opening her own Indika to much critical acclaim. Her newer establishment is called Pondicheri.

I must confess off the bat: reading about Pondicheri from Pondicherry, or Puducherry as this town is now formally known, got me more than slightly annoyed. All the more so because just about all the non-Indians I know who’ve visited have raved about the place, its food, and its style. So the task of explaining my discontent is that much more daunting (and very likely the reason this post has waited for so long), precisely because it appears already counterintuitive. Besides, it’s not a simple matter of writing a restaurant review, although that’s an element of the narrative that follows, but more: Pondicheri marks a point on a historical trajectory that began when the first Indian immigrants arrived on American shores, missing their food and wanting to share it. Pondicheri bespeaks an immigrant history–and the space it occupies, with so many tall windows, beautiful fabrics, and metallic sheen, is a perfect vantage point from which to contemplate the wider context within which this latest experiment takes form.

This post therefore is, and is not, about a stylishly industrial restaurant in Upper Kirby that calls itself “Pondicheri.” Rather, I’m wondering: what does Pondicheri have to tell us about the coming of age of Indian cuisine in North America?

But first, the history:

By the late 1980s, around the time we emigrated to Canada, there existed roughly two sorts of Indian eateries. On the one hand were the smaller, often family-run establishments which catered to the growing immigrant populace. These could generally be found in the “little India” districts, which in Toronto was on a stretch of Gerard Street, and in Houston clustered around 59 and Hillcroft [where the Mexican met the Middle Eastern met the South Asian], often alongside the grocery supply stores that gaves us our dals and spices and pickles, eased our North American passages, and made our culinary transitions that much smoother. As populations grew, established, and sought out the more-house-for-your-money suburban sprawl, “little Indias” mushroomed, dispersed, and diversified: no longer all on a single strip, no longer exclusively run by Gujarati business families, just slightly more caring of decor, Chettinad dishes [from a region of Tamil Nadu of the same name] started appearing on menus, Madras Pavillion began a sizeable operation out in Sugarland, Sri Lankan Tamil grocers and restaurants dishing out idlis [steamed rice-dal dumplings of a sort] and idiappams [string hoppers] dotted the Toronto suburbs of Scarborough and Markham.

But one thing remained mostly constant: these restaurants still turned inward, speaking mainly to their own. They were institutions built about immigrant homesickness which took the form of a longing for food, as famed cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey has written. If others ventured in, curious about the new immigrant cuisines transforming the look, feel, and smell of their neighborhoods, they were welcomed–but left to themselves: accidental tourists in foreign spaces.

On the other hand, there were restaurants that self-consiously sought out American publics–and in so doing, necessarily also took up the mantle of representing “India” to their sought-after audiences. These restaurants drew the office lunch crowds, their pink walls muted by dim lighting, the formality of starched napkins and wine glasses, waiters in white shirts and black trousers serving papadums as starters. The menu in these places was mostly Mughlai–inspired by Mughal imperial cookery from centuries past. Here were your saag paneers, tender tandoori chickens, and lamb saagwalas; kebabs, koftas, biriyanis, and naan breads; all rich in aromas and even richer in ingredients. Mughlai staples were interrupted by other anglicizations: [Goan] vindaloos, [South Indian] mulligatawnys [in Tamil “molagu thani,” or pepper water], and the occassional other experimental dish deemed suitable for the American palate. Restaurants dishing up such fare were called variously “The Taj,” “The Raj,” “India Palace,” “Bombay Palace,” “Bombay Brasserie,” and “Moghuls“; their names upheld a nostalgia for a long-gone imperial past and a colonial romance with the unfathomably exotic East as creamy as their curry sauces. What the writer Saint Nihal Singh described in the early 1900s as the “dainty dishes of the Hindoo pleasing to American palates,” remained–to borrow from the title of Jaffrey’s 1975 compendium cookbook–invitations to Indian cuisine. Even the Kyber North Indian Grill on Richmond in central Houston, moderately innovative in its service of Peshawari food as complete American platters [protein plus sides, as opposed to the à la carte mix-it-yourself approach of conventional Indian restaurants], was an invitation into subcontinental cuisine via the Khyber Pass through which so many others had historically come, invited or not.

Later editions edit the description that appears on this
1975 cover significantly: no more talk of working out
recipes for American cooks in American kitchens.

For us [“us” being Verne & myself, along with other graduate student post-doc fresh-off-the-boat types much like us], visits to these fancier restaurants were heady indulgences: hard on the pocket and heavy on the stomach. What’s more, though the tastes were familiar and enjoyable, identifying with the fare was another matter. This was food we knew, but not food we really ever cooked at home.

Then again, we were in a sense incidental. The invitation to Indian cookery was, after all, only tangentially written for us.

The conversation with the American public was well underway, however, and it wasn’t about to change course on account of us. From the early 1990s on, anyone driving past the intersection of Kirby and Richmond in Houston would have noticed a curious exchange taking place on the adjacent marquees of Khyber and the Cajun seafood restaurant Pappadeaux. Khyber’s somewhat impish Mickey Kapoor, veteran of the 1965 India-Pakistan war and self-named “Marquee de Sade,” who seemed to talk up his Western clients far more than us desis, has for years put up humorous quips on his restaurant’s roadside marquee in direct response to Pappadeaux’s adjacent announcements–not once in all these years apparently managing to get a rise out of his straight-faced Southern neigbour. The one-sided exchange began with Pappadeaux’s cheer to the Houston Rockets: “Go Rockets!” their marquee read. Boring, thought Kapoor, answering: “And Please Come Back!”

So was born a Houston tradition of speaking to local audiences in ways that start from the plate, but go beyond the palate. There was only one time in all our years in H-town that I saw the Khyber marquee without a quip or a pun–in 1998, when India held its first test of nuclear weapons in Pokhran. For that one lone occassion, Khyber’s conversation with Pappadeaux paused, and the marquee read simply: “Go Nuclear!” [I’ve been cursing myself ever since for not stopping right then to take a photograph.]

Pappadeaux: "Hiring Today 3-5."
Khyber: "My You Do Start Them Young!"

Pappadeaux: "Interviewing Waiters, Busers, Cooks"
Khyber: "Are You Planning to Get Into the Restaurant Business?"

Pappadeaux: "Interviewing All Positions."
Khyber: "We Aren't Going to Take This Lying Down."

Pappadeaux: "Order Calamari, Get a Pappa's T-Shirt Free."
Khyber: "Squid Pro Quo."

Pappadeaux: "Every Tuesday's Fat Tuesday!"
Khyber: "Praise the Lard!"

Pappadeaux: "Come Try Our Stuffed Flounder"
Khyber: "On what charge?" 

Pappadeaux's: "Our Crab Fingers Are Delightful!"
Khyber: "Let No Crab Give You the Finger."

Khyber's response to the massive wind system that was 2008's
Hurricane Ike,which knocked out the city's power for well over
two weeks: "Not Gone with the Wind!"

Khyber's Thanksgiving Quip

Uninvited guests to a cuisine that was and was not of our own making, then, we remained occasional patrons, and always interested observers of the processes in motion all around us. When The London Sizzler came to the plaza at the corner of 59 and Hilcroft, we hoped that this marked the start of a new interaction of “ethnic” and “American.” This smartly done restaurant in a thicket of nonchalant, lackadaisical mom-and-pop joints, complete with pool table and large screen television, seemed to invite new sorts of folks in, by bringing something of the UK and Indian-East African diaspora experience to the United States. Chicken piri piri was on the menu, fireblazingly spicy, but alongside other more conventional tandoori preparations. There was Gobi Manchurian, too, and other Indian Chinese dishes–for us a comfort food that we thought, surely others would enjoy as much as we had? We couldn’t have been more wrong. The idea of being served up “sizzler” had an American class resonance that we had no inkling of, and it brought Indian cuisine right to the level of your average Luby’s Cafeteria. Something about the dynamics of a place that served “non-veg” alongside spirits and pool tables didn’t appeal to many Indians, either. This, in spite of the fact that other Indian restaurants [Mayuri, Pavani] had long embraced the “multi-cuisine” concept [by which descriptor such regionally non-specific eateries are known in India], and served quite a mixed clientele.

We used London Sizzler as a site for several HapMap research focus groups, because it was a fair mid-point option, but not many who attended had even heard of the place, let alone stepped inside. If we hoped this would be an effective meeting point of East and West, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Instead, it offered a different sort of possibility. Here was a place of Indian diasporic confluence: a reconvergence, after so many travels to so many places, of the Indian Chinese, Indian-East African, Indian-British. But the conversation was limited to those of us who wished such reconvergences, and it didn’t go too far beyond us desis in any case, this time either.

When the “Bombay Palace” on Westheimer gave itself over to Kiran Verma, though, it was clear something else was going on. Not since Mickey Kapoor had moved into Khyber–his third restaurant in town, this one located on a piece of prime real estate between Rice University and what would soon become the swankily urban Upper Kirby district, the gateway to the elite River Oaks–had an Indian restauranteur made such a move from suburbs [“Ashiana” on Briar Forest] to the Inner Loop, from margin to center. And to Highland Village, no less, en route to Uptown: what a center to occupy! “Kiran’s” completed what Ashiana had begun: the development of an “Indian plus” approach, as one review noted, with usual Mughlai fare but then more. Racks of lamb, seafood curries, crab salads, more imagination for dessert than we are used to seeing, and a wine list where we were always told “Indian” did not pair well with wine. Kiran’s was a place where the “magic of Mumbai [met] the charisma of Calcutta.” Colonial fascinations were not far behind, but at least it seemed that they were in the process of being decentered.

But then what was this in 2011, a restaurant done up in urban industrial chic in Upper Kirby, ensconsced within a shopping-cum-loft-residential complex and calling itself “Pondicheri”?

Like Verma, Jaisinghani had begun ourside the loop 610. Her first restaurant was Indika–named tellingly after the 300 BCE Greek ambassador Megasthenes’ historical work by the same name, colonial romance eschewed for historical self-assuredness. Indika moved from cramped quarters on Memorial to its gloriously present Montrose/ Westheimer location in midtown Houston. Pondicheri,  by contrast, seemed to have begun not as a trial out in the burbs, but with all the self-confidence of having arrived. If this was an invitation to Indian cuisine, it was of a different sort: secure enough in its poise to offer railway breakfasts and street food while reinvigorating the classic Mughlai fineries.

The place has table to ceiling windows, full of light. One looks out onto a civic space of a sort: shops, lofts, parking garages, arranged around wide pedestrian walkways. Inside, steel-and-glass dominate, right down to metallic accents in the fabric upholstery and in the typically Indian stainless steel pots, buckets, kerosene lamps, and tiffin carriers. These objects give Pondicheri a bistro-like atmosphere, complete with wine, now of course. One places orders at a counter done up with shiny hexagonal tiles, with employees who no longer wear only black and white, and who speak in crisp American accents; gone are the family helpers and the awkward new immigrant Indian waiters who would take any work they could find. Pondicheri appears intended to be a quick food/ take-away place that nonetheless dishes up gourmet meals with an “eat local” organic, environment-conscious ethic. A chalkboard indicates from where the restaurant’s meats and seafood are procured; notes on the menu swear by the organic and the humane. There’s is also the Pondy Exchange: a system by which patrons get take out food in the tiffin carriers (for a $25 deposit), turning them back in (even dirty) for a fresh food-packed stack. Delivery is also planned, once again with the aid of the carriers bearing the Pondicheri logo. Above all else, and beyond the all-day breakfast options, what Pondicheri promises is food served “the way we eat in India,” says Jaisinghani.

And so we come full circle, from presenting “Hindoo delicacies” to reluctant Americans to re-creating “the way we eat in India” for the “‘bring it on’ palates of jalapeño-happy Houstonians,” as Houston Press writer Robb Walsh has wittily remarked. Even Tabla in New York could never push boundaries like Pondicheri, Walsh continues, so the restaurant has its local Texan context to thank for its experimental success.  

There’s lots to be said about the coming of age of Indian Americans as a community in the United States, about property ownership and anti-miscegenation laws that forced early Sikh immigrants to marry Mexican women in order to obtain farming land, about the struggles of assimilation pushed and pulled by  dual identities, about the relative invisibility of South Asians from media and public life until the second and even third generation, when suddenly they are everywhere–vocal, assertive, entrepreneurial, in a position to influence policy, demand (and get) Deepavali greetings from Presidents in the White House, and to assertively question their own representations in high school history textbooks. Jaisinghani’s success, and the adulation to which Pondicheri has opened, are products of this very trajectory, this important (and fulfilling) story of immigrant coming of age.

And yet–coming at last to the source of my initial annoyance–Pondicheri is not quite, can’t be, “the way we eat in India.” Not at all. For one, none of our foods here, no matter how innovative or involved, come with blueberries sprinkled over arugula beds hiding butter chicken morsels, with jicama and barley combined in side dishes, or with masala-sprinkled “desi fries.” Indeed, the “desi fries” idea could tell it all: the very notion of the “desi” really only exists outside of India, when being “of the soil” of one’s homeland starts to matter as never before. “Desi fries,” by extension, have meaning only elsewhere, in contexts where “South Asia” has a cogency it cannot possibly claim in South Asia.Who eats fries in India except alongside very occassional sandwiches, and that at classy hotels or almost ritually at McDonald’s? Spice dusted fries would be called “masala fries” here, but in Houston they’re desi. Each one true to form in its way: in India, it’s about the seasonings added, but in Houston it’s about (multiculturalist) identity.

Pondicheri’s menu is innovative and different, yes of course. A breath of fresh air on the Indian foodie scene, which is changing rapidly to accommodate a new sort of fast food, even beyond the basics as at “Cafe Spice Express” at Grand Central in New York. A new crop of eateries, Subway-Chipotle-inspired franchise-ready restaurants like “Bombay Bowl” (Denver), “Chutneys” (Washington D.C.), and Merzi (Cambridge, Mass.) are each fairly self-consciously concerned with the business of aiding “understanding”–clearly directing their attention to those who don’t understand how “Indian” works. These adopt the build-a-bear approach to food service, understanding facilitated by “deconstruction,” so food is taken apart and then reassembled before your very eyes, both to underscore freshness and attain comprehension. [Those who have chanced on Derridaean deconstruction will likely envision the French philosopher turning in his grave.]

[Two salads for me: a Barley Beet Jicama and the Butter Chicken on arugula; Carrot
paratha, chicken saag samosa and the"Tuk tuk thali," for the kids. Verne had the
Masala Fish with Turmeric [not lemon] rice on the side. Desi fries for us all.]

Pondicheri doesn’t take that route, thankfully, and though it targets “understanding” just as much, it goes about it with something between a displaced native’s nostalgia and an ethnographic surveyor’s need for comprehension. Here are thalis [complete meals with vegetables and dals and breads served in small katori bowls on a single plate], chaats [snacks made of assembled crunchies, chutneys and the equivalent of pico de gallo], railway food, street food, Mumbai frankies and Indian-style burgers, omlettes and uppma [a South Indian breakfast item made of semolina and vegetables]; Pubjabi butter chicken, Kerala fish, Beef Kheema: breathlessly racing the length and breadth of the subcontinent. With a nuggets of mid-20th century nostalgia mixed in for good measure: “utterly butterly delicious,” as the tagline goes, Amul butter is on the menu for 50 cents a pat, and the taste of bounvita we all grew up on is sandwiched between “age old” Parle-G biscuits–a double dose of the sepia-toned. [Though, knowing the high sugar/ poor cocoa quality of bournvita and Parle biscuit ingredients, I, for one, never want to touch them again. And Amul butter, seriously? Whose nostalgia was this brought to the table? Though Amul butter ads over the years deserve a post unto themselves, I will admit.]  

The recreation of “the way we eat” extended to the stainless steel ware that so dominates Pondicheri’s decor. The buckets, the vessels, the katoris, the kadais, the tea/coffee cannisters (used here for water), even the hurricane lanterns. These are items used in just about every Indian home, and at the commonest Indian eateries, or event meal services, where bare-chested sacred thread-donning Brahmin men come by with buckets of food, slapping servings down before successive rows of guests as they walk unceremoniously past. In Pondicheri, by sanitized contrast, such accoutrements are suddenly uncommon, and for that oh, so nouveau chic. 

The tiffin carriers bear special mention since they feature in Jaisinghani’s proposed “Pondy Exchange” take out/ delivery plan–which had to be inspired, we thought, by the famous Mumbai Dabbawalas: the 5000-odd semi-literate porters who carry tiffin carriers [“dabbas” or boxes] of cooked lunches from homes or catering services to over 200,000 offices and back, through rain or shine, through vast Mumbai distances and the thickness of the city’s traffic flows, using cycles, auto rickshaws, trains and just bare feet to get the stainless steel carriers back and forth, always bang on time. So long have the dabbawalas been around (over a hundred years and counting), so efficient and so low cost and low tech is their operation, that they’ve been written up in the New York Times, the focus of a BBC documentary and a Harvard Business Review case study on supply chain management, visited by Prince Charles, and invited to his wedding in 2005.

But if this is what Pondy Exchange is building on, we unfortunately aren’t told of it. Instead, we’re promised some combination of home food and street food, and returned to evocations of colonial nostalgia in the name “Pondicheri.” With no further discernable connection to Pondicherry’s Franco-Tamil history (or cuisine, for that matter), common utensils become retro chic–in much the same way Urban Outfitters or Whole Foods would take images of Hindu gods printed on cheap plastic or cotton or tin lunch boxes, and market them as trendy accessories to a global ethnic look. Out of context, the objects have no particular meaning, do not convey any real sense of “the way we eat,” but float around in abstract design fields, suddenly classy because the retro SS look is in. Or because stylized grunge is the new “ethnic.”

All told, the point is not to eat as we do in India. The point is to savor an idea of India while living in Houston, via the mélange arrayed in Pondicheri’s dishes. The point is to embrace a refined cosmopolitanism, ensconsced here but wanderlust, longing for the elsewheres of our selves, whether we’re Indian or not. The “way we eat in India” is hardly a singular way, almost unbearably diverse–impossible to collect unless by essentializing design. And the impulse to collect is redundant in India, but so, so vital elsewhere. Look at it this way and you realize that Pondicheri cannot exist anywhere except outside of India. The ultimate irony is that Pondicheri belongs very much in Houston.

Could it have been any other way? Perhaps not. To my mind, Pondicheri is important in the evolution of Indian cuisine because its agendas appear to index so many of our present conditions, both culinary and identitarian: environmental, local, nostalgic, cultural, didactic, innovative/ experimental, fusion-oriented, Indian plus-plus, industrial, traditional, chic, “the way we eat in India,” quick-fast-takeout-delivery. Our present dilemmas are not conclusively resolved at Pondicheri, but everything is there expressed–and it is in the nature of our present (South Asian) cosmopolitanism that most of these are imbricated, and mutually implicated. Can’t really leave anything out, in other words.

I find myself wishing, however, that Pondicheri had been just slightly less ambitious, just a touch less eclectic, and somewhat more straightforwardly true to its roots. Not authenticity, but accuracy? A rich butter chicken that stands up to, and wins over, the tart bitterness of arugula with just the most subtle mediation [though I loved the addition of crunchies typically included in Indian “mixture” snacks in lieu of the conventional croutons]. A Kerala meen molee [fish curry] that perfectly infuses coconut with curry leaves and mustard seeds, both muting fishiness [as Indian preparations are wont to do] and drawing it out. Salads and vegetables that are minimalist, as most home cooking really is, whether you use barley or quinoa or any other newly annointed superfood. And chaats that aren’t preludes to dinners, but tiffins in their own right. Without the pretense of trendy environmentalist branding, but attentive to the environment all same. Cosmopolitan in the widest sense, talking to Indians as well rather than presuming their understanding, or, worse, ignoring it–and therefore undertaking its surveys from a definite center.

It’s a tall order, I’m quite aware, but I can continue to wish. Meri marzi [as I please], in response to the “aap ki marzi” [your wish/ pleasure/ prerogative] which Merzi the restaurant offers with a flourish of old world hospitality.

The reviewers will continue to rave about Pondicheri, and the young and the restless will flock to it, no doubt. For our part, we will applaud the success of yet another enterprising, creative Indian chef who attempted, at least, to represent “the way we eat” to an increasingly multicultural American public in fresh and creative ways [when we visited, a group of young headscarf-sporting women sat behind us, laughing and enjoying themselves immensely]. 

We may go again to try out Pondicheri’s breakfasts, the next time we’re in Houston: how wrong can you go with eggs? But beyond that, we’re more likely to wait, for as long as it possibly takes, for a restaurant that includes us–all of us–more robustly and accurately in its ever-more cosmopolitan conversations.