In fact 1996 was an eventful year for the Indian food universe. The Golden Arches finally arrived in 1996 in Delhi’s Basant Lok market with a beef- and pork-free menu tailored to the Indian market and starring the game-changing McAloo Tikki. It paved the way for McDonald’s entry and the explosion of the quick service restaurant (QSR) format. In the late 1980s, India’s first foreign burger outlet arrived in Connaught Place, Delhi, via the UK chain Wimpy. Let’s step a little back to 1977, when a restaurant called Nirula’s opened in Delhi and introduced the inconveniently trendy idea of self-service, hot dogs, and thick-as-sin hot chocolate fudge sundaes. The setting was ripe for the foot soldiers of this revolution, the young “foreign-returned" chefs, to enter the scene and transform how, what and where we ate. The decade saw the emergence of the well-travelled Indian, who knew what pasta cooked al dente really meant. TV shows like Friends and Beverly Hills, 90210 instilled the idea of conversations in coffee shops, teen romance over chocolate shakes and heartbreak in pizza parlours. Towards the second half, however, the food industry began picking up on the changes sweeping through the country’s socio-economic fabric. It was this triptych of stand-alone Chinese, “Continental" and Mughlai restaurants that ruled India’s culinary landscape in the first half of the 1990s, with few variations on the template. For special occasions, there was Orient Express in the Taj Palace, but that was pretty much it," she says. “I remember going to Nirula’s, Moti Mahal, some Chinese restaurants and the different state bhavans. Bombay (now Mumbai) and Delhi had a similar foodscape, says chef Rahul Akerkar, who started his career in the 1990s: “Most restaurants in Bombay back then were pretty stuffy and one had to either choose from Indian restaurants like Khyber, Chinese places like Ling’s Pavilion and China Garden, and of course staples like Zodiac Grill and Shamiana at The Taj Mahal Palace." Chef Ritu Dalmia also remembers the 1990s in Delhi being about only a handful of restaurants. The epitome of coolness was when we brandished the fake stick-on tattoos that came free with Fusen, the popular Japanese bubble gum of the time.Įating out with the family in 1990s Calcutta meant golden fried prawns from Kim Fa in Tangra, Chicken a la Kiev in Mocambo, and potato-laden biryanis from Nizam’s. And of course we thought we were channelling Clint Eastwood when we dangled Phantom sweet cigarettes from the corners of our mouths. I have memories of singing the popular jingle “Bole mere lips, I love Uncle Chips" as we munched our way through spicy packets of potato crisps. Pepsi and Coke kept raising the stakes and a variety of home-grown and foreign packaged foods made an appearance, much to the consternation of our parents. This was the decade of junk food and cola wars. Efficient little plastic cups flew off the counter with a tiered vanilla soft serve dressed with chocolate syrup and topped with a pre-lib, luridly coloured karonda cherry. Touched by liberalization, my club’s little ice-cream parlour had suddenly reinvented itself with a gleaming new soft-serve machine and shelves lined with bottles of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. And in hindsight, hot chocolate fudge did seem like a good hat tip to the decade gone by. As the sun rose on a new millennium, the children of the 1990s lived to tell the tale.
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