Copyright vogue
Regardless of where we fall on the social spectrum, the sight of a grand buffet is enough to pull us in. As children, we could bear everything—from uncles with their prying noses to children and their cantankerous ways—as long as there was a buffet at the end of it. Wedding functions, marriage anniversaries, retirement parties: strip away the melodrama and niceties and you have an assortment of euphoria on your white bone china plates. To eat your way through a buffet is an art, too, one that not too many people have been able to hone. Now, to begin with, there is consensus that your plate at a buffet doesn’t have to look like you need tweezers just to pick up a coriander stem jutting out of a pani puri. But does the said plate need to be visually repulsive? We stack everything, afraid that food will run out. The seekh kebabs, all soggy with the raita they are floating through, get the life squeezed out of them under an intimidating mound of biryani. The radioactive red of the chicken tikka bleeds into the naan and the naan itself becomes a lifeless tissue paper at the end of the sorry ordeal. The dal goes through all states of matter from liquid to solid to plasma. All chemistry lessons in the microcosm of the Indian plate. A few months back, when I visited the CUR8 restaurant in the Four Seasons, Bengaluru, the goal was not to criminally punish my food for the buffet lunch that awaited me. It was a pleasant Bengaluru Sunday. I’d just listened to the classic song Jotheyali by SP Balasubrahmanyam & S Janaki on repeat and the otherwise infamously pugnacious Bengaluru auto drivers had been kind with me: engaging my love for the song, dropping scandalous trivia about the late Balasubrahmanyam and punctuating every sentence with a throaty laughter. Once at the Four Seasons, I was escorted to the lower ground floor to CUR8. For a restaurant not on the upper floors, CUR8 was surprisingly awash with natural light, the outer sitting area exposed to the natural elements. The food followed shortly after. The team had been kind. They had telepathically perceived my dislike for buffet plates that looked like a crime scene, and offered to serve the best dishes one by one. Did I have any allergies? Was I looking for anything in particular? None at all. I surrendered to the team and they trusted my guts of steel. First, on a platter came appetisers from various regions of southern India: prawns glazed with Chettinad masala, chicken fried Kannada style and spiced with Bedgi chillies and a nearly filleted fish drowning in Dravidian masalas. To balance the overwhelming flavours, the next dish was a soupy pasta, handrolled and thick, less cheese and more pasta, just how I like it. I might be missing a few dishes along the way but blame it on the comatose state I was slipping into. The cocktails all complemented the sunlight trickling in—they arrived in wide-rimmed glasses with fresh orange slices swimming in tequila and others were even subtler with delicate portions of thyme and fresh fruit thrown in. As with any buffet, before the food renders you temporarily immobile, CUR8 has a solution: when you’ve had a kebab too much, walk across to the other side of the restaurant and take in the artwork on display. The selection is not random. Every few weeks, they have rotating exhibitions as part of the #CURATEDBYCUR8 campaign that aims to perform socially conscious and visually compelling art. One of them had artworks solely by women artists, some showcasing raw, feminine power and others abstracting the female form. At the end of it, I was only too happy that the peace of my Sunday afternoon had not been disturbed by a culinary carnage and I had not disappointed the gods of buffet etiquette. Sure, an abnormally long siesta would follow after all that I had wolfed down, but I was primed and fuelled for the week to follow. I went to Dubai solo but the food kept me company Is dosa the next darling of the fine dining world? The century-old heritage hotel in Ahmedabad that doubles as a cultural archive of the city
