Dubby Bhagat

Kathmandu:

The 60’s. Firpo’s. Calcutta’s finest eatery. His Excellency Raja Jitendra Bahadur Shah, Nepal’s Consul General to Calcutta and Lady Ranu Mukherjee host a table of city boxwallahs to a lunch of fantastic European food. Down the road in a street restaurant called Nizam’s, Jug Suraiya treats me to the delicious, inexpensive Kathi Roll. Morsels of spiced meet cooked in front of you over a charcoal fire on skewers and served wrapped in a parantha and fried in egg and stuffed with chopped onions and chilies soaked in lime juice and flavoured with cilantro or dhaniya. Cut to 2005. Those two experiences come together in Bawarchi on Lazimpat near Suwal when Raja Jitendra Bahadur Shah’s grandson Sanjay Nangia watches me sample the Kathi Rolls his Bawarchi is famous for. The Lazimpat Bawarchi is the fourth outlet in Kathmandu (one closed down because of a landlord and loo problem) and is seven days old. ‘’Our kathis are made-to-order,’’ said Sanjay, “Our guests like them with a touch of tomato or momo sauce. But people who remember Calcutta eat them with just the onions and the lime juice.’’ Bawarchi’s kathis have travelled well and once you sink your teeth and cover your taste buds with a double chicken, double egg kathi, you are biting into a gorgeous bit of history and one of the most original and unusual sandwiches in the world. The aromatic meat and the ‘eggstrodinary’ (I couldn’t resist that) wrap have so many textures and tastes that you will inevitably ask for more.

Sanjaya’s partner is Mustafa Merchant, a Bori Muslim from Calcutta, where his family started the Bawarchi chain. Mustafa supervises the food in Kathmandu bringing to bear the Bori love of eating which, according to one food writer, included the creation of Biryanis. ‘’I use Kashmiri saffron that I get in Asantol,’’ said Mustafa. Bawarchi’s Biryanis are cooked in steam in a style called ‘dum phukt’ where meat or chicken is alternately layered and cooked with spices in pots sealed with wet flour. The meat is marinated in a melange of yoghurt and condiments. And potatoes are often added. The Varki Kabab is the most unusual Kabab I have ever eaten. It is meat marinated in spiced yoghurt filled with crushed dried cherries and ground cashewnuts that has a taste that is a gentle shock to the tongue and you sit there waiting for the next bite. “We are going to shorten the menu. We were too enthusiastic and to ambitious,” said Sanjay. Hope they never leave out the Chicken Bharta which was a specialty in Calcutta’s Amber restaurant and is rarely found outside it.

In a salute to Amber and the writers who ginned there I ordered and reveled in the Chicken Bharta which had onions and cashew nuts and cardamom and Mustafa’s touch of cream that all run riot through the minced chicken. Over to India’s most famous Curry Connoisseur, Camellia Panjabi who writes of the famous Chicken Dopiaza, “Dopaiza is a popular dish in restaurants outside India. Do means two and piaz means onions in Hindi and the term describes a dish using twice the normal proportion of onions or in which onions are used twice in the cooking process.” Dopiaza is essentially an Indian Muslim dish and Bengal has a tradition of fine Muslim cooking. The province was ruled by the nawab of Murshidabad and Muslim Moghul governors until the British took over. And the exiled Nawabs of Oudh, as well as the family of Tipu Sultan, came to Calcutta after ceding their kingdom in the south to the British. So there has been an inflow of Muslim culinary influences.’’ In Bawarchi, the Dopiaza should be eaten with the artistic Lanchedar Parantha so that the cooked onions’ sweetish flavour and the taste of cinnamon, cardamoms, peppercorns, cloves and ginger mixed with yoghurt, can be mopped up in true Nawabi fashion that would have pleased Raja Jitendra Bahadur Shah and Lady Ranu Mukherjee. Sanjay Nangia also sells weighing machines. It’s a fact I’d rather not think about as I tuck into my next Kathi Roll or Biryani or Kabab or curry or anything that Bawarchi so temptingly serves.