Hello Foodies! How’s it tasting? As promised we have picked another question this week to make a post around, hope you enjoy reading …

a. Which is the most authentic Indian restaurant in Exeter?

b. Do you guys serve ‘authentic Indian’ curries

I’ll try and answer both questions to the best of my abilities .. so lets take the first one shall we?

a. Which is the most authentic Indian restaurant in Exeter?

This one is difficult to answer quite honestly. Well firstly because I haven’t eaten in them all. But the real reason is , the response is very much depedant on your definition of ‘Authentic’ or to rephrase that, ‘authenticity’ of Indian food can vary quite a bit. I’ll explain.

 

Most of you must already be aware of the size of a country like India. Now within this huge landmass are various states and regions each of which has retained its own traditions and cooking styles and recipes some using ingredients very unique to that particular region or state.

 

Lets take for example the very popular tourist spot of Kerala, located in southern India. The recipes down here use a lot of coconut and I mean A LOT. Some of the dishes say for example Fish Moilee is made entirely from coconut milk . However if you go up north say to the capital city of Delhi , you would find that the usage of coconut in meals is extremely less.

Or take something very simple as a cabbage dish and just the state of Kerala. In Kerala alone a cabbage dish can be made using just cabbage, desiccated coconut and a few spices or the same cabbage dish can be made without any coconut being used at all. They both are authentic recipes though. See where I’m going with this? Just in my family alone, a simple cabbage dish is made atleast using 5 difference recipes/styles and depending on your own personal taste you may love one version and absolutely say ‘yuckkkkk! ‘ to another. But in their own way they are all authentic recipes. My mum for example likes to call them names like maharastrian cabbage or kerala cabbage or ‘homestyle cabbage’ and so on .. Can you imagine having all of those names in any restaurant menu? Yikes! No thank you.

So lets go back to the question about the most authentic restaurant serving Indian food, the answer is I haven’t found one where my taste buds have jumped up and down or reminded me of home. A couple restaurants came real close , one being Curry Leaf and the other was Bombay Bills ( I think owned by the same group that owns Tiger Bills ), especially their vegetable Biryani was heavenly. However look my opinion in this case can be biased because I eat Indian food every single day and there are awesome cooks in my family going right back to my great grandparents. The recipes and styles have been honed and perfected over all these decades so when I go out to have Indian food ( on some rare occasion ) its difficult to satisfy my taste buds . They have been truly spoiled over the decades with some really top quality Indian food. I’m sorry I can’t pick one for you .

But I do have a bone to pick which i’m sure many fellow Indian’s will agree with. Even some of you non Indian’s who have had the pleasure of eating home cooked Indian food or have experienced food on your trip to India or a friend’s house will agree on this one. Why do some of the places serving Indian food really kill the taste by adding so much cream or ‘sweetness’ ?  The answer i’ve got is that regular Indian food can be too spicy for the British palette and hence the addition of cream of sweetness tones it down. Errrrr sorry no sale! Every single British palette that has tasted food at my home , loved the un-adulterated experience without any additional cream or sweetner. Remember there is a big difference between lovely tasting but spicy food and mouth numbing , arse burning ridiculously hot food. 100% of non Indians who i’ve had the pleasure of sharing my food with have loved it without any tweaks to the original recipe. For the ones that have a very less tolerance of even regular spice in food, the simple answer is to reduce the spice a little by default rather than adding crazy amounts of cream or sugar!  Anyway that’s just  my take on it

Now that brings me to the 2nd most commonly asked question

b. Do you guys serve ‘authentic Indian’ curries

In short the answer is YES.  We don’t tweak, add sugar or cream ( unless its part of the original recipe ) .  However as I said earlier the term ‘authentic’ can be quite tricky. The kind of food we serve is best compared to the food you would get were to you take a trip to India and eat at a friends’ house or go on a road trip and eat at the road site dhabas and eateries. Its everyday yummy food not made from pastes and frozen stuff.

We cook the food fresh, in limited quantities. Our recipes for the same dish itself changes a lot as we do different recipe variations for different regions. But at no time is it tweaked like they do in some places with ridiculous amounts of sugar/cream.

Some of the items we cook infact can’t be found anywhere in Exeter atleast ( that’s what we  were told ) . So we do cook some real gems and yes all food we cook is definitely ‘authentic’ in that sense , though not all are curries .

When asked about what’s the best compliment you get for your food, I proudly say the best one and the one we get a LOT is ‘ Your food reminded me of home’ .. Now I can’t think of any better way to end this post.. can you ?

Thanks for reading and feel free to send in your questions to us .. I’ll try to post a response to a few questions every week in this blog ..

Our service confuses a lot of people and I can understand why. Lets see , we have been asked

 1. are you a restaurant? – No

 2. are you a takeaway? – No

 3. are you a drive-through – errr NO

 Then what exactly do you do?

Ok let me give you some background here.

Once upon a time, a long long long time ago ( only kidding ! ) .. about 18 months ago, we got an SOS from my mom’s friend. Seems her friend’s son had gotten into Exeter University but he was having serious trouble with his food situation. He was one of those ‘strict’ vegetarian food only characters, further complicated by the fact that he had a ‘weak’ stomach and wanted proper Indian food. Unfortunately for him, his health worsened and he fell sick . He was having trouble finding quality authentic Indian food in Exeter, which he could have every day. The Indian takeaways and restaurants were alright but he couldn’t eat there everyday because of various reasons including costs. So they were requesting if we could give him a small ‘tiffin’ atleast a few days a week to help him out.

Where it all started

Now as the request had come from mummy dearest, there was no way to say no. So we ( myself and my wife ) , agreed to share our food with him . Let me paint you a picture here, ever seen that Tom and Jerry cartoon where Jerry feeds this little orphan pup some milk and pup goes away and gets all his friends?? Yup that’s exactly what happened. The food we gave him , he kindly shared with his friend who then talked about it and so on and so forth and we had people calling us asking if we could cook for them. And there in started the Indian Tiffin service in Exeter.

So we then got our heads together and sorted the required permissions and liabilities and tried to figure out how we could do this along side our regular day jobs. We haven’t got it all tied down yet. But our lovely group of customers are so understanding that they let it slide .

But before I paint the wrong picture here, this isn’t something new or out of the ordinary. The Tiffin service goes back to 1880 and originated in Mumbai and for those that don’t know.. The ‘service’ was actually started by the British! How’s that for coming full circle??

Although there are various facets to a tiffin service and I won’t go into the details here ( unless you want to hear all about it, in which case drop us a line and I’ll do another post on it ) , suffice to say we are pleasantly surprised with the response we have received and are proud to take a small leaf from this glorious tradition ( 125 years old ) that still flourishes and is estimated to be growing around 5-10% each year in India.

Until the next post, eat, work and play hard people!