Every Thursday, at around noon, the Sapad Brigade assembles in Koshy’s Restaurant on St. Mark’s Road. Two aspects – food and a table in Koshy’s bind this shape-shifting mass, whose members come and go. The Sapad Brigade counts as its members television producers, writers, marketing consultants, restaurateurs, alternative healing therapists, photographers and artists. It’s a shape-shifting mass because the sheer breadth of professions its members pursues makes consistent weekly attendance virtually impossible.
The table that the Brigade prefers is the last one in the row to the left of the restaurant’s entrance. It offers a complete view of the various clusters in Koshy’s – the gays and lesbians in the far corner, the lawyers near the cash register, the first-rung politicians and their cronies on sofas against the wall and the journalists, actors, writers, artists and other social detritus in twos and threes by the wood-clad columns.
For about 30 minutes, the Brigade talks about the food that is to come – on this day, mutton chops, raagi mudde, kheema gojju and Ceylon paratha at Ramanna’s Military Hotel. The group breaks up into two and heads for Yediyur, near Basavangudi. It’s the first time at a military hotel for the three women members of the Brigade. At Ramanna’s, a dingy, smoky restaurant frequented by sub-inspectors of police and real estate goons, the presence of women is a rare occurrence. The staff quickly clears up the long stone bench in the kitchen and insists that the plates be replaced by tableware reserved for special occasions. The Brigade begins to order. Being as vociferous as it is, the group orders pretty much the entire menu – at the end of an hour and a half of eating, the Brigade has notched up a bill of about 1600 rupees – this, in a place where a complete meal for two costs no more than a hundred rupees.
At about 2.30 in the afternoon, the Brigade heads back to Koshy’s full of stories of the meal and the meal itself. Over coffee, texture, taste, flavors and ingredients are discussed. Then, before the group disbands for the day, the next week’s meal is finalized – biriyani specially cooked for the Brigade by an elderly Muslim khansmah from Frazer Town or hummus and pita bread at a new middle-eastern restaurant on Koramangala or perhaps a trip to the dreaded Mudde Madappa, run by a cantankerous old man who will just about stop from whacking you behind your ear of you don’t finish your food.
Though the Sapad Brigade took root in several hour-long discussions between, among other people, it’s two principal members – the producer Adarsh NC and the restaurateur Prem Koshy, it’s origins lie in the idea that forms the basis of a food guide to Bangalore by the actor and event manager Ajit Saldanha. About six years ago, Saldanha wrote Sapad Raman – a guide to the best restaurants in Bangalore. Saldanha worked with the premise that the best doesn’t necessarily mean the best liveried establishment, but one that carefully considers every ingredient that goes into a meal and one that holds the dedication to consistently well-cooked food as its unchanging principle. So it came to be that Sapad Raman formally introduced English-speaking Bangalore to Siddappa’s, one of the finest breakfast places in town, run by a family of temple-caretakers and located in the temple the family serves. And it pointed the way to Maratha Darshan, then a hole-in-the-wall on Queen’s Road, primarily serving comfort food to Congress workers and government employees. Saldanha’s book, while a definitive guide to the city’s finer food establishments, was also a documentary of one of the many sub-cultures that feed Bangalore’s soul. It described nostalgia for slow-cooked, non-production line fare and the purveyors of that fare. It spoke for a tightly-knit community of people who would go the length to find a fantastic meal.
Though the Sapad Brigade by no means uses Saldanha’s book as a guide – many of the establishments listed in Sapad Raman have either shut shop or changed addresses – the doctrine that guides the two is the same. It’s the credo that sets this sub-culture apart from the mass-production tenet that drives most of Bangalore. At the Sapad Brigade, the choice is never between fries and potato wedges or Fillet-o-Fry and Zinger Burgers. Here, the prospect of a well-crafted meal is not sullied by a boring wait at a Byzantine line, but tinged by a barely-repressed anticipation.
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