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Dusty Miller: Laid-back Lunch At Jaipur |
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 15:57 |
“GOING for a curry” in Ha-ha-ha-rare is not quite as simple as that ubiquitous phrase would sound in most of the rest of the world.
For a start there’s not exactly a surfeit of curry houses in this country and the few that we have are---let’s face it---not exactly cheap and cheerful.
Candidly most are dreadfully dear but the owners are sickeningly cheerful when there’s anyone eating there!
A sudden urge for spicy food which came over me late on Tuesday morning was fairly swiftly assuaged by an impromptu five or six minute drive to The Jaipur Restaurant, above the Hindus' Sunrise Sports Club in Hurstview, Ridgeview, which is in Belvedere South.
This was the city’s original Asian quarter and now multi-squillion dollar multi-storey Bollywood-style dwellings, designed as roomy accommodation for several generations of extended mainly entrepreneurial families, lie amid mainly lush well-watered tropical garden splendour, along roads with Harare’s steepest, most severe and exhaust-pipe challenging “sleeping policemen.” (“Humps” to the uninitiated.)
These well shaded residential streets let slip the fact that they were built on the capital city’s original airport: RAF Belvedere, and are proudly named after World War II vintage planes: Wellington, Dakota, Sunderland, Hudson, Blenheim, etc, and later models: Cessna and even Concorde.
Jaipur shimmered in heat haze. A horde of Asian kids carried out debilitating circuit training round the arid patchy cricket field, before perspiration-drenched squash games; savage amusement on a blazing November lunchtime.
The first icily chilled can of imported Castle lager hardly touched sides as I glanced at a menu which doesn’t say much to the non-cognoscenti. I told the amiable easy going Vaysant Nayee, who runs the place, I was fairly hungry, not exactly made of money (who is these days?) and didn’t have all the time in the world. “Deal with it!” were my instructions.
By the time the starters arrived: golden deep fried samoosas, onion rings, chicken bites, onion pakodas and whatnots with wee bowls of mango pickle and other sambals the “fairly hungry” status had turned to “ravenous”, due to intriguing wafts of coriander, cumin and chili paste redolence escaping from the kitchen and, candidly, down to the extraordinary length of time the appetisers took to be served.
Fair’s fair, virtually everything is ultra-freshly produced to order. I assume ordinarily that doesn’t include the actual curry sauces and gravies, which are always better having
bubbled and squeaked for a day or two. But this was Tuesday and the restaurant had been closed for business since a late lunch on Sunday.
It was simultaneously reassuring and frustrating to have to wait so long for food; something many Zimbabwean aren’t too good at. Vasyant tells me he’s fully aware of this problem and may try the buffet route to overcome it.
That’s fine as long as you don’t have half your clients with the appetite of “Dismal” Donald coming off an enforced RGM fortnight-long starvation diet. The “blue-rinsed brigade theory” (that for every out-and-out dyed in the wool glutton at a buffet, there are three or four little old calorie-counting ladies balancing things out) just doesn’t work in Africa. Here you get platoons of Desperate Dans, Fred Flintstones…or Dismal Donalds and no dyed dowagers offsetting gratuitous greed!
The penultimate time I was at Jaipur, Zesa were messing about with the current and the rice just wouldn’t boil. Vaysant’s wife, in the end, had to cook the staple at the family home, delivering it by car.
Nowadays, he tells me, because of the restaurant’s proximity to the industrial areas (what industry?), there are very few power cuts; the club has its own borehole, so water’s no problem. But “someone” liberated the telephone cable and they have had no landlines for six full weeks!
I was served two “sample” portions of a tasty, if rather bony, mutton curry and an intensely flavoured chicken tikka, with potato curry, saffron rice (turmeric rice, I expect), onion-and-tomato sambals, more pickles, poppadums and a naan bread.
The curry was cooked mild-to-medium; next time I’ll go for medium-to-hot. Other than that there was “naan” better food being served for kilometres around that lunchtime.
I admit to having three or four cans of lager…blame that on the warmth of the curry and ambient heat of the day… with savoury courses and I was very ready for the usual decadently sweet, teeth-enamel challenging Indian puddings of jalabee (a rich dessert prepared from liquid dough, deep-fried like a koeksuster and dipped in very sweet syrup) and kholfi, traditional Indian home-made ice-cream (which had unfortunately melted!) studded with nuts, almonds and raisins.
The place was fairly full with laid-back, no-hurry captains of industry, several of whom I knew well, and seemed to be doing a thriving take-away business, again to people in no real hurry to graze.
I left the office in the Kopje at 1:15, so would have been at Jaipur by 1:25 at the latest and returned to my desk (it was a quiet day!) at 3:40!
Couldn’t get away with that every day of the week, nor could I, on a quotidian basis, afford the $7,5 million CASH (re-valued twice) bill. That would have been trillions had I paid by cheque and no one in this office knows what the hell $7,5 million plus 13 noughts would have been before “revaluations” (Hexillion springs to mind?)
It’s those sort of figures and stratospheric hyper-inflation that makes the odd lunchtime break at somewhere like Jaipur so necessary, relaxing and cathartic.
Do try to book. Use the cellphone: 011611894 or Vansant’s home number 740714.
Oh and try to make sure you have the correct club! The Goan Club is nearby (with excellent piri-piri chicken I’m told), but the Moslems' Universals Club is also fairly close.
When 40 or so hearties from Greendale Good Food & Wine Appreciation Society rocked up there, instead of Jaipur, just before Friday lunchtime prayers and began unloading crates of beer, bottle of wine, gallons of gin and tonic, bushels of brandy and cokes, there was very nearly Jihad! A fatwa was almost placed on my head!
The GGF&WAS “revival” lunch will be a buffet held at Jaipur on Friday February 6, 2009. Bring your own bottles, no corkage.
The society has, sadly, been in hibernation for several months, a victim of the credit crunch,. after 27 glorious years.
All members, former members, lapsed members and Goodfellows at Large (in the Diaspora) who happen to be in Harare then are more than welcome, but we will need some idea of numbers for catering.
Lunch, as usual, will be at twelve-thirsty-for one but it has been suggested we hold an Extraordinary General Meeting at noon, which will be confirmed, or otherwise, nearer the time.
Diarise NOW!
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By Dusty Miller
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