The world of restaurateurs and chefs has often been likened to the ephemeral universe of the stage. Serving up a seven-course meal, or even a selection of choice hors d’oeuvres, rustled up from just the ingredients at hand — that could well describe the making of a play, with its spice and aroma and just desserts. It’s live, it’s not pre-processed (hopefully), and there is that sense of adventure unique to each order, and different each time. Theatre directors are just as prone to slice and dice, peel and quarter, simmer or braise; whether it’s the playwright’s text that begs desperate pruning, or actors’ egos that ask to be battered and breaded.
On their part, chefs, or maybe our romanticised versions of them, can be the most performative of beings. As described in Dana Polan’s book, Julia Child’s The French Chef , the prima donna of the kitchen treats her ingredients like they were characters in a play that she is directing. It’s this impulse for dramatisation that makes her TV cooking shows such a compelling (and compulsive) watch. In an episode on sauces, writes Polan, Child talks of Béarnaise and Hollandaise as siblings who come from the same stock (pun intended) but end up with different personalities. In another, in her trademark style made notorious by Meryl Streep in the film Julie & Julia , she likens egg yolks to people, “They want to be understood; otherwise, they act like hoodlums and beatniks.”
Drama in the kitchen
The book, Time, Space, and the Market: Retroscapes Rising describes how, outside the kitchen, chefs like Joël Robuchon (once anointed ‘Chef of the Century’) have been known to transform the experience of dining out into a staged performance “by arranging the lights; choosing the decor, the tableware and the wines; handling his staff like actors and his customers like spectator/actors (not unlike characters in a play by Bertolt Brecht); and orchestrating the products like a carefully scored passage of which he is the sole conductor.” Anyone who’s visited a teppanyaki restaurant, can vouch for the theatrical qualities of live cooking on an iron griddle, a prop that is remarkably alive to the touch. I’ve even seen a pizzeria chef perform operatic arias from Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ (not very impressively) in between loading pizzas at the oven. Indeed, as has been discussed in this column, conversely the kitchen has provided grist to many a theatrical enterprise. Food has been cooked and consumed and wasted in copious amounts on stage.
All of this has come to mind because of a circular being handed around (or we could just call it a Facebook post) of a new restaurant in Pune. On August 29, stage auteur Mohit Takalkar will flag off a new venture he’s started with friends — an all-day-dining destination called Barometer, located just next to the City Pride multiplex in Kothrud. Less than two weeks ago, Takalkar was in Mumbai discussing his career and approach to theatre, in a free-wheeling conversation with younger counterpart Aalok Rajwade at the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh. Takalkar’s 15 odd years in theatre can be considered young by most standards, but he’s already a veritable veteran of the stage. At the talk, he dropped a bombshell of sorts, when he admitted to fighting a losing battle when it came to figuring out a sustainable model for his unique and uncompromising brand of theatre.
A fine balance
One of the great visualisers of the contemporary stage, Takalkar and his troupe Aasakta have presented works that reflect both vigour and passion, but haven’t been able to consistently garner the audiences that could prop up their efforts, outside an arts subsidy regime (which is non-existent for the most part). One of the ironies of the occasion was the presence of Rajwade, whose Natak Company, also betrothed to experimental theatre, albeit a more youthful and upbeat kind, has managed to cultivate a loyal demographic that allows them to keep their heads resolutely above water. Takalkar’s works are more demanding of his audiences, and this kind of fatalism is not new to him, if one follows his pronouncements over the years. “Aasakta stages three plays per year. People associated with theatre groups are discouraged to see a dwindling audience. But, this doesn’t hurt me. If I have set myself to do something different I can’t expect a huge audience, because that is unrealistic. We are not disappointed; we will keep doing experimental plays till it’s feasible for us,” he had told a theatre website.
The fact that Takalkar happens to be a trained chef, makes Barometer seem a little inevitable. He had once said, “Theatre has always kept me happy. The day it doesn’t, I will stop. Should that happen, I would not mind opening a restaurant as I am a good cook.” However, the fact that that notional restaurant has now opened should not be taken as an indication that Takalkar has hung up his stage director boots. A couple of days after the opening, his Kannada adaptation of Champra Deshpande’s Dholtashe, titled Beediyolagondu Maneya Madi , will be staged at Bengaluru’s Ranga Shankara.
Moonlighters Inc
There have been others in theatre business who have been bitten by the ‘food entrepreneur’ bug. Rangbaaz’s Imran Rasheed recently partnered a friend and floated a restaurant called Garam Masala that specialised in Mordabadi cuisine (which has since closed). Then there are the ‘moonlighters’ — a host of theatre personalities with their own food labels who came together last weekend for the Moonlight Café, a flea-market style event at the Cuckoo Club in Bandra. They include the redoubtable actor-siblings Prerna and Preetika Chawla, who run Pickle Shickle, which is, as is obvious, a pickle-making enterprise. If Takalkar’s culinary adventure strikes gold, then its effect will likely be felt on the world of theatre — either we’ll miss his absence from the arc lights losing him to chefdom, or his prosperousness could fuel even more intrepid experiments of the kind he is known for.
