Hyderabadi, jeeraga samba, Kolkata, Lucknowi, Sindhi, Mughlai, Afghani, Bhatkali, Thalapakattu, Malabari, Middle Eastern, Bombay, Kutchi — if you correctly identified all of these as variants of biryani, this one’s for you.
The Beef Sapad Trio (BST), consisting of Shilpa Natarajan (Barbie Q), Sandeep John (TLPJ -TenderLoins of Punjab) and Yohan Chacko (Veal Smith), recently put out a YouTube video celebrating biryani, All About the Taste , an a cappella parody of Meghan Trainor’s hit song, All About that Bass .
Yohan, a dentist and part-time funnyman, says, “The idea came up when we were practising for a parody show earlier this year. It was a great hit that evening, and so we decided to record and release it online.” Having done an a capella song as part of Enna da Rascalas, the comedy group he is part of, Yohan wanted to experiment with this as well. And so, Joslin Julius (Peter Mani) and Rajiv Rajaram (Tucker Mani) came on board to help.
The main vocals have been sung by Shilpa with the rest providing backing vocals. While the tempo is a bit slow, the lyrics make up for it with lines such as “Yeah my mama she told me don’t worry about the flies. She says that the ambience don’t matter as long as the taste is just right.”
“The introduction of local flavour like Nakka Mukka, Thithithara and Yen Veetu Thottathil was done to make people raise their heads thinking ‘Did I just hear what I heard?’,” says Yohan. The video was shot by his wife Lipee Priyadarshini in front of a green screen in his clinic; using online tutorials, he did the editing himself.
Currently, Yohan’s favourite is the Ambur biryani, but his forever love, he says, will be the mutton mughlai biryani from Paramount Hotel in Kilpauk: “If anyone visits me from other cities, I immediately take them there for dinner. It’s just an excuse to eat there.”
