It was during his honeymoon at Ooty that M.G. Nagendran chanced upon a kiosk selling spring potatos. He wasn’t interested in tasting them. But his wife was.
“So, we bought one and I tasted it,” he recalls, “It was good.”
A working professional then, Nagendran got talking with the person manning the kiosk. The answers he was given were terse and not sufficiently explanatory. Once back in Chennai, he checked the availability of spring potatoes in the market. There were none. After a number of Google searches, he teamed up with his friend, M.J. Abdul Azeez, and set to work. And thus was born Mr. Potato, a hugely-popular kiosk located near the Besant Nagar Beach.
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So, what is spring potato? “It is potato in a spiral form,” he says simply.
The process of making one takes just under four minutes. “Many people just order, stand here and watch it being made,” smiles Abdul Azeez, as he guides me through the process. It’s easy and also fun to watch — once the potato is washed, it’s inserted into specially-made bamboo skewers (bought from Assam) and fed into the cutting machine. The skewers give the potato slices a unique spiral shape that makes it look, well, quite pretty. It doesn’t end there; the slices are then dipped into a specially-made ‘magic mix’, which gives it flavour, and then, deep-fried.
Abdul dabs the slices with a thin tissue paper, to get rid of the excess oil, and adds a liberal amount of cheese. After that, he adds a pinch of chilli powder.
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He then hands it over to me — a delightful concoction of brown, red and white in a sexy spiral shape.
It isn’t crispy, like the ones in your normal chips packet, but soggy…in a really yummy sort of way. “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” laughs Nagendran, as he explains the right way to consume the fare, “You have to peel it off the stick and then eat it.”
Spring potato comes in two varieties at this kiosk — chilli cheese and chaat masala. While the basic one costs Rs 50, anything with cheese costs Rs 60. Word of caution: keep a tissue handy for there’s a lot of oil at times.
Mr. Potato is located at Besant Nagar Beach (outside Tantra) and 100 ft Road, Velachery. For details, call 9841728054.