Alistair Lethorn, the home chef who runs Aal's Kitchen and is hosting the pop-up, is Anglo-Indian himself
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The cross-cultural exchange of food between the UK and India has been such that the tiny island has reaped greater benefit from our vast range of inputs than we have from their more limited repertoire (curry houses, after all, are a dime a dozen in the UK, while rare is the Indian restaurant that serves shepherd's pie). But that doesn't mean that a smattering of dishes that were born during the British Raj haven't persisted in our culinary landscape over the years, with a pop-up now putting the limelight on this somewhat neglected cuisine.
Alistair Lethorn, the home chef who runs Aal's Kitchen and is hosting the pop-up, is Anglo-Indian himself. "My grandparents were both British and settled in Nagaland, which is where I was born. And the food I'll be serving is what I grew up on, and what I eat at home whenever I return there even today," he says.
Alistair Lethorn
The menu, Lethorn adds, involves typically Anglo-Indian dishes such as ball curry, mutton stew, ginger chicken pot roast, and rice cooked in coconut milk. Two of the more unusual dishes it features are tap meat and pepper water. "Tap meat is basically buffalo meat that is first beaten on a stone to flatten it out, before it's cooked into a proper fry with a lot of onions, pepper and green chillies," he explains.
Pepper water, on the other hand, is like rasam. "It involves a lot of tomatoes, which gives it a level of sourness, while the pepper makes the broth somewhat spicy. You'll find both these dishes throughout the year in Anglo-Indian homes," he says, adding that you will now also find them this weekend at the Bandra eatery where he is hosting his pop-up.
ON: April 20, 9 pm onwards
AT: The Bagel Shop, 30, Pali Mala Road, Carter Road, Bandra West.
CALL: 7039613392 to RSVP
COST: Rs 900
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