The Indian dining scene is getting hip but restaurants are co-opting cuisines while ignoring the techniques

We sprinkle our menus with terms from international cuisine to sound more sophisticated without understanding what the terms mean

My eggs Benedict at one of the fancy new cafes that have popped up in Kolkata came with a descriptor:  English muffin, mushroom/ chicken salami/ bacon, poached egg and hollandaise sauce.

The sauce was more Hollandish than hollandaise and a little scant. And the eggs arrived on a sweetish white bread pav, not an English muffin from any angle.

I realised then that for the restaurant English muffin is just a word that goes with eggs Benedict. In reality, they could serve pav, or a hamburger bun, but almost never an actual English muffin which is a small, round, flat, yeast-leavened bread, frequently sourdough, and not to be confused with sweet, floury cupcakes either. Soon some Kolkatan will go abroad and complain when they find a real English muffin in their eggs Benedict.

The dining scene in India has grown far more cosmopolitan but sometimes it just adopts words without paying attention to their meanings.

Writer and chef Rajyasree Sen says she’s ordered a shepherd’s pie and been served some “weird mince thing without potatoes on top”. She’s asked for a pavlova and gotten a “normal tart with some meringue on top”. Pavlova is made like a meringue but it’s not a fruit tart with meringue on top. Except on some Indian menus.

My problem does not stem from some picky obsession with authenticity. I am all for gobi Manchurian even though it has never been anywhere near Manchuria. Cuisines evolve to capture local flavours. Tex-Mex is a classic example of a cuisine that started out as an American-friendly twist on Mexican food and now is its own thing.

But what we are seeing here is something different. It’s like cooking chicken pulao and passing it off as biryani just because biryani sounds more cool. We sprinkle our menus with terms from international cuisine to sound more worldly and sophisticated without understanding what the terms mean. A nasi goreng becomes regular fried rice with a fried egg on top.