CHENNAI: A day after International Chefs Day was celebrated by the men in the tall hats across the city’s luxury hotels, it may have been easy to dismiss thousands of others who do not have claim to that title. But ignore them you cannot, because if there’s any question about who feeds Chennai’s hungry stomachs when they’re not at home (and sometimes even when they are), indubitably it is the ‘master’. The core component in the kitchen of any restaurant, fast food joint, tea shop or kaiyendhi bhavan, the ‘Master’, as he is proudly called, possibly works very much like hotel chefs, sans the linen and luxury. “I direct the boys to begin peeling potatoes at 5am everyday. After that, work on the idlis have to begin. The only thing that I insist on these days is that at 6.30am, the first dosa be made and that it be mine. I will taste it first,” recounts Krishna Kumar or Krishna Master as he is called, who runs the kitchen of a popular breakfast joint in Saligramam. He is puzzled when we ask him if he considers himself a chef, “Chef? You mean the cooks in the star hotels? I was offered a job at Adyar Gate once, but they said I couldn’t make idlis wearing a banian. So, it didn’t work out.” This kitchen, his kingdom, is his daily calling he adds.Everyday, hundreds of cooks toil over hot stoves for hours at a stretch before they toss your fried rice and dump it on your plate. “We don’t have to maintain a stiff work routine and we can wear whatever we want,” says a cheeky Ratna, a young fast food tosser in Mambalam. “Often, the customers tell us what they want and we oblige,” he explains on how customer-relations can exist anywhere when it comes to food. The only problem with having customers staring over their shoulder when their food is made is that people make disapproving noises when they feel that the meat portions are too small. Does he ever dream of working in a fancy hotel’s kitchen,“I won’t be able to smoke every 30 minutes then, but at least, customers will be off my back then!,” he concludes. For the majority of the cooks though, its not all fun at work, especially for those who have remained as street-side cooks for years. The lack of money to expand, the fear of losing customers every time prices are raised and constant financial worries plague cooks who operate from thallu-vandis (push-carts), all this besides harassment from the police. “Since we started cooking food from bunks on the Marina beach, every six months, there is some problem or the other. But as long as we have regulars coming and calling us from the beach at 11.30pm and asking why we shut early, we know that we have a responsibility to cook,” says a cook.
Comments
0 comment