By Nisha Ravi
A chaat corner.
A salad section.
The same old starters - mushroom fry, corn fry, soya chaap, cheese poppers and some meat variants if the culture allows it.
Your regular naans, rotis, dals, paneer makhnis, aloo mutters, and just about every text book sabji.
And then the elevated experience with chowmein, and other Chinese options. An even more elevated option? Pastas. Marrying a South Indian? Live dosa and appam counters.
The list, no matter how elaborate, somehow always seems ultra standard at wedding buffets be it a small scale wedding or the big Ambani wedding bash.
The ironic thing is I was talking to Aakash, Kara’s co-founder just a few weeks ago. It was happenstance that we strolled past a Catholic wedding.
“Oooh a wedding, should we crash it for the food? We could do an exclusive on how gatecrashed wedding meals are way better than the regularly attended ones.”
“Fascinating idea. Although, what do you think of wedding food in general?” I asked.
“Actually you know what….it doesn’t excite me anymore.”
I couldn't agree more.
And don’t get me wrong. I can bet my meagre savings on the fact that the catering at the richest wedding in the country will be nothing short of spectacular, there is something absolutely mundane and monotonous about an endless variety of offerings at a wedding buffet.
Speaking of which, what a shebang the whole Ambani wedding has been. It's perhaps going to take us weeks to get over all the stunning outfits, the even more stunning jewellery and of course. The FOOD.
I think my heart did a double take at the sight of the richest man of the country eating a mirchi bhajiya like I would have at a wedding. I don’t know what I was expecting but hey, it is nice to know they eat mirchi bhajiyas just the way we commoners do.
Apparently a whopping 2500 items featured in the menu was curated for the pre-wedding bonanza alone. That means a guest should be ingesting something every 2 minutes in the 3 days to be able to try everything. Alright, aright, I know that’s not how it works. But wow. 2500 items.
My first memory of a wedding was when I was about 5 or 6. I obviously do not remember all of it but I vividly remember the food. It was one of those midnight weddings in Mhow, MP. I remember being sleepy but being woken up to eat dinner.
I also remember being so excited by the sheer variety and the endless rows of rice, naans, curries, and most importantly dessert. And while I specifically do not remember eating at all, I remember wolfing down warm gulab jamuns in larger quantities than would usually have been permissible. It was perhaps, for this reason, that early on in my life, I began to love weddings. I’d avoid talks about mine like the plague but anyone else’s, I am there, first, decked up.
Indian weddings are such a grandiose affair. In my late 20s, as is common in India, just about everyone I knew was getting married, giving me the chance to deck up in a Kanjivaram and trot off to eat a feast.
And maybe the food is good but then the mass manufactured approach to this makes the whole grand affair so lacklustre. You see, the larger than life wedding buffets are at best average. Having gone to tons of those, I find myself exhausted by the choice and the randomness of the assortments.
But it took going to my first Gowda wedding in Karnataka to really see what a community puts out, with pride, at their weddings.
A core non vegetarian community hailing from the picturesque hilly towns of Hassan, they take delight in their fall-off-the-bone mutton chops, biriyanis and kola urandais and that is exactly what features at a wedding feast too!
Or my first Calicut Moplah wedding where 4 ladies at a time sat in a circle around a large copper platter. A heap of mutton biriyani is served with chammandi, papadum and a dates chutney but what really seals the deal is the poricha kozhi, mutton roast, beef fry and the other delectable meat forward dishes that adorn the bed of biriyani while the women giggle and chatter away.
There is something so heartwarming about embracing the meal of your land, of your people and of your culture on your special day rather than trying to fit a continental spread on a budget.
So when someone now asks me if I like wedding food. Hand to heart, I’d say, “depends what kind of a wedding it is”.
This is a Part 1 of a Wedding Food Series we are developing at Kara Tales. Subscribe to be in the know!
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