Eating out: A chance encounter with master chef Antonio Carluccio

(This article dates back to 2005)


Chef Antonio Carluccio is in an expansive mood in July 2005. Just hours before the gourmet glitterati of Bangalore sample an Italian feast he has conjured up — just as Mamma would have done it — he has stories to share, food theories to propound. And a distinct feeling of coming home to the boutique hotels of his friend Priya Paul.


Because as diners at The Park hotel's i-t.ALIA recognise from conversations with its executive chef Abhijit Saha, its memorable menu is the brainchild of London-based Carluccio. It grew out of 300 original dishes he fashioned in 2001 at the boutique hotel's kitchen over 15 days. Who can ever forget its exquisite grilled king prawns with roast potatoes, artichokes and tomato? Or the divine green apple salad with walnuts?

To dine at the restaurant is to be a confirmed convert to Italian food. A fact that would make Carluccio proud. For this food evangelist has made over a 100 appearances on the BBC. That's besides his wildly successful books on the cuisine. Thanks to his Neal Street Restaurant and his Italian gourmet café-delicatessens, Carluccios, he is today considered Britain's leading authority on Italian food and funghi (mushrooms, to the uninitiated!) No wonder foodies toast this Chef Commendatore for his lifetime dedication to Italian food.

Settling comfortably on a sofa, Carluccio confesses: "We manage very well in Italy to produce a good meal with just a few fresh ingredients. That's the secret to it all. For me, it's important that The Park's chefs recognise the actual taste of a dish from my demonstration — and they can now replicate it."

What do Chefs Saha and Mandaar Sukhantar replicate at the sit-down dinner for 60? With wine, the guests sample unusual antipasti — divine deep-fried olives hinting at a mild cheese, with crunchy frito misto of seafood, even an unusual Sardinian foccacia bread of onion and anchovy.

At crisply-laid tables with elegant flower arrangements, we encounter another of Carluccio's passions — the mushroom. This time, it is a delicious cream of porcini soup that is edgy and innovative.

It takes this diner back to our earlier conversation. "I've been going out to collect mushrooms in the wilds of southern Italy since I was six. I don't understand why the British don't love mushrooms as much as the French and the Italians do. So many good things in life begin with a fungus, like bread and cheese! And the English walk past perfectly good mushrooms at Hyde Park!" Carluccio sounds off indignantly.


The buffet spread assaults the senses. More antipasti — unforgettable pan-roasted red peppers with almond, fish carpione, and assorted salami with traditional breads like grissini, foccacia and ciabatta. Each the answer to a gastronome's prayers.

So are the main courses. Such as a delicate fresh asparagus risotto. Or pasta like tagliolini with white truffle oil. Stuffed tender lamb cutlets sandwiched with cheese. Tuscan tournedos of beef with mushrooms.

Fragrant broccoli with garlic and chilli. Gnocchi with melted gorgonzola. Grilled cubes of polenta with caponata. And a mild, stew-like chicken from Burano (the island off Venice famed for its lace).

For a food writer like Carluccio, with his book on 20 Italian provincial cuisines slated for an October release, how important are restaurant reviews? "Not much," he laughs. "For how can any critic know all about the 80 cuisines now available in London? And even the famed Michelin guide has been known to make crucial errors!" Instead, since the palate never lies, we glide smoothly on to light-as-air Zabaglione in a wineglass for dessert, with brilliant pears poached in red wine, along with a Gianduja and mascarpone cake. Rounded out with coffee granita with heavenly sliced walnut and fig salami.

The Carluccio feast lingers in memory long after the last morsel is downed. These dishes with the maestro's touch will soon be accessible on the i-t.ALIA menu. What's left to say? Bon appetit!

(The Hindu Metroplus, 2005)

Theatre: Simon McBurney and Complicite ~ 'Measure for Measure'

 (Note: this interview took place in 2005)


SIMON MCBURNEY is impossible to label. On stage, he has the unfathomable energy of waves that lunge at the foot of cliffs, tentatively reaching for the skies. Off it, his restless eyes, his intense body language, his quicksilver tongue, couch life as a theatre of possibilities.

That's what surges through when Complicite — the loose-knit, multi-cultural performing ensemble he formed in Paris in 1983 with Annabel Arden and Marcello Magni — presented Shakespeare's ambiguous "Measure for Measure" in Mumbai and Bangalore in November as a torrent of stagecraft and high-tech wizardry, a liquid flow of uninterrupted scenes and text that writhe, seethe and sweep spectators away by sleight of theatre. At its very core is artistic director McBurney, playing the duke in disguise as a friar, a star even amidst a cohesive, brilliant ensemble. Even those initially sceptical tend to exit as converts to the McBurney stage spell.

Bold deviations



No wonder the legendary Peter Brook said, "Simon McBurney and Complicite have created their own tradition and this is why they are so special, so valuable." With this production, McBurney respects the text, yet subverts it as only a true blue iconoclast can — by introducing cinema-like staging, by visual stage cues that run counter to speeches without blurring the foci, by yoking Shakespeare to sexual politics, boldly deviating into contemporary social commentary.

What makes McBurney one of the most talked-about directors on the world stage? Was it his experience of studying with legendary French mimes Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaultier? Does it stem from his American father and Irish mother, besides a Cambridge education steeped in Shakespeare?

McBurney recalls that he chose to stage "Measure for Measure" in 2004 as a self-confessed "theatre-maker, not director", mainly because Nicholas Hynter of the U.K. National Theatre wanted him to co-produce "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

"That was too obvious for me. So I chose this one. But when I read it again, I found I didn't understand it at all. I wanted to be challenged deeply, to be completely lost, and little by little to crawl out of that place of unknowing into another equally uneven piece of ground where I feel that I am fully engaging with the text," chuckles McBurney, bleary-eyed yet trooping on gamely, between five back-to-back shows at Bangalore's Ranga Shankara . "That's precisely why I wanted to do it. I didn't want to fit into what other people want me to do. My brother describes me as constitutionally disobedient. I'm interested in the limits of things."

McBurney constantly redefines himself within theatre by choosing alternate assignments. Such as directing Al Pacino in "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" in 2002. Or directing Haruki Murakami's "The Elephant Vanishes" the next year. Or playing Leontes in an eight-player production of "A Winter's Tale" in 1992.

Was it a rebellion against existing theatre of the Eighties that impelled the Theatre du Complicite? "I wanted to make theatre that I wanted to play, what I'd want to see as a theatregoer," he recalls, his fingers brushing his thinning hair out of his eyes. "I tend to respond to my environment, to criticism, to what I read. To me, it means being alive to the circumstances around. Usually, I feel: Right now, I want to make this."

Was France a turning point in this life? "At 19 or 20, I was quite well-known for doing comedy, invited to perform on radio and TV. But I was distressed by the nature of the machine unfolding in front of me. I wanted to run away from it. At the same time, my father died," says McBurney intensely, replaying past scenes. "It was important to be in another environment, to start thinking, talking and dreaming in another language for four years. It gives you a more powerful perspective on the world. Besides, Paris in the Eighties was much more cosmopolitan than London. Shows by troupes from Poland, Germany, Italy and the Far East were very well attended."

Theatrical baggage



What theatrical baggage did he jettison in Paris? "I began to think much more about the nature of action on stage. In other words, what you do is as important is as important as what you say, what you see is as important as what you hear," McBurney explains, amid a flurry of gesture. "In Britain, we call people who come to the theatre the audience, those who listen, while the French call them `les spectateurs,' those who watch. There's even that fundamental semantic difference."

A difference reflected in Complicite's startling forays beyond 28 in theatre. Such as a radio production of their lauded play "Mnemonic" for BBC 3, and collaboration with John Berger on a radio adaptation of his novel, To the Wedding. Even a multi-disciplinary installation performed at a disused tube station. But then, McBurney has also done a theatrical piece for the opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, triggered by Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, "a piece I didn't understand and which I wasn't even sure I particularly liked."

Understanding McBurney can be as confusing as his radical, raw and questioning forays into the nature of the theatrically possible. How has he liberated Shakespeare from the tired British tradition? "The English tradition of playing him belongs to the intellectuals, the upper middle classes. It's become a bit of an enclave, which doesn't reach other people," he muses. "In other cultures, because you're not subject to tradition, you can be much freer with Shakespeare. It's important to not feel fear about not conforming to how your culture expects it to be."

Indian experience



Was playing "Measure for Measure" on Indian stages a liberating experience? "It's hard work. How do you speak Shakespeare and free it? How do you perform it and free it?" replies McBurney, rising from the empty auditorium to re-energise himself for the last show in Bangalore. "As we encountered three different theatre spaces, including the Jamshedji Bhabha and the Prithvi in Mumbai, we discovered so much about how to play this play, how we relate to each other, about the intimate nuances of the text because we are able to measure each show against the others.''
 
McBurney concludes with a paean to Indian audiences, "In India, we felt a true exchange with the audience, who participated through their concentrated listening, their sophisticated understanding of the language. It wasn't the false exchange of coming to India on a holiday and supplying money to an economy. So, we take back a deep sense of meaning, a sense of hope that is rare in our world. It is a gift of such preciousness that it is almost indescribable."

Cueing in to McBurney


On Shakespeare: Shakespeare writes for a continuous present. He was a great poet who didn't remain a prisoner of his time, unlike other writers like Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher.

On Complicite: We don't have a set company. This is part of the economic reality of the 20th Century. Yet we aspire to be a consistent group with a high degree of creativity. Like a deep pool in a river, some of us go away, do others things, then come back.

On Measure for Measure: I didn't understand the play at all in the beginning. Through it, I explored the relationship between power and sexual politics. Shakespeare's perception of the exploitation of women by men was very dark. In Mumbai, it hit a political chord because of the recent clampdown on dance bars, which echoed Angelo's war on licentiousness.

On Indian influences: Habib Tanvir's Naya Theatre was important for me. So were Kathakali and other traditional forms. And Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury...

(The Hindu Sunday Magazine, 2005)

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Measure for Measure: Bangalore 2005 

Ranga Shankara. November 16 to 18. 

Complicite's Measure for Measure, disconcerts us by bringing us face to face with a study of sexual politics, cloaked as power play. Perhaps a return to Elizabethan morals. It unearths questions that make us squirm: how does celibacy differ from chastity? What did Shakespeare, then 40, have in mind in this seldom-staged play?

Cinema-like in its multiple foci, Orson Welles-intense in its accents, McBurney's presentation sets a searing, interval-free pace, where scenes collide, where the text blurs, then coalesces into redefinitions for individual actors and viewers alike. The mood is relentless right from the haunting opening scene, where rain projections soak the stage floor, lovers embrace passionately and a cigarette glows in the distance.

Warmth is defined by the lack of it, politics by its present context, sex by its primary drive. This polemical, hard-driving interpretation is defined by its desire to deconstruct, then reconstruct, the Bard for our time. Its grey spaces are populated by the lecherous Angelo and double-talking Bush (on a monitor), by timeless sexual exploitation and social hypocrisy.

McBurney does not tamper with the text, but gives us double-edged technical clues to an insidious underlayer, that initially puzzles us, then make us clutch at our seats once we gauge its true import. How dues he cue us in? By prisoners dressed in Guantanamo Bay orange. By spying on intimate conversations through video devices. By layering the floor with tantalising checkerboards. By dressing sex workers like today's porn stars. By using mikes to couch aggression and antagonism, a la TV talk shows.

The soundscape is a dramatic overlay, yet immeasurably potent. The trendy gear echoes today's vivid street life. The overhead bulbs impact the shifting power equations, as much as the players ranged at stage-edge. Their constantly dissolving tableaux and forays through the audience, highlighted by Paul Anderson's brilliant lighting design, add up to a staging that is unforgettable, intangibly disturbing.

Because of the concluding twist, of minimal impact when read, feels like a blow in the solar plexus when Measure for Measure plays out after an unrelenting 120-minute, intelligence-led assault on our senses. Because McBurney provokes us with haunting images — such as Isabella/ the Madonna on the floorboards as she penetrates Angelo's moral turpitude. Or the rear screen that allows us to glimpse a shadowy tree beyond the stage, as we catch our collective breath. Even Angelo's white shirt stained with the blood that was not his to spill at will.

Beyond technical wizardry and stagecraft, what the audience will ultimately cherish is Complicite as an outstanding acting ensemble. Especially the subtly shaded duke, played by the inimitable McBurney as a character of unusual emotional intelligence. And Naomi Frederick's Isabella, whose delineation drew gooseflesh and tears with felicity.

With due respect to Shakespeare, it was the surreal mating of The Globe with Ranga Shankara that was the true measure of this production. Take another curtain call, Complicite!

(The Hindu Metroplus, 2005)

Music: The Mark of Knopfler

Two personal takes on Mark Knopfler in Bangalore, circa October 2005

HE’S GOT gravel in his voice. His spatulate fingers fly over the guitar frets. He’s got communication skills that most CEOs would die for. But are those reasons enough for a guesstimated 20,000 people to gather at Bangalore’s Palace Grounds on March 7 for a magical Mark Knopfler concert? Brought to town by DNA Networks’ T. Venkat Varadhan, it had the city swinging. 

Mark who? The quip from a nattily-suited young executive in the Rs. 2,500 enclosure nearly results in a lynching. Why are you here, you villager, groans his neighbour in a fluorescent floral shirt, brandishing his mobile phone. A pretty Manipuri belle in a hot pink cut-offs, teetering on stiletto heels, sticks her tongue out at the offender. Standing all around them are Dire Straits fans, packed shoulder to shoulder, cosy as only music buffs can be. Collectively addicted to Knopfler, the face and driving force behind the 1977-launched British band, its lead guitarist and lyricist/ vocalist. 

Every murmur dies out once the five time Grammy winner appears live on the  3000 sq. ft. stage, highlighted by powerful crossbeams of ceiling-suspended ‘flying lights’.  But he is no longer the Knopfler of the headband-held locks. He’s a more sober variant at 55, his white shirt tails hanging out over groomed blue jeans. He’s jowlier, he’s paunchier, he’s balder, with great glasses on.

But who cares about his looks? Once he launches into the opening chords of “Why, Aye Man,” his sheer talent reaches out. The audience sings along as one. Raised arms wave from side to side, amidst fluttering scarves. Cameras on mobile phones capture the magic. Heads sway in time. Hands clap in rhythm. 

Requests rend the air. “How about Sultans of Swing?” “Hey, Mark, give us Walk of Life. Please, please, please, I could die after that,” sings a local crooner to her onstage idol, her arms outstretched from our second row of standees. “Money for Nothing, yaar! That’s your best hit ever,” yells a 30-plus ponytailed fan, clad in a black Iron Maiden T-shirt.

Knopfler’s riffs get raunchier. More incandescent, by the number. His solo slides glide into popular songs, with an entirely individual lyrical phrasing. His fingers pick, tease and coax, pluck and sing. Knopfler in action hints at the blues, echoes country melodies, brings alive jazz dives. The Seventies-Eighties mood of the Dire Straits is all-pervasive. His new back-up band is in great sync ~ Glenn Worf (bass), Richard Bennett (guitar), Guy Fletcher (piano) Chad Cromwell (drums) and Matt Rollings (organ/ accordion). 

Knopfler often changes guitars in performance. We keep him company on his sometimes pentatonic, five-note bluesy journey. It’s a powerful Fender for one number, a Martin the next, a Gretsch 6120 for a third, picking from a range of 15 lined up on stage. Old times roll as this sultan swings with his red-and-white Stratocaster.

Within the crowd, memories coast down the musical backstreets, annulling time. Does Knopfler onstage faintly resemble the Glasgow-born guy who was a rock critic, taught English, and was a rookie reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post? Or the teenager who longed for an expensive, elusive hot-pink Fender Strat? Did he spend hours imitating his musical icons, including Jimi Hendrix, Scotty Moore and Django Reinhart? Was it the band’s first drummer Pick Withers whose friend named them ‘Dire Straits’ in the mid-70s because they were so stony broke? Knopfler today has played with a galaxy of greats, including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Sting, James Taylor, and Tina Turner.

Vitally alive, Knopfler’s smokey voice spins out ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with infinite tenderness, or the more recent ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’ with beguiling drive. What sets this quiet man of rock and roll apart? His songs. His words. His narrative connections into the everyday. We agree on that.

That’s what makes his stories connect with us. For isn’t ‘Sultans of Swing’ about a fledgling music band? Wasn’t ‘Money for Nothing’ jotted down in an electrical appliances store? Isn’t a soldier dying in a battlefield at the core of ‘Brothers in Arms’? As for ‘Boom like That,’ doesn’t it take off on Ray Krock, who founded McDonald’s?

The concert momentum picks up against an LCD cloth that creates a starry backdrop. As Knopfler refuels with cold tea onstage, we surge to his musical travelogue. From ‘What it is’ to ‘Wild West End,’ from ‘Prairie Wedding’ to ‘Song for Sonny Liston,’ from ‘Done with Bonaparte’ to ‘Donegan’s Gone,’ his spoken-word growl rings true.

Knopfler’s flitting fingers on the classic Fender tantalize us on the blow-up screen. He haunts us with drawn-out blues chords, lilting solos, cadenced patter, even as he perches on a stool for a few numbers.

“Knopfler must be dead tired, after playing live at Mumbai on March 5,” observes a DJ behind me. “But he’s such a pro. He’s still electrifying, isn’t he?”

As the final notes of Knopfler’s 1982 instrumental movie track, ‘Local Hero,’ slide into the night, we wake to a realization. That his music still defies categorization. Was that a Celtic lilt coming our way? Or a bluegrass banjo-like sound? Is it rock? Is it blues? It is modified jazz? Is it rooted in folk notes? At the end of a superb show, who cares about labels?

Knopfler has traveled wild spaces away from the Newcastle-on-Tyne boy inspired by his uncle’s harmonica and boogie-woogie piano. His avowed fans today include cricket top leaguer Sachin Tendulkar. And Abhishek Burman, 55, who flew down from Kolkata to visit his IT-centric son ~ and listen to Knopfler live.

“I rushed here from Goa for this concert,” says American Katya Miller, 22, who’s backpacking around India with a friend. “I’d never get a chance like this at home.”  

Ranvir and Shaila, both youthful BPO professionals, do not feel Knopfler belongs to another generation. “He’s totally today. A really cool dude, machaan,” stresses Ranvir. “It doesn’t matter that he’s my dad’s age.”

As ardent listeners, we remain grateful that Dire Straits steered clear of the punk strains raging around them in 1977. That Knopfler remains true to his own solo evolution since 1996, as witnessed by his 2004 second album, ‘Shangri-la.’ That the University of Newcastle conferred an Honorary Music Degree on him in May 1993. And that Knopfler came to us in Bangalore, dazzling us with his virtuosity, on the recovery path from a serious motorcycle crash in 2003 that made him cancel a tour. That’s the Mark of the man. 

*       *         *

 

Mark Knopfler: 'Sultans of Swing' at the Royal Albert Hall, 2005

MARK KNOPFLER onstage in Bangalore. A demigod come to life. At least to my neighbour, Tara Teresa Tasneem.

She doesn’t mind if the face and voice of the Dire Straits today comes as a package deal. With a jowly chinline. A craggy visage. A receding hairline. A camouflaged paunch. And outsize specs. All rendered glam by dazzling white shirt-tails over classic blue jeans. Yoked to electric fingers flying over the frets of his red-and-white Stratocaster, the yearning plaint of pentatonic blues.

“I’d give my best Kutchi biriyani and Mississippi Mud Pie for an evening with Mark. I bet he’ll prove to be the Sultan of Swing,” sighs TTT, post open-air concert, post dreamtime. “Wouldn’t you?”

I look away. I like the gravel-throat growl that passes for Knopfler vocals. I like his frantic, frenetic speaking guitar. I’m smitten as he belts out a poignant, teasing ‘Brothers in Arms.’ But I’d still stay true to my pin-up boys.

“I’m a finger fetishist,” I declare to triple T. “So, thanks, but I’d opt out. Knopfler’s not my style.”

“What’s wrong with his perfectly capable hands?” counters TTT. “Didn’t you watch him tease and pluck through those riddling riffs? I doubled up with pleasure when I listened to him do ‘Song for Sonny Liston.’ What’s with you?”

“I don’t like his spatulate fingers,” I say. “No matter how smokey Knopfler’s voice is, no matter how potent his lyrics are, give me Sting any day. Or even Paul McCartney. Their hands are elegant. Less vein-ribbed. More tapering fingers. Brilliantly buffed cuticles. That gets me going.”

“Even at 55, Knopfler had 20,000 people singing along with him at Bangalore’s  Palace Grounds,” TTT persists. “If that isn’t drop-dead appeal, what is?”

“I’ll tell you what is. Paul’s dreamy eyes. His slimline body profile. His teen-cute half-smile. His choice of a Linda Eastman or Heather Mills for company. It’s a beauty-brilliance combo that he’s into,” I sing. “Even at 61, he packed stadia around 13 European cities last year. That means over three million fans got to listen to him live since his return to the road in 2002. If that isn’t awesome, woman, turn over a new leaf…”

As TTT catches her breath, I hum under my breath: I love him, yeah-yeah-yeah.

Silence persists. Time for a second salvo. “What’s Sting got to do with it?” I continue, reaching for that invisible message in a bottle. “My lanky teen nephew freaks out on him, just as I do. Cross-gender. Cross-continents. Cross-genre. That’s his buzz…”

TTT butts in, “But what’s Sting done to match Knopfler’s ‘Boom Like That.’ Isn’t that a freaky take on the McDonald’s tycoon Ray Krock? My man’s got what it takes, grey cells, et al…”

“Hang on, triple T, that’s tripe,” I’m not ready for a truce yet. “Chunky isn’t hunky in my date book. Five Grammy awards can’t compensate for a physique gone to seed. Sting looks like a long, lithe god ~ and sings like a dream. And his music is politics unplugged, power-scanning rainforests, global injustices. He rocks, woman. Hand it to him.”

“My Mark’s played with Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. How’s that for a class act?” jeers TTT, nibbling at her pink-streaked locks. “He’s worked as a true blue Yorkshire reporter. He’s even taught English. Can your musical icons match that?”

“Sticky brainjam!” I launch into the fray. “Your Mark sang for mere profit. My activist Sting’s February 2005 Indian tour was to help with tsunami relief work. Haven’t you heard how he and his wife Trudi set up the Rainforest Foundation to fight for an eco-positive world? Like my Paul, Sting supports Amnesty International. And he has a mere  15 Grammy awards, including five with the Police.”

But triple TTT doubles up as a karate champ. It shows in her verbal armoury: “Don’t you dare knock down Knopfler. He’s the quietest hero from the world of quasi-rock. Aren’t his drawn-out bluesy chords seductive? Like the Celtic undertones to his folk-driven guitar?”

“McCartney is magic. Look at the causes he champions. Animal welfare. Vegetarianism. Minefield survivors. That’s if you don’t count breast cancer research and AIDS awareness,” I argue, silently tuning into ‘Mull of Kintyre.’

“I sent up a fervent dua in 2003. I’m sure that helped Knopfler recover from the ugly motorcycle crash that cancelled his tour then,” croons TTT, more gentle on this track. “That’s how you got to listen to him live in our Bangalore backyard.”

“But Sting is almost an honorary Indian,” I insist, changing chords. “Lucky Ali heard him practicing amidst the maroon-ochre vibes at Dharamsala. He’s been to Gangotri. And is a yoga expert, to boot. He even auctioned his services as a yoga instructor to fund-raise for UNICEF…”

Notes negotiate. TTT and I agree to disagree. Down with spatulate fingers. Up with fine-toned, genteel hands that speak. And caress better than words. 

What’s so special about a Walk of Life? To me, giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon. Besides, I believe in yesterday.