What is your favorite restaurant?
People in my country India take great pride in their home-cooked food and it is truly heavenly. As a country in which agriculture is a primary field of profession, we have a large variety of food materials, right from the vegetables right down to the very spices. There is an almost never-ending list of amazing dishes with a deep flavour profile and I can say there is a very high probability that the best cooks in the country are cooking at home and not at some hotel or restaurant.
I am absolute in my preference of home-cooked meals over restaurant cooked meals any day, as I am yet to eat anything which tastes nearly as good as the food my maternal and paternal grandmothers used to cook. When it came to my parents’ generation, people started becoming a lot more consumed by their professions and thus the time for the kitchen drastically lessened and with that started the reliance on restaurants.
Where I live, when I walk or drive around, I see brands everywhere, they have very efficiently taken over and I wouldn’t hide my own preference for them with the expectation of an assured good quality. But my favourite restaurant isn’t one of them, it’s the one in whose place stands a two-floored store selling household and lifestyle products, I visited that store yesterday and bought an hourglass.
It was one of the first restaurants in the area, run by a one-legged man. My father thought the man was in the army once. We never asked his name, thus we never knew.
The restaurant wasn’t fancy in any way you saw it. It just had a ground floor. There were no air conditioners, a single large air cooler cooled the entire restaurant. The wooden tables and chairs were old and worn out. In the menu were some dishes which I thought were the best I have tasted in any restaurant. It was our preferred restaurant and it was a popular one. I even went to eat there during my college days and even my friends still share my opinion of the food there.
We visited the restaurant once every two weeks or got food ordered from there. Then, one day after this period of two weeks we found that they were no longer picking up the phone for delivery and later when I was passing by there, I saw it was completely dark, its sign board had been removed. It was broken down to create and a shopping complex came up in its place. I miss the food sometimes, I think I miss the memories there more. However, it did inspire me to learn to cook and if you ever come by my house one day, I may be able to cook up something decent.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 
2 responses to “The Food Relished”
Nice post 🙏🎸
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Well expressed your emotions and well said that we miss the place and miss the memories there more.
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