“You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.”
– Paul Prudhomme
“Where to today?”, asked my friend as we absently scrolled through multiple apps, trying to figure someplace to eat when we met later that day. I happened upon the offering of A Hole in the Wall Café, and knowing from my past Bangalorean experience, I thought it might be worth a try again. So, I shared the place details and we fixed up a time to meet. My rumbling tummy urged us to meet a little before dinner time as it also intuitively told my brain to start browsing the menu to decide beforehand what it would want to eat. I find myself often doing that, browsing the goods of a restaurant before so that I am raring to go as soon as I step in. I think that anticipation of what awaits me at the eatery helps me get over the nuisance of waiting I suppose. Sometimes I can almost smell the food through the virtual screen, almost.
“Have you ever been there?”, my friend questioned me again. “Not to this one, no”, I replied dismissively. It had been quite sometime since I went out to a proper restaurant or café. The last I remembered of eating out was the makeshift dinner that my family had on the terrace of our building, too bored to eat in but too cautious to step out. Times had certainly changed since the past two years when I had first visited this franchise of a café in Bangalore. I still have those memories tucked away. A group of friends from graduate school. A lazy brunch on one of those relatively free and rare weekends. And a feast to remember. Between the seven of us, I think we ordered more than we could generally eat, but certainly that didn’t stop us from polishing off every last morsel. It started with the innocent butter on toast and ended with a long lug of peach iced tea. But the journey was scenic with piles of food like the creamy masala scramble but with a kick to it, honey-drizzled classic French toast, a BLT that was worthy of an Instagram shot, a hearty veggie burger, blueberry waffles carrying a whiff of the summer, the full all English breakfast and, of course, Oreo pancakes doing double duty of being both breakfast and desert. Whoever thought to portray women stereotypes as those eating mouse-sized morsels of salad food, certainly didn’t meet these ravenous hordes. I don’t remember much of the remainder of the day, perhaps because we all may have spent it catching up on the z’s.
I was trying to remember the last time when I had such a spread and although I had to jog my memory a little, I realized it was this solitary affair back early in the year, but no less splendid. I had gone to this little hideout that I had accidentally discovered and lazily grazed through a breakfast of barbecued beans, golden hash browns, vivid green spinach, buttered toast along with iced tea and rounded it off with a latte, sipping while working on my laptop. It was a true recollection of radiant day filled with nutrition, satisfaction, and productivity. Making a mental note to go back to my Google Maps and search for the place, I got into the auto to take me to the current retreat, as the evening sun went down.
Hyderabad has always been known for its food and having had come back to the place after so long, and stepped out after even longer, I staggered at the sumptuous restaurants that I was passing by. I have always tried to make a checklist of places to eat but there were so many of them, along any route you took, that I always ended up forgetting a few. Nonetheless, as I stepped out of my black-and-yellow coach, I was pleasantly surprised that I could check one thing off my list. It was the same place that I had come to feast many months ago. I gleefully walked through the automatic glass doors of the café to again find myself standing in the grass-carpeted outdoors of the place. There is definitely something about coming to an eatery you have enjoyed before. It’s that familiar call of comfort through food that you can sense coming.
So, with a bemused smile, I took my seat and browsed through the menu, waiting for my friend. Hunger pangs were real at this time of the night, but I didn’t want to entirely negate the company to come, and so I ordered for cheesy fries and a peach and basil lemonade as I waited. When the courteous staff placed my order in front of me, I was surprised again. It was not my order was brought out wrong, but it seemed to have been brought out better. Where I thought I would probably receive a watered- down version of an orange lemonade was a strikingly green glass of the beverage, unmistakably due to the basil. And where was supposed to be the usual tiny appetizer plate of cheesy fries, was a wide bowl of melting cheese topped on crispy fries, finished with green chives complimenting the drink. The first thought was that the basil would be overpowering and the cheesy just too cloying. But when given a chance, both of them stood their ground. The peach and basil lemonade was mouth-puckeringly tangy, a perfect pair to the fries which were devilishly salty and moreish. More often than not, cheesy fries just end up being soggy fries with blobs of cheese not fully melted through such that you are just getting a mouthful of bland cheese with overly oily potato strands. But this one stood out for me in a long time of having such starters. The cheese had a beautiful swathe and seasoning to it, making the perfect sauce to encase the golden fried potatoes in. The chives just left you with that bit of freshness. I relished the bowl and the beverage under the moonlit sky, taking in the breezy ambience around me.
Finally, my friend arrived, they too ordered something for themselves from the truncated menu due to the situation and we tucked into the conversation and the food. The portions were so generous that neither of us had the appetite to ring up another dish, so with content tummies and good memories, we parted. As I made my way back to the home with a satisfied smile, it came on me, how simplest of food can make you feel so satiated. All I had was basically a lemonade and some fries and yet there was something so comforting about it that I came away with a feeling of being given a warm hug. It was as though my stomach and my soul both were nourished in that small hole in the wall.
