Oriya food in Orissa? Tough...

On top of every traveler’s wishlist is to sample the local cuisine. It’s a little difficult when your options are limited, like if you’re a vegetarian, trying your best to respect your roots (pun unintended). But what the heck. You can at least tell your grandkids one day that you survived on salad in Japan (my grandpa actually did this!)

Getting the best out of the local flavor was uppermost in our minds when we set foot in Orissa earlier this month for a whistlestop trip, which included, foremost, attending my grandpa’s doctorate function in Cuttack, and the touristy stuff at Puri and Konark. It was the first visit for me and my sister, and all we could think about when the train pulled over at Bhubaneshwar, was food. I know looks can be very deceiving. Don’t ask me where it disappears after I swallow!

When we hopped onto the cab, the first question we asked our escort was to recommend a good Oriya restaurant, the more downmarket the better. But since we had to call it an early night, we decided to try our luck at XIMB, the B-school where we were staying. We stepped in to the dining hall with glee, only to discover Chinese food. Chinese! Ugh.. Ok, whatever.

The next day, at the convocation in Cuttack, we got a little more inquisitive with the locals we interacted with, but for some weird reason, they didn’t share our enthusiasm. One of them said matter-of-factly, “Oh there’s a good South Indian restaurant just five minutes from here.” We cut him short and exclaimed, “South Indian! Are you freaking nuts!” Ok, we didn’t actually say that! But in our minds, we did. Better luck next time. We had lunch at the popular Bombay Hotel in Cuttack which served Gujarathi food minus the meetha. Seemed incongruous, but it was quite a decent meal in the end.

We were confident our luck would change that evening, closer to the Oriya heartland. Or so we thought. On reaching the hotel in Konark, we were given the rather pleasant news that the restaurant was closed because they were busy catering to a wedding reception at the lawn. You can’t be serious, we thought. Which godforsaken place shuts its dining room to its own guests? We looked up at the board which read PINKY WEDS PRIYAS and contemplated what to do next. There was an option, though, to gatecrash the wedding for a free meal! It was an opportunity to relive the scene from Three Idiots and the setting was just perfect – there were three of us after all. All we had to was masquerade as idiots, pretending to be long-lost acquaintances of either Pinky or Priyas, if we could separate the two, going by their names.

Fearing we would be kicked out of the wedding and the hotel, with the prospect of a night in the streets of Konark, we set out looking at other options. We were already pushing our luck, as it was beyond 10. We checked the nearest hotel, only to be told that it was too late. In the dining room was this burly guy who just did a bottoms-up on an Old Monk half. My mom and sister wanted to run! I turned to my right and saw a woman in a skimpy outfit with a year’s supply of make-up, accompanied by a sleaze bag of a guy. We’d raided a prostitution racket! Seacrest, OUT!

Our hopes hemorrhaged as we drove past every dhaba and whatever else which had put its shutters down. We had almost resigned to a dinner of grapes and bananas when we spotted a hotel with its neon lights on. Our hopes crashed again when we saw the owner get ready to leave for the night. We explained our situation and miraculously, he agreed to serve us. Overwhelmed by his generosity, we hopped right in. It was like a slummy, highway hotel but we weren’t complaining. It was a Marawadi hotel, not Oriya, but we didn’t care. We were starved. In the dining room, we were forced to watch a local televised dance show, before one of them switched to a typical saas-bahu serial. We were treated to the serial’s climax, where the mother in law circled her eyeballs at least five times in utter shock and disgust, all along thinking she’s the best actress in the planet. That amusement was followed by a dinner which surpassed our expectations. We tipped them generously and in a rush of overwhelming happiness, I nearly petted a stray dog.

It was only in (aptly named) Puri where we finally experienced our first Oriya meal the following afternoon. At Mayfair, a non-ecofriendly eco hotel, we did a Control F on the menu for “Oriya” and ordered daalma, dahi baingan and another mixed veg dish which I can’t exactly remember. It took us two nights and the better part of two days to wait for satisfaction… something to write home about.