If you’ve been following this series of posts, you’d know that sometime in May this year, I launched on a spree of watching food movies, in order to do some research for an article I had to write. As I … Continue reading
(This is a longer version of an article I wrote for Cuisine Digest, a hospitality industry magazine. Cuisine Digest does have an online presence, in the form of a Facebook page, but does not offer the option of reading the magazine online. The article I wrote for Cuisine Digest was the cover story for the August-September 2018 issue; bound by strict word counts, it was a heavily truncated version of what follows).
(This is preceded by Part 1—here—and Part 2—here, describing a challenge I set myself, of watching food movies from around the world and cooking dishes or meals that I associated with the movies. Read on for a list of ten … Continue reading
This blog has been in existence for nearly ten years now, and every now and then, someone suggests a theme for a song list. Some theme requests keep cropping up repeatedly (lullabies and bhajans being popular ones), because these are topics people know would have a large number of songs to choose from.
One topic which has cropped up perhaps only once or twice is that of food songs. Not even songs in praise of food, but which just mention food, in some context or the other. I remember friend and erstwhile fellow blogger Harvey remarking that while there are several songs that do mention food, the food mentioned is rarely the type that makes you salivate at the very thought of it (that’s probably changed somewhat in more recent films—chicken fry appeals to me, as do potato-filled samosas, though the songs in which they feature are appalling).
(This is a sequel to Part 1, where I introduced this challenge I set myself. It’s about five months, May-September 2018, during which I watched sixty-odd films and cooked 30-odd dishes or meals to go with those films. In Part … Continue reading
Or, in English, The Restaurant. Though, personally, I think the ‘grand’ of the original French title suits this film better, because the very grandness and importance of Septime—the eponymous ‘grand (or great) restaurant’—is what makes it the site of a very high-profile abduction…
I watched this film because I found it in a list of ‘food films’ and got very excited at the thought of an old food film. As it happened, there’s not that much food in Le Grand Restaurant, after all. Despite that, it’s a film worth watching.
Do you like watching food movies?
I do. And, back in May this year, having been approached by a food magazine to contribute an article on food movies (in particular movies about chefs and professional cookery), I went on a food movie binge. I’d watched loads of food movies before—everything from relatively ‘arty’ movies like Eat Drink Man Woman to popular hits like Chocolat, Julie & Julia and even the animated Ratatouille. But since this time round I wanted to look at the details of every film, at the nuances, I had to sit and watch them more closely, more at leisure.
To commemorate the establishment of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1945, World Food Day is celebrated on October 16. No, not a wasteful celebration of a food ingredient like Spain’s famous La Tomatina festival, and … Continue reading
When I began this blog, it was with the intention of reviewing films, and doing the occasional song list. I had never read a book on cinema, and had no real interest in doing so, either: my perception of the genre, so to say, was a world of sleaze: biographies laying bare lives about which I did not want to know the sordid details.
I am happy to say that, over the years, I’ve been proven wrong. I’ve read several biographies, of film personalities all the way from Balraj Sahni to Fearless Nadia, Mohammad Rafi to Kidar Sharma, Asha Bhonsle to Rajesh Khanna to Nasir Husain—and most have proven entertaining, informative, and definitely non-sleazy. A hat tip is due to biographers like Akshay Manwani, Sidharth Bhatia, Gautam Chintamani, and Jai Arjun Singh.
… and to Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, whose biography of RD Burman was the main reason I wanted to read this, their biography of Pancham’s illustrious (and, in my opinion, even greater than his son) father, S D Burman. S D Burman: The Prince Musician (Tranquebar, Westland Publications Private Limited, 2018; 344 pages; ₹799; ISBN 9789387578180) is an exhaustive detailing of the career of S D Burman, beginning from his days as a singer in Calcutta, till his death—while still far from having hung up his boots—in 1975.
(This travelogue was meant to be posted almost a month and a half back. But, with Kerala flooded and in such dire straits, it somehow seemed inappropriate to write about a touristy visit to a state which was already, at … Continue reading
Dustedoff 