Eating Out

At The Punjab Grill

It was high time food impresario Jiggs Kalra started his own restaurant, says FARZANA BEHRAM CONTRACTOR. With Punjab Grill he has raised the bar for foodies who love this robust cuisine

Think Punjab and what do you conjure? Hearty, robust, happy people? Sure. Also good eaters and good drinkers? Absolutely. The term Patiala peg didn’t just materialise out of nowhere!

I could very well be a Punjab specialist. In my professional hockey playing days so frequently did I go to play tournaments in Patiala, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar, I practically lived there. And I saw first hand the love affair that Punjabis have with food.

Lion-hearted is a favourite term of the Sardars, therefore Jiggs Kalra has done right by using an impressive lion as the logo of his restaurant, Punjab Grill.

Jiggs is someone not just I, but all in the food fraternity know and respect. A colourful personality, Jiggs was this confident man with a spring in his step and a gift of the gab. A charming and suave sardar who was fond of matching the colour of his shirt with that of his elegantly tied turban.

Jiggs was responsible for having given many a good cook his due. In the 70s it was his great passion to scour the bye lanes of the gourmet cities of India and discover the little food joints where unknown cooks would be preparing the most mouth-watering food. Preparations that would put fancy chefs to shame. He would pick these cooks out from their life of drudgery and obscurity and install them under the spotlight in all the metros of India. Twice a year, for many years Jiggs would come from Delhi, his hometown to Bombay to hold food festivals for five star hotels. These were occasions for great joy and jubilation because Jiggs knew about food like very few did. He would conduct these festivals with great finesse, planning every detail from the menu to the invitation card, to even the uniforms of the service staff.

Then sadly, one winter morning in Delhi, Jiggs suffered a stroke. It rendered him paralysed on the left side and deprived him of the power of his fluent speech and the spring in his step. He was confined to a wheelchair with drooping hands and legs and slurring speech. It broke his heart when he realised he could not tie his turban anymore. Someone else would have to drape it for him and that the proud sardar did not want, so he started to wear a baseball cap.

However, Jiggs is a spirited man and he did not allow the setback to get in the way. With the support of his family he was soon back - not on his feet, re-starting his foodie life. Holding food festivals, helping people set up restaurants, consulting.

And now, still wearing his baseball cap, still in a wheelchair, he has set up his own restaurant, the Punjab Grill. That´s his baby alright!

But while Jiggs has put in his expertise and years of culinary knowledge, it is Zorawar, the prodigal son who has returned from Boston armed with an MBA degree, who is actually spearheading the growth of what looks like a new chain in the offing. In any case both father and son are doing wonders with their newly opened restaurant at The Palladium at Phoenix Mills, Lower Parel.

It is not a large restaurant, but the facilities have not been compromised with. Seating is comfortable, not cramped and they have even succeeded in creating two private areas, partitioned by curtains – old fashion style. The décor is unobtrusive, the small bar discreetly placed in one corner. The display kitchen which hogs the limelight and rightly so, has four huge copper tandoors. One of which is exclusively for vegetarian fare. Very thoughtful, except these days I find many of my Gujarati and even Marwari friends going for ‘chicken night out!’ I am not surprised, it’s called the ‘global effect’.

What Punjab Grill promises is ‘a culinary journey into the grandeur of undivided Punjab’. A rich diversity of Frontier food, blended from the cuisines of the Hindus, Sikhs and Pathans, carried forward through the immigrants of the West Punjab. Says Jiggs, “It is a legacy and this traditional food has been flown downstream through immigrants who have lovingly cherished and preserved it. Punjab has always been a fertile land, rich in dairy produce which helped promote healthy appetites. Fortunately the Maharajas and Princes of Punjab also advocated and encouraged gastronomic adventures which is why we are where we are."

What Punjab Grill has done is create an interesting mix of menu taking from the food of gourmet places like Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Kabul, Amritsar, Multan and Patiala. So you have all the popular dishes on the menu. Like Amritsari Machchi, Pindi Chana. Lahori Seekh, Chaamp Taajdar, Raunaqeen Seekhan, Kadhai Murgh, Saag Gosht, Patiala Shahi Machchi and others. The good part is there is as much for the vegetarian to eat as the non-vegetarian, so they need not despair.

Tikkas and kebabs are Punjab’s mainstay and Punjab Grill has kept that very much in mind. They serve a wide array of vegetarian and non-vegetarian kebabs and have imbibed four types of kebab making techniques too; tandoor, sigri, tawa and kadhai. Stretching the repertoire further they even offer tandoori duck and tandoori lobster, as well as salmon tikka. And for vegetarians, the unusual tandoori item is Guchchi, jumbo morels from Kashmir which generally costs upwards of Rs. 20,000 a kilo.

Without doubt Punjab´s signature dishes are chicken tikka, tandoori chicken and butter chicken and these are on the world map. You can go to anywhere in the world and you will find these being served. While gourmet Punjab has come a long way from perfecting the art of cooking and roasting - from Tandoori Murgh to Murgh Malai Tikka, from Tikka Baluchi to Murgh Makhani, from Paneer Tikka to Tandoori Roti - you will find all this and more perfectly fine tuned at Jiggs´s Punjab Grill.

As for Zorawar, with food in his genes and the marketing zeal that is flowing in his blood, he is now looking at a global Indian food expansion with the main aim of putting Indian food firmly on the international palate and representing it in the correct way.

He has developed a very successful concept – Street Foods of India (SFI), an Indian QSR (Quick Service Restaurant)format that focuses on providing standardised, delicious Indian food quickly. Like an Indian McDonald’s SFI now has 8 outlets across the NCR and Hyderabad. With two outlets of Punjab Grill in Delhi, one in Bombay and another one scheduled to open in Chandigarh in June this year and more in the pipeline, Punjab Grill will soon be counted among the top chain of restaurants of India.