Memories of chicory-scented mornings and vanilla-flavoured evenings in some of the city’s once iconic watering holes tend to circle around certain select areas. While Spencers is now a city mall, none of these spaces exist anymore. So, as one authority on marmalade sandwiches famously remarked: “Recollections may vary!” We dive into our favourite memories to take a you on a quick trip to the past.
Traffic near Spencer Signal in Madras (now Chennai), the capital of the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu. ( 7.01.1962 ) | Photo Credit: K_N_CHARI
Woodland’s Drive-in
The Woodland’s Drive-in restaurant at Gemini’s Circle remains on top of the list. It ticked all the boxes. You could be a pro-idli-sambar conservative or a bread-butter-omelet cosmopolitan, but if you owned a car, or borrowed one from your best friend, you could drive into the tree-filled gardens at the Drive-in and partake of some of the best-ever coffee. Those who were veterans knew the secret, they reached there in the early mornings, when the bearers told you “First trip” and frothed the hot liquid back and forth to get a head of pure aromatic bliss.
By then of course, the legendary Mani, a young lad in those days, would have affixed the metal tray with its steel claws on to your open car window. The waiters apparently born on feet with hidden wheels would have taken your order and rolled back to the kitchen where the best Udupi style dosas and all the accessory items would be ready to be dished out.
Regulars knew when the Mysore bondas would be ready. Or what kind of rice based preparation would be suitable at lunchtime. The menu appeared in coloured chalk on a board at the entrance to the two additional dining areas, in the garden and inside.
CHENNAI, 14/04/2008: A view of the Woodlands Drive-In Restaurant, in Chennai. Photo: V. Ganesan | Photo Credit: GANESAN V
The Drive-in was not just a place for people watching. You knew which sets of pairs were merely flirting, when for instance a glass of rose milk, or badam milk lay untouched on their tray; or seriously courting, when the two sets of parents sat in adjacent cars watching discretely how the couple might be relating to each other. Many marriages, business deals, creative ventures, probably all the same thing, happened around the sacred groves at the Woodland’s Drive-in.
“For us hungry college boys it would be the fried bread slices stuffed with peas masala,” confides Kamlesh Patel, a champion of motor sports. Decades later, Patel now with an early morning bicycle gang re-lives the old days by catching up over coffee at the Geetha Cafe in T Nagar.
Spencer’s Fiesta Cafe
The gracefully curving red bricked arms of the arched facade of the old Spencer’s welcomed a cosmopolitan clientele at the Fiesta Cafe. It was located in one corner of its arms, maybe like it’s dainty gloved right hand stretched out to welcome up-country planter’s wives and expats who imagined they were at a typical Lyon’s tea shop.
The colours suggested cool pastel pastries with pink and pistachio green pastries behind glass cabinets, iced coffee and ham and cheese sandwiches. Again, recollections of clients’ past vary dramatically when it comes to the Fiesta Cafe. So, there may have been different items being offered at different times. Some remember the winsome Anglo-Indian wait-staff with names such as Dorothy or Elenore dressed in pastel frocks, with well-trimmed hair in the fashion of a Jean Simmons or an Audrey Hepburn, and exquisite manners when taking an order.
Others speak of the ice-creams that were served in proper ice-cream glass-cups with two winged slivers of corrugated wafer biscuits.
“When we heard our grand-parents ordering ‘ice-cream-soda’ we were sure that it was something out of the Archie Comics where soda-pop parlors were famous,” recollects one disappointed early Fiesta goer. “Imagine when it turned out to be a colourless flavoured soda water drink!”
Fiesta Cafe also served puffs in regulation triangles filled with vegetarian options and rectangles with minced curried chicken.
No wonder Spencer’s was considered the Mayfair of Madras.
Chung-king Chinese restaurant
This restaurant was hidden away in a narrow lane, past the wildly popular Buharis on what was then Mount Road and in an old building at the far end.
Chung-king was a family run eating place that you accessed via a wooden staircase onto the spacious covered verandah that made it particularly attractive in the era when air-conditioning was a luxury. As Confucius must have declared in his Chinese edicts, no Chinese restaurant can be without its hanging red silk tasseled lanterns.
chicken sweetcorn soup
Chung-king followed this mandatory law but in other regards was rather spare, with square wooden tables draped with a blue and white checked tablecloth with glass tops, serviceable chairs and a menu that everyone knew by-heart. Another habitue tells me that there was a family room, or private dining place within, I never went in there. This was just as well, as the two wait-staff, were both apparently named John. Or maybe it was a sign of how regressive we were in those days when there were not many Chinese families in the city. And either we did not have the bandwidth to engage with them socially, or they did not.
Most famous, even amongst the most conservative of patrons was the corn soup, whether called vegetable corn soup, or chicken, or crab corn soup, they all had the floating strands of beaten egg white forming petal-like fronds in the clear broth with golden corn. Corn, mostly the American maize variety, was still a rarity and to have some in a clear soup, no matter what its original constituents was, was enough to create a gastronomic breakthrough in Indo-Chinese relations.
As Kamlesh Patel says, “Their Chicken roast was something else, glazed into a dark brown all over, maybe like Peking Duck and then one of the Johns, would slice it and say: ‘See, white inside’. And it was, both crispy and soft.”
That’s how memories should be both crisp and crunchy on the outside, and melting with a soft lingering taste inside.
