Why do most Indian hotels have a 'ghar ka khana' (home food) section on their room service menus, and what can it teach non…
The act of tearing a fresh roti, twirling it into a cone and scooping up the right ratios of dal, meat or veggies is ritualistic. I didn’t always feel this way—as a child, my mother’s efforts to ensure we were connected to our Indianness outside India through food were often scoffed at—but the comfort a home-cooked meal brings me is core to my identity.
“Duuuude, all they eat here is bread and cheese and the odd bit of meat,” a friend studying in Switzerland told me over a FaceTime call. My mother felt the same when we spent two months in a hotel when my father’s work took us to Abu Dhabi in the early 2000s. Although Mum sought out every Indian restaurant near our hotel, she insisted it just wasn’t the same, especially because most of these restaurants did the generic Punjabi-Mughlai fusion most people know as “Indian food” outside India.
Where the monolithic “Indian” restaurant serves a flour-forward bread menu , you’ll likely see whole-grain rotis in homes, sometimes with indigenous Indian grains such as jowar and ragi . Sometimes, there will be veggies kneaded into the dough . I frequently crave laksa and Singaporean “carrot cake” and Emirati supermarket-style samoons . But I now cherish the feeling of sitting down with a home-cooked meal: a simple curd-rice, or khichadi , a home-style chicken curry with roti. And few things beat tearing a steaming, will-burn-your-tongue-so-blow-on-it aloo paratha, gathering the right amount of the tangy-sweet green chili pickle that sits on the corner of my plate and tempering the combination with fridge-cold yogurt.
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