When restaurants serve you a lemon…
The rice in your risotto? It’s probably from Goa, not Italy. The scallops? There’s a chance they’re less mollusk, more stingray. That New Zealand lamb rack? Possibly came from a sheep born and bred in Delhi.
There are lots of very obvious reasons why restaurant food doesn’t necessarily contain what’s stated on the menu. The biggest one is: ingredients can be expensive and switching to cheaper substitutes is an easy way to cut costs and build profits in a margin-thin industry. Another one is erratic supplies. For example, a chef specifies that the salmon he’s serving is Scottish, but six weeks later, the shipments get stuck. He chooses to serve what’s available in the interim, instead of reworking the menu. What makes it easier to get away with is that India’s imported food industry is quite young. As a result, we’re not experienced enough to tell the difference between unfamiliar but similar ingredients – Chilean sea bass and cod, for instance.
Certainly most diners can’t, but neither can some chefs.
Without pointing fingers, it’s safe to say that each of the “substitutions” stated below happen in Mumbai’s eateries. Sometimes the switch happens further up the supply chain, with mislabeling taking place at the manufacturer or supplier level, and even the importer or restaurant doesn’t know about it. Here are some ways to tell the fake thing from the real deal:
SCALLOPS
Just like crab sticks are made from pulverised kamaboko (which is made from Japanese whitefish and not crab), scallops are often made by punching shapes out of skate fish and stingray wings or even shark meat with a cookie cutter. This is a practice common across the world, one you can even do at home. Often, the package will specify that it’s skate flesh, or imitation scallop, but that information does not make it to the diner at a restaurant. The most common way to mask these skate/stingray discs is by pre-breading and then freezing them before selling them to restaurants who serve them deep-fried. Uncooked, or merely seared, it’s easy to tell fake from real. Scallops have a smooth ivory to beige-toned, delicately sweet flesh. One dead giveaway? They have none of the striations typical of the the flesh of these winged fish.
TUNA AND SALMON
Trout are closely related to salmon (they both belong to a subfamily of the genus Salmo), of which one particular variety of large trout is called sea trout, rainbow trout, or salmon trout. It’s not always easy to tell salmon and trout apart. The flesh of trout looks a lot like the flesh of salmon, especially if the food supply of the fish has been similar. Salmon has a more full-bodied taste, but only someone who has tasted enough trout would be able tell the difference. An even bigger sin, worldwide, is salmon flesh that has been dyed. Typically, the orange-pink flesh comes from the wild fish’s carotenoid-rich diet of shellfish and krill from the ocean. But farmed salmon, which may not have access to this food, can have flesh that’s greyish. The solution is to add pellets of artificial colour to the salmon feed. One pharma company even has a SalmoFan, which gives fish farmers the option of selecting a desired shade of pink for their salmon from a range of synthetic colourant pellets (made from petrochemicals). If browning tuna is “gassed” with carbon monoxide, it will stay a healthy deep red, which may hide staleness and even mask decomposition. It’s also called tail-pipe tuna. (If you hold a piece of brown tuna near a car’s exhaust it will turn a brighter red and stay that way). Sometimes tuna is injected with dye to make its colour more intense. Unfortunately, the only way to know if a fish’s colour is natural or synthetic is by knowing where the fish comes from, or testing it in a lab.
PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO
Parmesan may be the English translation of Parmigiano-Reggiano, but often what is sold in supermarkets or shaved onto salads is nothing like the real stuff. Like champagne, this cheese can only be called Parmigiano-Reggiano if it comes from one of five specific provinces in Italy. A good grana padano, also a DOC cheese, is cheaper, and not a bad substitute, but most times what gets passed off as Parmigiano-Reggiano is a hard Australian, Dutch or processed cheese, which has none of the distinct flavour or characteristics of what is justifiably described as the “king of cheese”. Real Parmigiano will have a slight crunch due to the crystalised amino acids that break down during the aging process, is on the whiter side of pale yellow, has a definite sweet lactic aroma, and doesn’t have a stretch. This means that when you sprinkle it on soup it dissolves without becoming stringy.
MOZZARELLA DI BUFALA
It translates to mozzarella cheese made from buffalo milk, but we’ve seen a lot of cow milk bocconcini pass off as this fresh cheese. Buffalo milk has none of the yellow-orange plant pigment beta-carotene, and this is apparent in the colour of the cheese, which is much whiter than cow’s milk mozzarella. It has a much higher fat content, and so the flavour is much richer and creamier. Cow’s milk mozzarella is available for approximately Rs400 per kilo; Italian mozzarella di bufala can be anything from Rs1,600 to Rs2,000 a kilo.
LAMB
The menu may say lamb, but quite often Mumbai restaurants serve goat (lamb is young sheep.) Even mutton, technically, means meat from a grown sheep (two years old or more), but here the word has always been used interchangeably with goat meat. Goat meat is leaner, and has a stronger smell, but a milder taste than mutton. It also has longer fibres, and so it works better with longer cooking times. This mix-up is not as bad as instances of passing off Indian lamb as Australian or New Zealand lamb. The former costs less than Rs600 per kilo, the latter about Rs2,800 per kilo. If your menu says New Zealand lamb rack, but it costs only Rs800 for the dish, you’re likely to be getting local lamb. Even if you’re paying in thousands, there is still no guarantee it’s been imported.
CHILEAN SEA BASS
The Patagonian toothfish known as Chilean sea bass is not really a sea bass, but a member of the cod icefish family. Its name is just a marketing gimmick invented by a fisherman more than three decades ago, to make it sound more attractive on menus. As such, you can imagine that actual bass tastes quite different from the now overfished and endangered Patagonian toothfish, which in turn, understandably can be easily confused with black cod, especially when covered with miso. Restaurants that mention Chilean sea bass on the menu could very well be serving regular sea bass. The toothfish can cost upwards of Rs2,000 a kilo while a kilo of bass is generally about Rs700 to Rs800 a kilo. Worse, I’ve come across at least one restaurant that serves basa described on the menu as “Chilean Sea Basa”.
ARBORIO
Goan fat rice is used as a substitute for arborio or carnaroli in risotto when supplies are low or erratic, and some chefs can make it work well enough. However, there’s no way any fine dining restaurant will admit their mushroom risotto was made with the finest quality Goan fat rice, much less charge less for the dish. One way to tell is that Goan fat rice lacks arborio’s “bite, which is easy to distinguish when you’ve tasted both. Arborio also has a more creamy aroma and texture.
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and the restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.