Table Talk with Anita Roy, Kishi Arora, Krish Ashok, Kriti Monga, Kurush Dalal, Ranjini Rao, Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, Saba Mahjoor

Table Talk with with Anita Roy, Kishi Arora, Krish Ashok, Kriti Monga, Kurush Dalal, Ranjini Rao, Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, Saba Mahjoor
Date: December 26, 2021
Time: 20:00 IST

Table Talk brings the year to an end with an informal chat with as many of our 2020 guests as could make it.

We’ll be looking back at the year and what we have learnt from it, with reference to food, but, as we have found through these past conversations, that can intersect with just about anything.

And of course we look forward to all of you joining us too.

We’ll chat for two to three hours, maybe more if you and our guests are willing.

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
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(About Table Talk and past guests)

Check this

What connects Chennai, Scottish Lace, Brooks Brothers, David Ogilvy, and a pioneering Indian luxury hotel chain?

In the 1950s, CP Krishnan Nair, who had quit the army, helped start the All India Handloom Board. He was also an entrepreneur, one who started multiple companies, many named after his wife. At one point, he sold a shipment of madras fabric (worth a look-up on its own, if you’re not familiar with it) to an American buyer, with the warning that the cloth should only be washed gently in cold water or the fabric would bleed. Someone neglected to tell Brooks Brothers, who had bought a sizeable amount of the cloth, about this. And so the clothes they made from the fabric went out to customers without appropriate washing instructions, and the bright dyes bled, and the colours faded.

The importer summoned Nair to the USA, threatened legal action. Instead they worked out a brilliant compromise and turned this lemon into lemonade.

They arranged an interview with Nair with Seventeen magazine. He made up from whole cloth (hehe) a story about this fabric made exclusively for Brooks Brother, and the mag ran a seven-page piece about “Bleeding Madras — the miracle handwoven fabric from India.”

Ogilvy? He turned the defect into a USP: “Guaranteed to bleed,” the ads said. One catalogue in 1966 carried this copy: “Authentic Indian Madras is completely handwoven from yarns dyed with native vegetable colorings. Home-spun by native weavers, no two plaids are exactly the same. When washed with mild soap in warm water, they are guaranteed to bleed and blend together into distinctively muted and subdued colorings.”

And Scottish Lace? Among the many companies Nair started was a lace-making factory in Sahar, Bombay, named Leela Scottish Lace, which was also the company that sold that fabric which landed up with Brooks Brothers.

And if you were around when the Leela Kempinksi (as it was first called) came up, you may have noticed a sign nearby with the company name. Captain Nair, as he was popularly known, is perhaps best remembered for the hotel chain.

(By the by, there is a town in Oregon, USA, called Madras (population 6,000-odd), and one story is that it was named after madras fabric.)

Bonus: there’s a connection with bermuda shorts.

In the 1930s, the Bermuda Athletic Association would invite Ivy League teams to play their rugby a tournament. This became so popular that there were chartered flights for students, who would bring back clothes they bought there. Among them, plaid- and madras-patterned swimwear and shorts, which then made their way to jackets and suchlike with the preppy New England folks.

Sources Gentleman’s Gazette, Orvis, Madras Musings, Wikipedia article on CP Krishnan Nair

Table Talk with Manu Chandra

Table Talk with Manu Chandra
Date: December 12, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

The various Olive brands, Toast & Tonic, Monkey Bar, The Fatty Bao, Cantan… You’d think I would have first encountered Manu through one of the many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed restaurants he has nurtured and/or created. But when he was making his mark, I was going through a particularly insolvent phase and then rebuilding from there, and fine dining was something that was, as my young friends say, out of my aukat. I first met him when I was editing ForbesLife India, and he wrote for us about the importance of sourcing local ingredients, and since then, his has been one of the voices on food that I’ve listened to carefully. At one point I somehow wound up on the guest list for the opening of The Fatty Bao in Bombay, and had the additional good fortune of having Manu sit with Antoine and I and informally explain some of the thinking behind his ideas.

The making of Chef Chandra started with an early interest in food and what went into making it and presenting it, and continued with formal study (like previous guest Kishi, he trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and their times there overlapped a bit), apprenticing in celebrated kitchens (Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern, Café Centro, Jean Georges), formative jobs (Mandarin Oriental,  Eyvind Hellstrom’s Bagatelle), prizes (a Sea Food Masters Award for the National Recipe Competition in the USA), before he returned to India, where he joined Olive Beach in Bangalore as Chef de Cuisine.

We will chat about this journey and his other formative influences, his work highlighting locally sourced ingredients, what it takes to be a chef, the challenges of running restaurants — multiple restaurants, each with distinct identities — the joys and sorrows of celebrity, The Social Kitchen, an initiative he is part of that wants to “bring families back to the kitchen or table to interact and talk using new kitchen design,” and what he’s been up to since he decided, a few months ago, to leap into the unknown. As ever, be prepared for digressions — these are conversations, not formal interviews — and you’re welcome to nudge us into them or back on topic.

We’ll chat for at least a couple of hours, including questions from and discussion with the audience, and may go on longer, if Manu and you are willing.

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause.

(I’ll add Manu’s choice here shortly.)

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
- this Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ttandfps
- and / or this Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TTandFPS

(About Table Talk and past guests.)

At Poetry with Prakriti this Saturday.

 

I’m reading at Poetry with Prakriti this weekend. 11th December, 7 p.m. I.S.T.

Please come by if you’re free and not too Zoomed out? Register (free) here.