A “homestyle” restaurant is, on the face of it, a contradiction in terms. Certainly, it’s unlikely to denote a place where food is prepared while the cook battles to keep the cat off the worktops, fields requests for help with maths homework from the next room, conducts UN-level negotiations concerning whether we’re to have “bowl food” (sofa, TV) or “plate food” (pros: more atmospheric and conducive to conversation, a positive role model for an impressionable young person; cons: rapid pre-prandial kitchen clear-up required, the said impressionable young person may prefer to catch an episode of The IT Crowdassuming she’s finished her maths homework) and manages, somewhere along the line, to get outside a negroni or three.
It may signify a restaurant that’s cheaper or more informal than some, that treats you like a regular and encourages you to feel like one: such places are rare and precious. Or it may contain coiled within it a whispered critique of “restaurant-style” restaurants – the rhinestone glitz, the groupthink, the cliché.
In the context of Indian and other south Asian cuisines, I guess the issue isn’t so much with glitz, rhinestone or otherwise, even if ambitious restaurateurs from these cultures have often tried to move upmarket, with mixed results. But there is a problem with groupthink and cliché – an intelligent alien might travel the length and breadth of the land and conclude that a stock palette of dishes, flavours and wall furnishings was laid down at a plenary session of the Curry Marketing Board in some sticky-carpeted function suite in the West Midlands in about 1974, nevermore to be diverged from on pain of excommunication, loss of allocated parking space etc.
from Nettech News https://ift.tt/2zRIW8l
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