Kimchi, sausage & tempura: How 1980s Chennai became a hub of culinary & cultural diversity
Chennai in the 1980s might have seemed an unlikely place to sample kvass and kimchi.
Yet for one evening every year the Russian drink brewed from bread and the spicy fermented Korean cabbage was
available to anyone willing to buy them for the benefit of charity.
August 22 marks Madras Day, when the city was founded in 1639. It has grown from a one-day event to a full month celebrating the city’s often overlooked past.
This includes a surprisingly diverse dining history. Outsiders may assume Chennai’s cuisine consists of idli-dosa and biryani made with short-grain rice, but the city’s cultural scene combined with its location facing South- East Asia has always meant a large expatriate community, which brought their cuisine with them.
The International Evening organised by the Guild of Service brought expats from consulates and companies together
to offer this food for charity.
It was a big event, attended by the Governor, but also open to anyone, and people really
came. The homemade Russian kvass was the most popular — it was so weakly alcoholic it could hardly be noticed, but even that was enough to cause big queues in a city with strictly controlled liquor sales.
The Germans were also popular thanks to potato salad and large amounts of imported sausages.
The Japanese provided perfectly fried tempura and the Koreans sold barbecued skewers and pungent kimchi, which was a
real revelation.
In retrospect, these paved the way for the popularity of the Japanese and Korean restaurants that would open in the
’90s when big companies from these countries started building their factories in Chennai. The event ended around then too, and might seem irrelevant in the city’s more cosmopolitan dining scene today.
