Caterer woes

We have this new caterer at our office cafetaria. I write about this caterer, not because the food's good or anything (it, in fact, is no better than the usual crap dished out by the others), but because of this 'feedback' guy they've posted near the cafetaria door, whose job it is to ask everyone if they're okay with the food.


This guy's presence, though annoying, is helpful in a way because these days, I'm in no mood to go through that trial-and-error thing we usually have to do with cafetaria food (taking a bit of whatever looks eatable, hoping that something would turn out to be good), and if this guy's around, I know for a fact that the food will be shitty, except probably for the rice and curd (which no one can possibly screw up, even me), and so I restrict my lunch to just these.

I usually avoid talking to the guy, not because I might end up being rude to him, but because I might feel bad about it later (I too am, after all, a nice guy... ha ha) and the last thing I need, looking at the current state of things, is this feeling (I even put up with my friends these days... ask them and they'll tell you how unusually tolerant and quiet I've become of late).

Anyway, this guy has this particular way of doing this feedback thing. He stands at his 'post' like a bouncer in a discotheque, hands folded, scanning the expressions of people coming out, and anyone with an expression betraying even the tiniest sign of displeasure, he closes in on them and asks them for their feedback. All this, with an extremely humble look on his face.

Last week was no different. He was standing there as usual, doing his routine, when I came out after lunch with my trademark blank expression, and he must have sensed something unusual about this, for he stopped and asked me, with an honest, innocent tone (like the one employed by Kindergarten kids while acting in one of those Annual Day things, where everyone plays a goddam vegetable or animal and steps forward to talk two lines or something in an honest-as-hell tone) and this real earnest look on his face (his last name's probably Hemingway or something... ha ha):

Him: Sir, was the food good? Did you like it?

Me: It was pretty bad.

The sly bastard then changed his expression from 'extremely humble' to 'extremely surprised', as if he was representing the best catering service in the whole goddam world, where they employed world-class, highly-paid food tasters or something, and were always used to setting a benchmark of excellence for their other competitors, and the goddam chefs had this healthy competition amongst themselves and strove to surpass each other everyday, thus improving the quality of food and therefore delighting the customer all the time.


Him (with same expression, but shaking his head slightly, probably from disbelief): What was wrong, sir? We would like to improve.

Me: The rice was not cooked fully, the curd was ok (you probably bought it from somewhere outside), and there was more garam masala than yam in the yam thing.

Him: Oh. What about the others?

Me: I didn't eat anything else, but judging by the expression on other peoples' faces, I'm pretty sure they were bad too.

To his face already displaying surprise, he then proceeded to add on expressions of injured pride, regret, resignation, anger (on being let down by his world-class chefs and food-tasters... he was probably gonna sack the entire bunch of bastards that very evening, judging by all the contortions he made with his face), and determination.

Him: Tomorrow, you see, sir. You will definitely like the food.

Me (dropping the red coin into the feedback box): Yeah let's see.


Needless to say, the food sucked the next day too...

Today's Cafetaria Menu

After supplying plain boiled rice with sambar and rasam for the last goddam 200 years, the caterers in our cafetaria decided to add more variety to their offerings and came up with the following:

Ghee Rice: A disgusting thing, in which rice is mixed with ghee [something I have a life-long hatred for] and garnished with all those tiny things you garnish stuff with. Truly pukeworthy.

Bisibela Bath: Sambar Rice, with a lot of special effects [carrots, boondi(one of those things that can't be translated), and peanuts]. Supposedly solid food but ends up being of a pasty consistency. When swallowed, it flows down your throat like radioactive ooze, like thick slime down a drainage pipe.

Lemon Rice: Bright yellow in color, missing the main ingredient: lemon.

Tomato Rice: Rice mixed with Tomato gravy within which lurk several million annoying long rolled-up spiky pieces of tomato skin which invariably get stuck between your teeth, or, if swallowed, miraculously survive the acids of your stomach, only to, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption, "come out clean on the other side".

Vangi Bath: Brinjal Rice. Tastes as disgusting as it sounds. Brinjals mixed with some weird powder and rice. Need I say more?

There are more, but none come to mind.


Anyway, today, those guys finally ran out of things to mix with the rice, and in the end, you won't believe what they came up with. Take a wild guess. Not in your wildest dreams would you imagine them to come up with...














Milk Rice Bath!

Rice mixed with goddam milk!!

And before you ask, no: I obviously did not try it. But I did ask a few colleagues who did not see the menu and ate it unknowingly. I was like "Hey... how's the milk rice?", and one of them turned red in the face. I asked another, who I did not lunch with, and judging by her about-to-puke expression, I didn't have to wait for her answer to figure out that she had eaten it. A while after she came to know, she told me she was feeling low [strongly suspected as a side-effect]. I suggested a cup of coffee to cheer her up, and gave her the idea to have black coffee, and when she asked me why, I told her that the black coffee would mix with the milk rice in her stomach to become coffee rice, and that this was something the cafetaria guys hadn't thought of [atleast not yet]. Needless to say, she did not find this idea very appealing.

Anyway, I know you guys won't believe me that there indeed exists something called 'Milk Rice Bath'. So at the risk of being labelled insane by all and sundry, I took a photo of the goddam cafetaria menu when everyone was around. Here it is:

Food

Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd, rotis, weird gravy. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, rasam, curd, rotis, some other weird-tasting crap. This is how repetitive the lunch menu has become at the cafetaria. And as you've guessed by now, I've got rice, sambar and curd coming out of my ears.

A lot of people I've complained to keep asking me, "Then why don't you go out for lunch everyday?" Like I never thought of it. I would, but then, there are a lot of things that eventually dissuade me from going out for lunch, some of them being:

1. It's hot as hell outside during lunchtime.
2. There's a physical effort involved.
3. All the good restaurants are not within walkable distance.
4. Because of (3), I have to go on bike, which again involves physical effort. I have to kick the bastard for like a million years before it starts.
5. The only people I get for company want to eat at this Malayali joint. I already have Malayali food for dinner, because there's only Bullet Rice (the mallu rice) at home, and the last thing I want to have is Bullet rice in the afternoon. It kinda gets to you after a while. The Bullet rice, I mean.

Worse than the Bullet rice is the coconut-flavored food you get at all these Malayali joints, which the other guys seem to dig a lot. I dunno, but the smell of coconut oil in food kinda reminds me of these nerds, the front-benchers in college who put bucketloads of coconut oil on their hair, the kind who become the honest "Letters to the Editor"type when they grow old. I know I'm crazy, but whenever I taste coconut-flavored food, I always think that they kinda took all these nerds into the restaurant kitchen and kinda wrung their hair dry in the goddam vessel and cooked the food in the oil wrung from their hair. The food's got a weird taste. I'll probably find lice in the food one of these days. Some guys found a cockroach in the food... the guy who had his hair wrung that day must've been one helluva huge giant nerd or something to have cockroaches instead of lice in his hair.

Anyway, I've just about had enough rice-sambar-curd in life. I'll probably get a haemorrhage or something if I have rice-sambar-curd again. These cafetaria guys can really drive you to death when they want to.