MUMBAI - China and India might be elbowing
each other in their growing global economic
stakes, but an ancient food connection is growing
deeper and stronger. Chinese cuisine ranks India's
most favorite after local food, in the country's
food and beverages (F&B) business bubbling at
9% annually.
A Federation of Indian
Chambers of Commerce and Industry study expects
India's F&B business to be worth US$117
billion by the end of the year. Showcasing the
Chinese food market segment
are
breezy young upstarts like Yo! China that aims at
being a $250 million food chain in the near
future.
Young entrepreneurs Ashish Kapur,
Ajay Saini, Joydeep Singh, Sampat Talwar, Arun
Chadha and Mandhir Soni started Yo! China four
years ago in New Delhi, with open kitchens
sporting a comic-book type of red and yellow
interior. Their tagline "Chinese food. Chinese
prices" was to bridge street food prices and
gourmet quality.
Yo! China is now India's
largest Chinese retail chain, with 14 outlets,
including contracts to serve Mumbai and Delhi
airports.
"There are 350 million
middle-class people who eat three meals a day,"
reckons Ashish Kapur, managing director of Yo!
China. "That's approximately a 1,000 million meals
a day, and we didn't see national restaurant
brands for such an opportunity."
His
colleague and chief of projects, Ajay Saini,
estimates India could accommodate another 10,000
Chinese outlets. "A recent market study said
Chinese food is the favorite option when young
people go out to eat and the second favorite
[after south Indian cuisine] when families dine
out," Saini told Asia Times Online. He figures
India's eating-out frequency is still a fraction
compared to Taiwan, South Korea or Thailand.
In which case, the Chinese food market in
India is set explode with one-third of the
population below the age of 15, and incomes
rising. "India is the only large country in the
world where the size of the working age population
will grow - and will exceed the number of
dependent children and old persons - until 2025,
the year up to which projections of population
have been made, and perhaps even beyond till
2045," Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram
told the Nobel Institute in Oslo on October 24.
Chinese food took root in India when
Chinese immigrants settled in the sub-continent in
the 18th century, mostly in eastern India, and
gravitating towards Kolkata (Calcutta) that hosts
the largest Chinese Indian population in the
country.
Tangra, a leather-refining suburb
in east Kolkata, became India's best-known
"Chinatown" with its concentration of Chinese
eateries, mostly in homes of local Chinese with
the family disappearing when customers appeared
through the living room curtains. Tangra also
became India's best-known origin for Chinese
sauces.
Since the 1980s, a spicy
Indianized version of Chinese food took to the
streets of metros, the cheap fusion cuisine
becoming a great social leveler. In its
pre-sanitized days, Marine Drive - Mumbai's famous
seafront - had Chinese food street vendors with a
clientele ranging from millionaire industrialists
to hungry office-goers grabbing a chow mein plate
for $2. (Though chow mein was originally a
Chinese-American dish probably first created in
the United States by Chinese cooks serving
American railroad workers in the 1850s that bears
little resemblance to true Chinese cuisine. The
term comes from Mandarin Chinese, ch'ao
mien', "fried noodles".)
Chinese
street food costs even lesser in Kolkata, with a
filling half-plate portion of vegetable chow mein
selling for Rs6 (15 US cents).
Kolkata
city centers such as Dalhousie Square and Park
Street turn into humming street food bazaars
during lunch hours, amid the clatter-bang of
ancient trams lumbering through crowded traffic,
and the sizzle of fried rice and noodles on woks,
blending with sellers of popular pan-Indian fare.
Pioneering Chinese Indian restaurateurs,
like Nelson Wang of Mumbai's China Garden, run
their decades-old establishments in Indian metros
- from Chungking in Chennai's Mount Road to
Kamling off Marine Drive in Mumbai - but are
losing top-end clientele to Chinese restaurants in
five-star hotels such as the Taj and Marriot in
Mumbai.
India's strong love for vegetarian
food causes more headaches for Chinese chefs. Even
street stalls sometimes use separate utensils for
cooking vegetarian and non-vegetarian fare.
US-based Mark Pi Chinese food retail
chain, with plans to open 300 restaurants across
India and 400 more outlets in the Asia-Pacific
region in the next five years, even promises a
"Jain" Chinese menu for the predominantly
vegetarian region of Gujarat: garlic, onions and
potatoes forbidden.
"Any restaurateur who
wants to serve Hong Kong-quality dimsum has to
import everything from the flours to the
fillings," sniffs Marryam H Reshii, a local food
critic writing in the popular Indian portal
Rediff.com. "It's only the rice, potato and wheat
flours from south China that can turn out perfect
dimsum."
UK-based food industry
researchers and analysts IGD estimate that China's
food market that was 35% the size of the US market
in 2003, and will grow to be 82% in another 13
years. The US, China, Japan, India and Russia are
expected to be the top five food retail markets by
2020.
India's love affair with Chinese
food can only strengthen with increasing tourist
traffic between the two Asian giants. The year
2007 had been declared "China-India Year of
Friendship through Tourism" and the Chinese
government said it hoped to double the number of
Indian tourists to China each year to about 1
million by 2011, out of a total of 7 million
Indians visiting foreign nations.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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