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Dosteen Trading
Spice-warm darkness, sleepy-distant background traffic humming, cheap electric fairy lights entwined in the trees, a hedged-in family area, the faint crunch of gravel underfoot, cheap plastic tables with cheaper plastic tablecloths, and the deep, lingering wafts of curries from the kitchen. This is perhaps one of my most precious childhood memories.
My family would pretty regularly go to Dosteen Trading, a restaurant better known by it’s fond title of The Greasy Spoon. I don’t have any memories of really looking forward to going as a child. My parents would mention that we were going to the greasy spoon and we would pile into our white short wheel base 1985 Pajero, with me or my brother usually sitting on one of the drop-down vinyl chairs in the back that I am pretty sure had no seatbelts. On hot days going to church in Ruwi, we’d spill out of those seats with sweated out shorts, and fear the first ten minutes on the way home with the brown vinyl burning our thighs after two hours in the 50 degree heat, but that is another story.
We would thread our way out to Seeb, past the Book Roundabout, later dubbed Hockey sticks, and now replaced ignominiously with an flyover, turn down the slip road on the right, and pull up at the restaurant. We’d walk up the stairs, past the indoor section, stark with electric fluoro lights and the stares of migrant workers flicking rice into their mouths with lazy hands. My father would talk to the waiter, who would magically shake and nod his head and lead us to Family Area, behind a gate designed to preserve the dignity of family females from the piercing stares of the bachelor workers in the main restaurant. Family Area was a garden out the back, hedged-in, gravel clad, filled with white plastic and feral cats, and badly lit. Fans on poles would stir the air, and the hedge would dim the hum of the nearby motorway in the sticky darkness.
A table would be grabbed, and the waiter, a bespectacled tall man with a well trimmed beard and an air of quiet grace would take our order with no pad or pen, all memorised. My father would joke that with brains like that, he must have a degree in astrophysics. And, he was right, the waiter seemed to carry a studied grace and presence that was greater than his vocation. I suppose that it was the best job he could find. Our order was always similar. I vaguely remember my parents getting biryani, and chicken or beef curries, with naan. But for us children, it was always the same: chicken tikka (the real chicken tikka with no sauce, a leg and thigh, with a red stain in the outer meat against the stark white inner flesh), a mild curry sauce in a saucer, and a pile of paratha, flaky oily, rich sweet flat bread to dip and scoop the mild curry sauce with. And to drink, a bright red, sugar filled, sickly sweet can of Shani. We would eat the food and try to shoo the cats away while my parents and their friends discussed weighty matters in the background. When we were full, we would run around the garden, and then the outside of the restaurant. Invariably I would end up watching the man run the tandoor, the oven, sweating away cooking naan. The tandoor oven was built into a concrete counter in a section separate from the restaurant and kitchen, where customers could see it when arriving. It was gas fired in the bottom, egg-shaped, and open only at the top, not the front, with a hole about a foot across. A gas ring in the bottom fired it, but the heat was packed into the concrete walls to cook on. The tandoor man would take balls of dough, and throw them and slap them into a disc, which would be draped over a small round pillow cloth. A quick action would see him reach into the top of the tandoor and stamp the dough onto the tandoor wall, where it would sit for 30 seconds, maybe more, and then start to swell and blister, cooked by the heat packed into the tandoor wall on one side, and the radiance from the gas ring on the other. At the precisely correct time, the tandoor man would then reach in to the furnace with a pair of steel pokers, one flattened at the end, one hooked, and flick it off the wall of the oven on the hooked poker. It was then flicked to a slot high in the wall, with a shelf on the other side, in the restaurant. Waiters would pick up the naan from the shelf and bear them to the tables for customers, a crispy, bready blistered flat bread perfect for mopping up curries and dals. Sweating in the heat, the tandoor man would keep on slapping, draping, stamping and flicking the naans all night long, for a short while with a small english boy watching with rapt attention.
Around the back, on some concrete steps overlooking Family Area, the Onion Man would be sat all evening long, with a board across his knees, finely slicing onions for the kitchen. His board was about a foot wide and and inch thick, bit in the middle it tapered down to less than a centimetre, where weeks and months and years of slicing onions had worn it down bit by bit. I remember thinking that the restaurant had basically fed a wooden plank to its customers, cunningly hidden in onions cooked into curries. I remember thinking with some pride that I had eaten some of that plank.
The evening would end with my siblings and any friends who came along playing tag around the outside of the restaurant, fueled by the horrifically pink and sweet Shani. When my parents had finished their evening of conversation, they would round us up and we’d troop home through a lukewarm evening under the yellow streetlights of Seeb and Al-Khod.
Years later, my brother would buy dal and naan for lunch, a perfect dal, moist but not wet, lentils soft but firm, spiked through with tomato, onions and green chilli, perfect for a lunch and post-spice serotonin fuelled nap. The Greasy Spoon was my first window into the world of curries, spiced food, and chillies. It is the reason that curries are probably my favourite food, and opened the door into Thai, Malaysian, Mexican, Indonesian and the wonderful world of food in general, not just as a meal, but as an experience. The Greasy Spoon would be called an Indian Restaurant, although it was really Pakistani, and the food was probably Kashmiri, although I don’t know for sure. A American’s friend’s family used to think it was not very good, and go to a different restaurant, which specialised in dosas, very thin pancakes, in their favourite version, filled with potato curry. I used to fish with a different friend, and we’d bring home our fresh Dolphino to his maid and in 45 minutes would have a steaming, perfect coconut fish curry on the table. But for me, the defining, best Indian food will always be measured against The Greasy Spoon’s lazy nights. I took my wife to the Greasy Spoon before we got married on my last trip to Oman. It seemed necessary to me that she see something so rich in my memory. And best of all, on a recent trip to Malaysia, we found a restaurant that has been the closest approximation to The Greasy Spoon flavours of my childhood I have yet to find. We had roti canai, almost a paratha, with a curry sauce, biryani, dal, and a masala dosa. I was in heaven, but my family loved it too. And best of all, my son wanted roti canai for dinner yesterday, long after our return home. I have passed the precious torch that was given to me.
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