As the mellow warmth of the sun coagulates with the inchoate wisps of darkness while the brow of the afternoon is rapidly dropping, I steadily roll back towards the edge of the chair on the bedside of the table and gently tether the tip of my tea bag. Today marks a massively monumental occasion in the progressive evolution of my restaurant; not only has the financial uncertainty lifted briefly around the restaurant, but retribution has been achieved in every sense; my five sworn opponents have been vanquished, individually, but I am sure that this collective debacle on their part will linger long enough to last a lifetime. Allow me to take you on a trip down memory lane

The year was 2004- My first year in the highly prestigious culinary school of India where I formed a close camaraderie with three students, Jacob, Rahim and Ram. To say that we were uniquely different individuals would be a massive understatement; while we had considerably contrasting personalities, our tangentially diverging aims to get out of the course was remarkable; Me, favouring orthodox principles of cooking, following recipes to the T and rigidly using tested recipes and cooking combinations to win accolades and enlist in a top restaurant; was significantly at odds with Jacob, who freestyled while dabbling with a recipe; while his performance in culinary school, was inconsistent at best, he unassumingly gained the respect of a tremendous number of divergent food critics; critics who considered the traditional approaches of cooking to oppose creativity, improvement and potentially keep extractive societal structures intact. Through the course of four years, our relationship began to verge on rivalry; and as our opposing schools of thought detached further from each other, the contentious relationship morphed into hatred, and our shared culinary passion did little to ameliorate our fractious relationship.

Rahim, on the other hand, was a budding food critic; to him, culinary school was about the breadth the course offered, and less about the depth. His obsession with the great food critic, Matt Preston, was ludicrous and his style of writing, more conversationalist in nature, and less dogmatic was misaligned with the manner of food criticism at that time. His increasing flirtation with unorthodoxy had thrust him closer towards the line of Jacob, and his increasing hatred caused him to influence Rahim against me, who directed his chagrin against me for breaking the bond of our friendship due to mere differences in our style of cooking. Finally, Ram was the businessman to be, away from the reach of a recipe or the call of a critic. His aim was to build a massive network of chefs, managers and waiters to form a restaurant in the future. Yet, beneath the shallow sands of our apparent friendship, lied a sense of hopeless envy as I effortlessly balanced my culinary skills and my business aspirations.

Yet, a couple of years later, as we drifted apart, the redolent emotions of Emanuel, Rahim, Ram and Jacob were well persistent; as I plied my trade as the head chef in the International

Tobacco Company (ITC), my three friends combined and worked in tandem to pull me down. Jacob’s acrimony coerced him to rally chefs against my approach, while Rahim, the food critic close to Jacob engaged his enviable talent to form negative opinions against me, which resulted in me getting ousted from the organization. Finally, Ram, filled with unbounded jealousy, utilised his political nexus to force the organization to have me replaced.

Now, twelve years later, with my team of 65 restauranteurs, and after forming an established restaurant, I decided to individually present my deviously inspired creations to each one of them, and I made a list of dishes to teach each of them lessons. The first dish to Ram, a dish called Decaying Delight, which featured a burnt pie to signify the relationship that exponentially decade, over the years. The second dish, which was called, an exotic misunderstanding, due to the misunderstanding between Rahim and me due to the negative influence of Jacob. The final meal, representative of the envy held by Ram towards me, called jealousy jamboree, featured a dish obliterated with salt and uncontrollable spice was exhibited to Ram. This is my climax, not a monumental scheme of revenge, a terrible retribution; It was just a firm remainder, that I had moved on, not just from their deceitful designs but that I had arrantly moved on from the concept of their friendship. 

.    .    .