A taste of France in Mumbai - Le 15 Pâtisserie

I’ve recently fallen in love.


I’ve been swept off my feet by the most unlikely little fellow.
Not Shahrukh khan or any other Bollywood star.
Not my cute 15 year old Indian pantry boy who takes pictures of himself in the mirror with my camera while I'm at work.
Not even the lovely little white dog that sleeps night and day on my door step and doesn’t budge when I step over him.



I’m a talking about love at first sight.
Or at first taste should I say.
The real deal.

I am talking about le 15 Pâtisserie.

Le 15 is a little shop in a hair salon right next to my house in Mumbai

I noticed it for the first time at the beginning of June and was very intrigued to see heavenly looking Lemon tarts and Macaroons on their stall.


It took me a few days to finally decide to try one of their products out – I think I was influence by the ^ on Pâtisserie. So French. So authentic.

And then it happened ; as if I lightening had struck me


Crisp and light, zweet and tangy, crunchy yet smooth.


It was the French culinary arts epitomized in a small unpretencious lemon tart.

It felt too good. 
So my boyfriend – who incidently is addicted to chocolat and has devoured no less than 5 le 15 Patisserie macaroons since I have started writing this article ("I'm just trying out the products honey", "yeah right") – said to me :
‘Pauline, we need to meet these people. 
I don’t know who they are, why they are here in Mumbai and if they are mean, ugly and stupid but I need to understand how it is possible to create such perfection. Here in India !’



So we wrote an email to le 15 and got to meet both Chef Mukul and Pastry Chef Pooja.


My boyfriend’s fears were unfounded though ;


They were even sweeter than their macaroons.

I really encourage anyone in Mumbai to try anything at le 15 Pâtisserie.


You cannot be disappointed. The only thing that might happen is that you develop a severe addiction.


Like me.

Le15 Patisserie,
Shama Hair and Skin Boutique,
 Krishna Building, Near Podar Hospital, 
JN Palkar Road, Worli

Why foreign women and wine have a bad reputation in India - Part 1

Ok so I’m putting women and alcohol on the same level. Sin and Sin again some may say. And sadly, India is not the only place where both are highly prejudiced.

But in India at least there is an underlying reason which explains it all. A vessel that links foreign women and booze. Three letters …

Goa.
How did this happen? Follow my words…

As I do not want to bore my very few readers to death, I will divide this article in 2 parts.
Part 1 – Women

Goa has many names: city of sin, city of wine, city of the Portuguese Inquisition.
The smallest state in India yet the most frowned upon.
Goa started out its road towards fame by being a Portuguese port. There, Saint Xavier, one of the founders of the Jesuit order – with his friend Ignacio from Loyola – was an active converter. In fact, the Church was so adamant about converting Hindus to Christianism that the hundreds of temples of the State were destroyed by the Portuguese. The Inquisition played a scary and famous role in making of Goa one of the most renowned places in India.

Yet, by the 1970’s this bloodthirsty past was very well over.

The vicious members of the Portuguese Inquisition – I won’t describe what kind of torture they used on recalcitrant Hindus because this is a food blog after all – gave way to vicious people of another kind.
Hippies.


In the 1970’s, Goa became the hub for nudists, hashish and trance music. People knew how to have fun back then. Sex, drugs and swimming naked in the ocean were basically the 3 main activities of the westerners living on the Goan coasts.

(for the sake of my readership I kept this image in small format ...)


Consequently, as you may imagine, local Indians were a little taken aback (major understatement). Indian men probably didn’t mind having a pot-headed, dreadlocked, all-loving western girlfriend but they sure as hell didn’t approve of them.

Because you see, Indians are pretty conservative when it comes to women.

Women should be covered by clothing from shoulder to toe. They should be married by age 23 – with a male selected by the family of course. And then wear signs of their married status in order not to entice other men.

Oh, and trains have separate wagons for men and women of course.

So when foreign women in Goa started showing their assets a little bit too conspicuously, people started thinking. They started to think that foreign women were easy (to put it nicely). And now, for this reason, I have to wear big bangles when walking alone in Mumbai.

My first Indian Wedding

This post will be a little off my usual topic but I just couldn't resist writing something of one on the most entertaining experience I've had since my arrival in India:
an Indian wedding.

People had told me Indians could get a little over the top when it came to celebrating. They said Indians liked to party and didn't mind a little glitter from time to time. They explained that women would be slightly over dressed...
Major understatement.

I thought I was prepared. Grave mistake.
Stepping past the entrance door of the Taj Lands end in Mumbai propelled me in the middle of a Bollywood movie/Maharajah palace/MTV clip. My epileptic friends beware, so much glitter, shine and gold can be lethal.

Now I'm just being silly. I actually had a fantastic time.
Indian weddings are extraordinary celebrations with up to a thousand guests, filled with rituals and lasting for several days.
The first day was about dancing and festivities. The groom and bride's friends had formed groups of 6 and practiced a choreography for several weeks prior in order to be ready to fight for the best moves on stage in front of the whole assembly.
Have you seen Zoolander? The dance-off?
Same thing but with more jewelery.

After performing on stage the winning group was elected by applause of the house. And let me tell you the house was on fire.

On the second day, came the traditional Pushkar. A wedding procession with the groom on a (heavily) decorated horse. The groom is dressed in a sherwani (long jacket) and churidars (fitted trousers). On his head he wears a sehra (turban). The baraat (basically the groom, his horse, his relatives and friends and all the jewelery they can wear at once) is headed by the dancing of the congregated folks. When arriving at the venue of the wedding, the groom is welcomed by a welcome song called talota. Then the groom knocks on the door with his sword and enters the wedding room.

I could go on and on and describe the whole celebration but I think pictures will be way more efficient than my blabbering. Enjoy !

Selling wine in India

Some of you might know this already, but I have left France to go to Mumbai for the summer.

This explains the lack of posts lately.

I am working for a French company selling Indian grown wine in the West region of India (Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa mainly) for 3 months.

What’s interesting about this mission is that wine in India is only nascent. So I’ll be at the vanguard of any further development for wine in a country whose population should outgrow China’s by 2030.

To tell you the truth, wine is only at its premises here: although Indian wineries have emerged as soon as in the 1980’s (Château Indage) and developed in the mid 90’s (Sula), the local population is still very far from having the reflex of drinking wine when they go out for dinner.

For most Indians, there are no such things as varietals and wine is only red or white. Women are still very reticent to drinking any alcoholic beverage whatsoever.

And men … well they prefer whiskey.

So you can imagine that the quality of Indian wines has long been the least of Indian producers’ worries…

Thus, education and tasting opportunities during weddings or banquets will probably be the only means to carve in Indians’ minds that wine is not a drink whose sole purpose is to be mixed with orange juice (true story) in order to make cocktails.

The higher classes are starting to get more and more interested in wines, although they are focusing on international brands for now. The trouble with imported wines though is that they are submitted to very heavy levies. For instance a bottle of Moet champagne which revolves around 28 euros in France would be 118 euros here.

Ouch.

India has been part of the WTO sine 2007 but when you see that imported spirits are taxed at more than 250% you understand why Europe and the US are regularly in dispute with India.  

I’ll try posting when I can, although my days are pretty packed.

I’d like to let you know about my experience here, with a main focus on wines of course but I will also certainly just talk about living in Mumbai and getting accustomed to the Indian life style.

Next post will be about my first Indian wedding…

Have you seen Bollywood movies? It was just like being in the middle of one…