Secret Sauce by Priya Bala

Author:Priya Bala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

20

Leopold Café

Fame, notoriety and a full house

THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS is nothing if not unpredictable. And there’s no saying what will cause a change in fortune. For Leopold Café, located in the happening hub of Colaba in south Mumbai, it came about by way of being one of the settings for the action and conversations in the bestselling novel, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Real-life incidents at Leopold would prove to be even more dramatic. The restaurant was a target of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. Unafraid, it re-opened within days and preferred to keep the bullet holes on the walls. The crowds began to pour in, some to salute the spirit of defiance and others to revisit the site of a tragedy. Leopold Café is now a must-visit tourist destination in Mumbai and the owners have no reason to complain about the increased footfalls and attention.

Even before these events, Leopold Café was one of Mumbai’s better known restaurants, though not the crowd-puller it later came to be. There are records that it opened in 1871. What is known, though, is that sometime in the late 1930s, it was taken over by the family that has been running it since. After his father, it was Farhang Jehani, a familiar presence at the restaurant, who took over and now manages Leopold along with his brother, Furzad. Jehani remembers that thirty years ago, Leopold Café wasn’t packed to the edges the way it is today. Still, in the ’80s, the restaurant that had kept its vintage look intact, began to attract a motley clientele who brought an unmistakable energy to the place. There were backpackers, media persons, office-goers, fashion designers and models, courting couples and even the people of ‘slightly questionable reputation’ Gregory Roberts describes in Shantaram. While the diorama of Mumbai street life swirled on the pavement outside, inside at Leopold it was always busy.

Then, in 2003, Shantaram was published. Roberts, who was a regular at Leopold, wrote in the book, ‘For one cool, precious hour each morning after it opened, and the floors had been cleaned, Leopold’s was an oasis of quiet in the struggling city. From then, until it closed at midnight, it was constantly crowded with visitors from a hundred countries, and many locals, both foreign and Indian, who came there from every part of the city to conduct their business. The business ranged from traffic in drugs, currencies, passports, gold and sex, to the intangible but no less lucrative trade in influence – the unofficial system of bribes and favours by which appointments, promotions and contracts were facilitated in India.’

Jehani admits the book brought a deluge of customers, some following an unofficial Shantaram trail and landing up at Leopold for a beer. He speaks of an eighty-year-old foreigner who was an India regular who had been wary of coming to Mumbai. ‘He read Shantaram and was encouraged to come, so he dropped by at Leopold and loved it. We’ve become friends since,’ Jehani says. There was an

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