Coffee in an Irani café versus Chai in an Udupi hotel

There are certain things no true blue Hyderabadi would even dream of doing much less think about actually doing them. One such thing happens to be ordering coffee in an Irani café. When one is in an Irani cafe one drinks only chai. Even if chai is not available (which is quite impossible, by the way) no one even accidentally thinks of ordering coffee in an Iran café if he knows where his mind is at. Even the dumbest Hyderabadi doesn’t get such an idea. So the moment anyone does such a thing, he is revealed as someone not from Hyderabad.

Similarly, it is at one’s own peril that one orders chai in an Udupi hotel. Those Udupi guys can’t make chai even if their life depended on it. However, they can make wonderful coffee which is the sole reason why I sometimes step into Udupi hotels notwithstanding the loony waiters one finds there. They stand there, nose up in the air, like you’ve just stepped out of a garbage truck even if you are wearing your best clothes. In my forty eight years of life I’ve yet to come across a smiling waiter in an Udupi hotel.

Anyway, I like to think that the Irani hotel chaps make coffee better than the Udupi guys can make chai because one can at least drink half a cup of the Irani coffee without puking whereas the chai in Udupi joints is something I cannot even bear to look at. Once, in an experimental mood, I made the grave mistake of ordering chai in an Udupi hotel. When the waiter repeated ‘Chai?’ and gave me a peculiar look like I was the first guy in the hoary history of the hotel to have ordered Chai I knew I was in for something. Needless to say it tasted like they have made chai for the first time in their lives. It was the first time in my life that I ever took an oath. That day onwards I vowed never, never to order chai in an Udupi hotel even if it were the my last drink on this earth.

The other day I was at Adarsh café enjoying a couple of chota samosas and chai when two guys walked in and settled down at my table. When one of them looked around for the waiter I knew the guy wasn’t a Hyderabadi. In Irani cafes one dimply doesn’t look or call for the waiter. One simply waits until the waiter spots you and slowly sort of drifts in the general direction of your table.

Then when the jumpy guy asked the waiter, ‘What’s available?’ my hunch that he wasn’t a Hyderabadi was proved right. I realized they were from some place where they don’t even know what an Iran café is otherwise they wouldn’t have walked into the hotel especially after the waiter’s response to their query. ‘Look in that,’ the waiter said, pointing to the glass shelves display the usual items, ‘check there and call me when you’ve decided.’ He then walked away, hands in his pockets, jingling the change.

Which brings us to another Hyderabadi thing. There’s a certain style of placing your order in an Irani cafe that separates the Hyderabadis and the rest of the world. To place an order in an Irani café you should first know your nan katai from your Osmania and your dil pasand from dil kush. Unlike in an Udupi where you ask the waiter what’s on the menu and wait until he stops listing out the 642 items and then takes your order, in an Irani you just tell the waiter what you want, with just your fingers and wait.

But the question remains- if the Irani cafe guys cannot make coffee and the Udupi hotel chaps cannot make good chai, why do they put it on the menu? That, my friends, is something that happens only in Hyderabad and like all things Hyderabadi, it is something that has no simple explanation.