About this event
Food EventEvery great Indian kitchen carries a map of migration. The food Nozhat Choudry cooks traces one of the most beautiful of them — the journey of the Mughal court table as it moved south from Lucknow into the Deccan, and learned, in Hyderabad, to speak a second language.
In the north, the Nawabi kitchens of Awadh perfected restraint: the slow steam of dum pukht, the marriage of cream and nuts, gravies built in quiet whispers of warm, aromatic spices. When that sensibility reached Hyderabad, it met the coconut, the sesame, the tamarind and the green chilli of the Deccan, and turned bolder, earthier, unmistakably its own. This dinner sits on that seam. It opens in the cool elegance of the north and closes in the warmth of the south, and asks you to taste the distance between them.
Nozhat learned all of it at one table. Her mother, Akhtar Bano, brought Hyderabad to the north of England in the 1960s — in spice tins, in muscle memory, in the patience of a properly sealed pot. Everything she understands about feeding people, she learned watching her mother. She has three daughters of her own now, and feeds them the way she was fed, which is how a table outlives the person who set it. The Private Dastarkhwan, a supper club she hosts in Oakville, is her attempt to keep her mother's table laid. This evening at The Depanneur is the first time she brings it to a larger room.