A Brown People’s Version of White People’s Lives

The gleeful inauthenticity of South Asian Italian cuisine. Words by Sharanya Deepak. Illustration by Svabhu Kohli.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay is a long read by Vittles editor Sharanya Deepak about delicious and chaotic South Asian Italian dishes, from keema spaghetti to pink sauce.

This essay is taken from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of contemporary food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy. We have sold three-quarters of the print run so far and we are sold out of Issue 1, so don’t sleep on it!

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The bedrock of Italian cuisine, I have been told my whole life, is minimal ingredients, freshness and proper, by-the-book technique. It is allegedly a cuisine rooted so firmly in tradition that there is a special state-led cabinet and culinary police force employed to determine who may be causing it harm. I sometimes wonder where Aunty Pasta in West Delhi fits into this lineage. Aunty Pasta is a small street stall just outside Karol Bagh metro station – a place that is a stranger to moderation and discipline, culinary or otherwise. Here you can buy everything from a retro MacBook to thrifted Yeezys to Pakistani salwars; around the stall, there are juice stalls, roadside sandwich grills, hundreds of people shopping for trinkets, and a couple of other people selling momo chutney-pasta made to Aunty Pasta’s recipe (only one of which is a permitted franchise).

At her stall, Aunty – as many Nepali women migrants in the city are known – whips up a concoction of sliced penne, oil, diced green capsicums (peppers), mayonnaise and Maggi masala, all mixed with an MSG-laden momo chutney that she pours into her seasoned iron kadhai from a plastic mug. The dish’s ingredients are essentially the same as those that go into a regular momo, but selling something less traditional helps Aunty to stand out and survive. The pasta – which has, since its invention around a decade ago, been subject to a cycle of influencer adulation, followed by mockery – is good in the way that a packet of crisps at a train station is good: it prompts buying a cold, fizzy beverage, and tastes mostly of starch and oil.

Across India, Italian ingredients continue to crop up in unlikely forms. Not too far from Aunty is ‘Billu’s Hut’, which takes several – more far-fetched – risks. On the menu is achari chaap pizza, Punjabi-sauce pasta, pasta Mexican, Punjabi paneer pasta and corn-nachos pasta. In North Delhi, another street vendor sells an Indo-Chinese macaroni dish to students at Delhi University; here, pasta and noodles are tossed together with oil, spices, ketchup and soy sauce (if you balk at the thought of combining pasta and noodles, I can point you to an influencer review I once watched, which said ‘maida maida hota hai’ – that flour is flour).

Aunty Pasta

Yet it is the tamer, more traditional takes on the cuisine – pink-sauce pasta, malai tikka pizza – that have white folks everywhere gasping in uncanny-valley horror, as if the sanctity of their Tuscan holiday has been destroyed by South Asians adding spices to their pasta several oceans away. Last year, at a party in London, an acquaintance told me that when his girlfriend of Italian origin visited India, ‘it was hard for her’ to see the garlic-filled, spice-laden pasta sauces. ‘She had a difficult time,’ he said soberly, as if narrating incidents of systemic inequality.

Across the subcontinent, Desi spins on Italian dishes continue to shock the European canon. There is makhani-sauce pasta, roti lasagne, pizza with chicken tikka or beef keema, and spice-filled pasta sauce sprinkled with whatever mixes people have at home. In West Delhi this year, I ate spaghetti with a pesto made from mint and green chillis – it tasted like a Maharashtrian thecha. As I write this, my little brother tells me about a pasta his Kashmiri friend made with leftover aab gosht – mutton cooked in milk – which was the best carbonara he ever ate. This is a world where nobody seems to care about European scrutiny, where any culture of the West is mere flourish to adapt for maximum entertainment. When I spoke to a cafe owner in North Delhi, she told me Italian food was popular with local clientele. ‘Authentic pizzas and pastas’, she said, ‘inspired by people like Massimo Dutti, famous Italian chef’.

The origins of Italian food in South Asia are unclear, but most people I speak to say the same thing: Desi Italian is less inspired by Italian cuisine than it is by its twisted American counterpart. It was only decades after southern Italians migrated to the US in the 1940s that their food began to trickle down, like much else in American culture, to urban South Asia. The other thing that most people tell me is that some of the first Italian food made in India must have been started by some well-travelled Gujaratis. Writer Paromita Vohra mentions Snowmans in Bombay, where you could find pizza rolls. Cookbook author Saee Koranne-Khandekar tells me about Café Churchill in Colaba, which made a ‘wonderful’ roast potato and chicken lasagne. Not every exciting Indo-Italian creation came from Gujaratis. Editor and writer Supriya Nair remembers the classic Udupi restaurant pizza in Hotel Shabari: ‘All Udipis had the same pizza menu for the longest time – eight-inch pizza with tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, and a mountain of Amul cheese on a biscuity base.’

Even if no culinary heritage can be traced to a singular source, in Bombay the documented history points to one restaurant: Trattoria. Tratts, as it is popularly known, was opened in Cuffe Parade’s President Hotel in 1981 by Ajit Kelkar, who then headed the TAJ hotel group. Trattoria quickly became famous for its large selection of cafe-style Italian dishes (prawn cocktail, vodka pasta), served in a banquet room with an open kitchen and comfortable sofa chairs; it remains hugely popular today. ‘You should go after midnight,’ Alex Sanchez, a Bombay-based American chef and restaurateur, tells me. ‘It’s just full of people eating aglio [e] olio’. Before Trattoria opened to customers, chefs were sent to train in Italy, but also, crucially, Manhattan. In Bombay – the city that housed the Indian film industry – any establishment that promised a new vocabulary of glitz was sure to work. The idea was to sit in chandelier-filled rooms and eat dishes with names no one could really pronounce.

Even so, like anything new, Italian food needed to be sold to Indian diners. In 2001, when the restaurant writer and television host Rashmi Uday Singh listed the restaurant, she mentioned the ‘cappuccino tarts’ and ‘eggless’ dishes for Hindus and Jains. She also mentioned what was a primary draw in the city of Bombay: celebrity sightings (in this case, a young Jackie Shroff). Very soon, Trattoria became a signifier of new European cuisine, a safe choice for Indian elites living abroad when they were in town – Salman Rushdie, for instance, is said to have stayed at the President. But none of this could have guaranteed a trickle-down into the rest of Bombay’s eating culture. How many people – then and now – could afford to stroll into the President for a prawn alla vodka?

Photo credit: Trattoria

One of the restaurants that has long claimed to have made Italian food more accessible is the all-vegetarian Little Italy in Pune, opened in 1989 by Raj Mehta. When I ask Amrut Mehta, Raj’s son and the current CEO, how the idea for the restaurant came about, he echoes everyone else: ‘You know, we are Gujaratis – my dad had the acumen. When he met an Italian chef, he thought it was a good idea’. Little Italy started as a small operation that catered to European tourists visiting the Osho Ashram in Pune – the same ashram that features in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. In the 1990s, an Indian clientele started visiting the restaurant, and within a few years, when a branch had opened in Bombay, Little Italy had tweaked their recipes in favour of the Indian palate. Thin-crust crispy pizzas, well-cooked pasta (al dente won’t cut it) and a tomato sauce with more garlic and spice than the Italian way. Mehta also tells me that while Europeans like simple, one-dimensional flavours (others I speak to are less diplomatic, calling this preference ‘bland’), ‘Indians like spices. As a business, we need to keep that in mind’.

Today, across Little Italy’s fifty branches, many of the dishes that are popular are the ones that first made the restaurant’s name in the nineties: pastas like ‘Barberesca’ – a cream sauce with broccoli, tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, tempeh, chilli pepper and parmesan; and pizzas like Bombay, topped with spicy tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, cottage cheese, coriander and mozzarella. ‘And then there’s the thing we introduced years ago that people still love,’ Mehta says, fifteen minutes into our phone call. ‘Pink sauce.’

When I hear this, I double-check for confirmation. Discovering even the alleged inventor of pink sauce is like finding out which caveman rubbed flint to make fire. Pink sauce rules the trifecta of sauces that form the lexicon of Italian food in India. There is ‘red sauce’, made with tomatoes and spices (mostly described as ‘rich’ and ‘tangy’); ‘white sauce’, made with cheese, cream and flour (generally referred to as ‘creamy’ or ‘melty’); and pink sauce – the best of both worlds. I ask Mehta for the origin story. ‘I think one day, a Punjabi gentleman mixed up two dishes on the table’, he replies, contemplating. Even if what Mehta says is myth, it is a plausible one – this kind of customisation and blending is inherent to how Italian food is eaten in India.

When San Francisco-born, Eleven Madison Park-trained Sanchez arrived in Bombay to head up the kitchen at The Table in 2010, he patiently addressed requests to add more chilli, salt or cream to plates that were sent back his way. ‘Like Italians, Indians are extremely particular about what they want,’ he tells me. But what on earth was pink sauce? ‘I made a few versions using what I knew from working in Italian restaurants elsewhere, but nothing worked. My line cooks would laugh at me, and I would say, Fine, guys! You do it! And they made a sauce with lots of garlic and chilli, adding cheese and enough dairy to make it pink. The sauce had to overwhelm the pasta’, he says. Eventually, Sanchez devised a pizza using pink sauce, called it ‘Pink Panther’ and put it on the menu at Americano, the restaurant which launched in 2019 that he co-owns. To no one’s surprise, the dish is the restaurant’s top seller. ‘It’s my little joke’, Sanchez tells me. ‘Reclaim pink sauce!’

Pink Sauce, coyly renamed as ‘Mixed Sauce’ on a menu in Delhi

If India has pink sauce supremacy, in Pakistan – where ‘vegetarian’ and ‘eggless’ are not concerns – Alfredo fettuccine is the primary player. ‘It’s everywhere, man! Everywhere!’ Alia Chughtai, a Karachi-based journalist, tells me, when I ask if she has encountered the recipe. The Pakistani version of the dish (and the only one with which I am familiar) is fettuccine – or whatever other pasta is on hand – cooked in a cream and flour sauce, then topped with spiced, baked or fried chicken breast. ‘People will top it up: green chillis, red chilli flakes and whatever else they want’, Chughtai adds. Writer Ahmer Naqvi tells me he ‘remember[s] a time when there was a “meri beti Alfredo fettuccine banana jaanti hai” vibe ongoing among middle-class families’, referring to the notion that a woman’s ability to cook the dish was used to advocate for her eligibility as a good hostess and wife. In his track ‘Introduction’, rapper Faris Shafi rhymes ‘Alfredo Fettucini’ with ‘red ho Lamborghini’.

On both sides of the border, Desi-Italian food seems to be a way to summon a fictional universe modelled after the Western world, an ‘elsewhereness’ that is aspirational but not imitative. ‘I like this,’ an American friend once said as we ate in a family-dining Western restaurant; she had ordered a macaroni salad with crispy corn and peppers. ‘A brown people’s version of white people’s lives’.

Packaged dry pasta was first introduced to South Asian markets in the 1970s; since then, billions of recipes – as infinitely varied as every household’s dal – have become a part of the repertoire of Desi-Italian cuisine. The Italian simulations of the restaurant world are timid compared to what happens in South Asian home kitchens. Many people I speak to mention dishes like ‘pasta sabzi’ or ‘chhonk vaali macaroni’, in which macaroni is cooked with a ‘chhonk’ – the everyday tempering of rai, haldi, jeera, mirchi (mustard, turmeric, cumin and red chilli powder) used for dishes like dal. Koranne-Khandekar tells me about her mother’s dish, inspired by a Tarla Dalal recipe, of spaghetti mixed with cream, sautéed onions, tomato sauce and ketchup, layered with a medley of vegetables and canned pineapple then topped with grated processed cheese and baked. When cooking Desi macaroni, ketchup is often present. Taiyyaba Ali, an independent chef who runs pop-ups, tells me that pasta dishes act as a place to ‘use Western and thrifted ingredients – like Domino’s oregano seasoning – that didn’t otherwise fit into an Indian repertoire’. By the 1990s, local pasta companies and small shops were selling new pasta shapes, while macaroni recipes – often marketed as ‘lunchbox staples’ – became a feature of women’ s magazines.

Some of these dishes – like Pakistani keema spaghetti (which also uses ketchup) – are so popular that they have become an institution. During the pandemic, Chughtai, like many others across South Asia, temporarily ran a delivery kitchen called Tangerine Tiffin, which had keema spaghetti on the menu as ‘Ammi vaaley keema noodles’ – Mum’s keema noodles. It was her most successful dish. ‘To me, keema spaghetti has never been Italian, always Pakistani’, cookbook author Maryam Jillani tells me. In a piece about the dish, Jillani writes that it was influenced by the method of ‘bhuna’ (through which the meat is cooked until it separates from the spices), noting how such recipes are modified not just by preferences of taste but also technique. ‘For many mothers, pasta was a base starch, like flour or rice’, Ali adds. ‘No one knew they were being “disobedient”. There was no sense of the original recipe.’

One common theme unites the Italian dishes that have become popular in the subcontinent: each has some element that feels familiar to South Asian diners. Unlike French cuisine, which people associate with raw meat, egg-based sauces and stoic fine-dining establishments, ‘there is a heartiness to Italian cuisine’, according to Koranne-Khandekar, that matches South Asian preferences. Naqvi loves Italian food because ‘the tomato-garlic-oil combo feels very similar to karahi gosht, which could be Pakistan’s national dish’. According to pasta chef Sambhavi Joshi, the Italian dishes that have caught Indian attention ‘have the same full, creamy mouthfeel as butter chicken and dal makhani’. Over a meal, a table of my friends concur that ‘pizza dough is just glorified tandoor ki roti’, which reminds me of the period when I would only eat pizza from one spot that made it on naan. Nair, meanwhile, mentions the ‘lactose availability’ of Indian diners. ‘So many Italian recipes are – especially in Bombay, and Gujarat – an excuse to eat cheese’, she says.

This is why, since the 1990s, pizzas – made on store-bought doughs, and sometimes rotis – have become similarly popular with South Asian households. ‘When I was growing up [in Islamabad], my mother bought pizza dough from the Afghan bakery, pre-made marinara sauce and picked her own toppings.’ Jillani tells me. ‘While she didn’t code any of this as “liberation”, I’m sure it must have been fun to be able to do something outside the traditional repertoire.’ In India throughout the nineties, when economic liberalisation had set in, products like FunFoods Pizza Sauces, branded pizza cheeses and, later, ‘taste makers’ (packets of spices that often tasted vaguely like Domino’s seasonings) made home-style pizzas ideal for hosting. By the noughties, ‘pizza’ had become a theme or abstraction to dispense as party snacks, like the ‘herbed pizza strips’ from Tarla Dalal’s The Complete Italian Cook Book (which was published in 2000 for an audience of mostly elite Indian housewives).

Today, the dry pasta market in India is valued at more than $1.4 billion, topped by older brands such as Bambino but also newer ones that sell pasta made from gluten-free Indian grain like jowar (sorghum). There are Italian cheeses sold by big brands like Amul, plus small-batch versions made by (and sold to) the upper classes in friendly organic stores, where they are stocked alongside handmade ceramic and soaps. There are also ranges of ‘Italian spices’ (‘itself an oxymoron’, according to Nair), instant packaged food sold by multinationals like Maggi, and trusted small-sale sellers like Bharat Masala.

In Pakistan, this is taken up a notch: the brand Bake Parlor’s macaroni mixes range from ‘Balti Macaroni’ and ‘Tikka Macaroni’ to ‘Shashlik Macaroni’, ‘Chicken Ginger Macaroni’ and ‘Bihari Tikka Macaroni’. The website has recipes, too, for dishes like Balochi tikka lasagne and penne pasta pizza sticks. (To make the pasta-pizza sticks, penne, olives and cheese are loaded onto a skewer and dusted with spices and the brand’s pizza sauce, like a doughy, Italian-flavoured seekh kebab.)

As the market evolves, so too does home cooking. No one is simply throwing macaroni shells in a tadka pan anymore. There is chilli-garlic pasta, schezwan spaghetti, and cheesy pressure-cooker macaroni. Rajeswari Vijayanand, who runs the blog and channel ‘Raks Kitchen’, uses Italian pantry ingredients to suit her Tamil cooking – she tells me about her recipes for pasta sundal and orzo payasam. ‘Sometimes people in the comments will say, “this is disrespectful,” But I am a home cook – I use the tools of instinct and memory’, she says. People with more access to the global pantry might use ingredients like tahini, harissa and miso in their recipes, along with contemporary brands of upscale, small-batch produce. ‘There is cuisine, and then there is cooking’, Sanchez says when I ask about Indian-Italian dishes. ‘When it comes to cooking, “correct” is not a useful conversation. In a way, Indian-Italian cooking is a huge compliment to Italian cuisine.’

Before we continue, I must – as one is forced to – declare that I actually like Italian food. I have loved eating arancini in Rome. I have been fed aromatic soups and spaghetti alle vongole, lovingly made in huge pots, by my friends in Naples. Food in Italy, much like food anywhere, is delicious. I question only the treatment of those who dare trespass on the rigidity of the cuisine, especially when the policing comes from outside the country. It has been disgruntled British acquaintances who have lectured me about freshness if I dare so much as look at a bottle of Sriracha when hastily making pasta. Once, at a mediocre restaurant I worked at in Brussels, I was asked to tell an Indian family not to add chilli flakes to their lasagne, as if it hadn’t been made with substandard produce from Lidl’s discount aisle.

By the time I returned from my life in Europe, I had internalised all this snobbery. ‘God, overcooked pasta’, I muttered when I watched a friend eat a spicy pasta arrabbiata and order ‘extra sauce’ on the side for his free garlic bread. ‘You know it’s after noon’, I said at dinner with cousins when someone ordered a cappuccino (in response, my chair was dragged and positioned at a corner so everyone on it could throw croutons at my head). The idea that we must protect the sanctity of Italian cuisine reflects what I like to call ‘political proximity’, where things are sometimes brought into the white, Western canon, their value rendered by how much they appeal to a European appetite for culinary adventure. Even if those things are new, they must be unthreatening; it doesn’t take much for something to become too novel – not exciting anymore, but a threat of some kind. To its protectors, Italian food is safely exotic – delicious, exciting and a little different. Crucially, it is owned by white people, which makes it just foreign enough.

Earlier this year, I spoke to Alberto Grandi, the co-author, along with Daniele Soffiati, of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (‘Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist’). He told me that, these days more than ever, the Italian public believe that the world is hell-bent on destroying Italy’s cuisine. ‘Italians are convinced that everyone else in the world eats disgusting food,’ he says. ‘It allows the image to be formed of Italians being the perfect, rustic makers and consumers of cuisine.’ Grandi’s work, which has summoned the ire of puritanical chefs and food writers everywhere, argues that the idea of a unified Italian culinary tradition is steeped in marketing rather than truth. ‘In politics, it is easier to send the message of a “hypothetical enemy” [in this case, the ones tampering with Italian recipes], rather than a meaningful one that is based on what people really need.’

Today, Italian cuisine is propped up by the Punjabi farmers making parmesan and the Bangladeshis who run restaurant kitchens in Venice. Reuters reported that, in 2023, non-EU workers made up 34% of new hires of cooks and pizza-makers, with the proportion of non-EU kitchen assistant hires (such as cleaners and dishwashers) even higher at 58%. ‘Of course, this is not acknowledged’, Grandi says. ‘Because if it is, how will they sell the myth of one traditional cuisine?’ I think of all the South Asians cooking in Italian kitchens, policing their own instincts. When I tell Grandi about pink pasta, he is unfazed. ‘Did you expect shock? Because I am Italian? I am not shocked. Adaptability is the foundation of Italian cuisine.’

Meanwhile in India, the idea of being devoted to the true Italian method is a new way for the elite to distance themselves from the public. At her restaurant Casa Pasta Bar, Joshi serves pasta made from local, single-origin Indian grain, which she says ‘is a very Italian thing to do. But often, people don’t understand, and say, “This is not Italian” – because I have not used “durum semola” imported from Italy’. Archit Puri, a strategy consultant who works closely with restaurants, tells me that what used to be experimental is now the basis of a ‘pizza-pasta-burger repetition’ among venture-capital backed, consultant-run restaurants that are solely geared towards profit. ‘While the first Indo-Italian dishes were experimental, they have now become the norm. People use fancier names for the dishes like red sauce pasta and use them to replicate the same menu everywhere’, he says. But outside the rigidity of industry, the experiments continue, led by the dynamism of the home kitchen, small restaurants and innovations on the street.

Menu at ‘Italy via Punjab’ in Pune

The day I ate at Aunty’s Pasta, I got into an argument with two identical-looking lads who, wanting to speed their motorcycle through the road – which had been destroyed by crowds and rain – bullied and shouted at an older man with a heavy pushcart. As I ate, my argument widened, ending only when one of the boys conceded. ‘Haan hain hum badtameez chutiye!’ he yelled, calling himself an asshole before I could. If food is about one’s environment, these aren’t the rolling hills of Emilia-Romagna. In South Asia’s cities, pleasure is a sacred, evasive thing, which must be experienced (whether ‘tangy’, ‘melty’ or ‘creamy’) in the dense, pacy bustle of life.

While the first innovations may have been coded into a genre, they continue, as always. On the internet, there are recipes for Bangladeshi ‘nashta pasta’ or ‘breakfast pasta’ – pasta mixed into spiced scrambled eggs. In Toronto’s Pizza Karachi, people flock to eat pizzas with toppings like Bihari sauce, Afghani tikkas and soft pieces of reshmi kebab. Last week I chatted to Amit, a young vendor making a street-style makhani pasta near where I live. I told him that this recipe may upset Italians. ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t everyone adding masalas and malai in their pasta?’ Amit remained confused as I explained further, then asked me to show him videos of famous Italian chefs. ‘It’s not like I can put any of these men out of work’, he said, as someone nearby asked me if Massimo Bottura was in fact Steve Jobs. ‘Zindagi kabhi mushkil hai kabhi tamasha, aisa-vaisa hua toh maaf kardena’, he continued as I wiped down my last bit of makhani sauce. Life here is all hardship or spectacle. So forgive us if we take it too far.

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Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from and currently in New Delhi, India. She is also an editor at Vittles Magazine.

Svabhu Kohli (they/them) is an independent visual storyteller whose work explores the interconnections between people, place, and the natural world through layered narratives rooted in magical realism. Their book The Desert Queen received the 2024 Stonewall Honor Award. Kohli’s practice bridges art, ecology, and storytelling to nurture deeper relationships with the living world.

A note from Sharanya: I’d like to thank everyone I interviewed for this piece. Special shukriyas to Supriya Nair, Ahmer Naqvi, Alberto Grandi, Paromita Vohra, Archit Puri, Sofia Grandi, Sanam Maher and Taiyaba Ali.