Friday, September 12, 2014

Don’t you sell to Indian’s in India even if you are not Indian?

This past weekend I finally got to visit Café Max which is at Max Mueller Bhavan in Indiranagar.
This is not a food blog where you will get to hear my experience with the food. The simple reason for this was that I never actually got to eat the food there to be able to write about it.

And why dint I have anything to eat? Because I was a vegetarian that day and hence had to lay off almost all the items in the menu.
The fact is that most of their food is non-veg which is not wrong in any sense.

What irked me about the menu was that they passed off Non Veg food as Veg food!

That’s right, they have food that has EGG in it and they explicitly call it VEG food. Now maybe in Germany egg is termed as vegetarian and hence it is acceptable to call food that has egg but no meat as Vegetarian but last I checked we in India still consider it as non-vegetarian.

When I was living in Singapore it was a common problem when you ate at a local eatery. You could order veg food and they would serve it with the egg and when you insist I want veg food they would be like this is veg, no meat. Then we would need to explain that Indians consider egg as non-veg and hence we can’t eat the food since it has egg in it.

Here are some snapshots of their menu from Zomato.
This is the menu items that we saw too and hence it is as new and relevant till this 
past Sunday.

I would like to draw your attention to the entry – Crepes.
By highlighting that Ham and Cheese is Non-veg your suggesting that the other 2 are veg right? But you forget that Crepes are made with Egg and hence ALL the items ought to be non-veg.
Same goes for the Mediterranean crepes in the starters section! It says Veg when it has egg. 
And this was confirmed by the waiter as well.
Don't believe me? Read the entry highlighted under breakfast!
A quick look at the Max Mueller Website’s about us section  - reveals this at the end of the about us -
We would like to support them (Indian artists, scientists and journalists) in their roles as promoters of culture and pave the way for future international and cultural cooperation.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/bag/uun.html

Great way to promote their culture I guess. Personal preferences be aside, Indian’s as a nation term Egg as non-veg and hence even if their primary audience maybe German (which is not the case as I know people who go there frequently and the clientele is largely Indian).
It is grossly un-cultural to be promoting eggs as vegetarian in India. Good for health, maybe but surely not vegetarian and surely not in India.

A quick byword about the service we experienced - Crappy. Not worthy of a tip let alone the service charge they force you to pay on the bill.


P.S. – the author of this blog is a hard core non-vegetarian and can only tolerate vegetables when accompanied by non-veg.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think they are stepping the gun out here in making Indian culture be on the same page as the other cultures which is totally wrong