The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C Morais
by Rik Ubhi
Food has always been a handy trope to interrogate identity. And no more so than in South Asia; here, gastronomy and ontology are inexorably intertwined within a landscape in which so many different peoples, religions and languages co-exist – and not always happily. Richard C. Morais’ novel The Hundred-Foot Journey appears, at first, to advance this narrative.
The scion of a family of self-made restaurateurs in Mumbai, Hassan Haji is compelled, following a vicious episode of Muslim-Hindu violence, to embark on a culinary journey. It is a journey that will take the Hajis to London, the Loire Valley and Paris, where Hassan is eventually feted as the rising star of French cuisine. En route, Hassan’s talent is nurtured by a series of benefactors – illustrious chefs Madame Mallory and Paul Verdun, and exuberant aristocrat, Le Comte de Nancy Seliere, with whom Hassan opens his celebrated restaurant, Le Chien Mechant.
But it is gastronomy, rather than ontology, which dominates here. Morais writes evocatively about the art of cooking, from coriander being chopped in a “riot of awkward leaves and stems instantly reduced to a fine green mist”, to a “masterpiece of paper-thin slivers of grilled goose liver layered delicately between the pudenda-pink meat of freshwater crustaceans”. These are wonderfully vivid, almost yearning, descriptions, and they show how good Morais is when writing about the minutae of food and how affecting food can be.
However, like an overly fussy plate of haute cuisine, the other individual tastes and textures of this novel are undefined. Global events are alluded to but then passed over fleetingly as plot points, subservient to the culinary force of Morais’ writing: the Second World War features as a means for the Haji family to become wealthy catering for British and American troops, and the tumult of 1947 is simply glanced over – “Independence and Partition came and went. What precisely happened to the family during that infamous time remains a mystery”. There are several desultory love affairs and, despite Hassan’s notion of himself as an “outsider fighting for a seat at the table occupied by French insiders”, the legacy of Hassan’s identity – of a Muslim Indian working as a chef in one of the most purist of culinary traditions – is left disappointingly unexplored. Indeed, Morais’ insistence on erroneously using ‘yaar’ to mean ‘yes’, rather than ‘mate’, leaves one with the impression that his interest in Indian/Muslim identity is never more than superficial.
Hassan himself is oddly passive for a first-person narrator. The determination that he must clearly possess to reach such dizzying gastronomic heights is never really shown; his Parisian success seems as much due to the influential help that he gains along the way as to the innate talent he is said to possess. The lesser characters are far more interesting, especially Madame Mallory – the forbidding double-Michelin-starred chef who works across the road from the Haji’s Loire Valley address. She, more than Hassan, embodies the drive and unremitting self-doubt we expect a top chef would need, and Morais skillfully evokes the senses of regret and unfulfilled ambition that haunt her. It is a shame that Hassan never generates such levels of compassion.
There are, perhaps, too many novels fighting for space in The Hundred-Foot Journey; narratives are introduced, mouth-wateringly, and then are either hurriedly devoured or pushed off the plate altogether. But, as a novel about the restaurant scene in Paris during a certain era, and as a paean to food as art, it is an enjoyable read.
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