I Am What I Eat: Urvesh

I loved interviewing Urvesh Pavais for the Borough Market blog. My first impression was of someone calm, quiet and collected. Perhaps it was his voice, which is mellow and unwavering. This was true even when I got him talking about his favourite subject, but his eyes lit up and he talked thoughtfully and at length about the topic he is most passionate about. In fact, most of my questions for him remained unasked. Just one question was enough to elicit the answer to my next five! 

This made it very difficult to decide what the theme of the post should be. I decided to focus on the visceral nature of food and the memories associated with taste and smell, as it followed on nicely from the previous post. However, it meant missing out a lot of really interesting material on Gujurati history and cuisine, the ambiguous lines between local, regional and national identity and cuisines, food and religion, food and symbolism... the list goes on.

Here is how the post began...

Eating is a sensory experience that has the power to evoke memories and emotions. In my first postfor this series I suggested that smell and taste can transport you back to another time and place. In his book, Remembrance of Repasts, David Sutton explains some of the science behind this.

First and foremost, taste and smell are interrelated senses that sit in the part of the brain that controls our emotions. Interestingly, both can evoke vivid and distant memories when a stimulus is present, but they are difficult to recall on their own. If I ask you to imagine the colour orange, you will have no trouble visualising it, but if I ask you to recall the flavour of a peach, you can’t experience the taste without actually eating one. Instead you might call on your other senses to visualise the last time you ate one. In doing so, you might also picture where you were, who you were with and what time of year it was.

So I start by asking Urvesh Parvais about the foods that he grew up with, the foods that are important to him. This is the concept behind his family business, Gujurati Rasoi, so it’s a topic that he’s given a lot of thought.“The idea is that everything we serve is representative of what we eat at home, at our own dinner table.” At Borough Market he and his mother offer a thali with rice, mugg (mung bean dhal), potato and fenugreek and a cauliflower curry served with condiments, such as raitha, onion and coriander. When I get Urvesh talking about food his eyes light up and he talks thoughtfully and at length. Food is his passion.

You can read the rest on the Borough Market blog.