Clink and creativity

Located within the confines of a prison wall, The Clink Restaurant at HMP (Her Majesty’s Prison) Brixton celebrated its first year of operations in February 2015 with an Indian themed fund-raising dinner hosted by chef ambassador Cyrus Todiwala who has been training select prisoners in preparing Indian dishes using traditional spices, ingredients and techniques. With individual tickets priced at £ 75+vat, guests were greeted at the prison restaurant with a fruit cocktail to be followed by a four-course menu that presented an assortment of flavors from Bombay street food, Goan and North Indian inspired dishes with an exotic dessert, coffee and petits fours to finish, notes the Clink website.

Over the last two decades Todiwala and his wife Pervin have been expanding their culinary imprint in the UK from Café Spice Namaste, to Mr Todiwala’s Kitchen to two additional London restaurants, Assado as also The Park Café in Victoria Park, East London. A regular television chef who appears on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen and other programs, Todiwala considered his association with The Clink Restaurant "an honor.” As he further explained, "It is especially meaningful when one can contribute towards improving the lives of others. To give individuals who might have taken a wrong turn the opportunity to do right and to help pave their way to a great future is very rewarding.”
The Clink Charity that currently runs three restaurants and hopes to operate 10 by 2017 believes that through the training offered in its restaurants, reoffending by prisoners has dramatically reduced. As against the national reoffending rate of 47%, The Clink Restaurant workers showed a drop to 12.5% one year after their release. As conveyed by Clink Charity chief executive Chris Moore to The Times of India of January 11, 2015, "The initiative offers prisoners hospitality training, work experience and mentoring to help them find employment on release… Not only do the prisoners acquire academic qualifications but they also learn to work as part of a team under pressure, gain confidence, motivation and pride.” Only non-violent offenders who have undergone rigorous interviews are selected for this program.
Since the restaurants are located within the confines of a prison wall, entry is restricted to those aged above 18 if they have booked 72 hours in advance. They have to be prepared for a thorough security briefing, mobile phones have to be turned off and no handbags are permitted inside.
Constantly reinventing himself, Todiwala’s latest venture is his first restaurant in India, The River Restaurant at the Acron Waterfront Resort in Goa on the banks of the Baga river that was opened in January this year. It offers delicacies using Goa’s abundant seafood, seasonal fruits and vegetables. "I spent eight formative years in Goa, so The River Restaurant marks a homecoming for me,” Todiwala was quoted by The Caterer. Before he came to Goa as executive chef of the Taj properties he was "mostly enamored of classical French and other European cuisines.”
Having returned to Goa with his new restaurant he hopes to "bring to Goa the food innovations I either developed or absorbed as a chef working in Britain, while raising the profile of Goan food in the eyes of the rest of the world.”
Also keen to preserve traditional Parsi cuisine, Cyrus who had roots in Surat, Gujarat and Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh noted in an email to Parsiana, "My single greatest fear lies in the realization that one fine day we will lose it all and several superb home grown and protected recipes shall die with their owners. Please get some great people to share these vividh vaanis (classical recipes) and let someone like me see if we can redo the recipes in a simpler format that can allow the young of today to appreciate what our community’s cuisine is all about…rather than to adopt some modern unhealthy rubbish.”
Believing that the affluence of their husbands made some Parsi ladies of yore obliterate the tiresome cooking practices and conveniently hire domestic hands from Goa, Gujarat and Maharashtra, Cyrus states that this led to the "dilution of some of the cooking.” Subsequently when Motilal Masalawala introduced their convenient masala mixes, the traditional dhansak masala was further pushed into oblivion! "But the traditional masala continued in the villages and in our house and a very old great-grandma’s recipe (for dhansak) even calls for sukka limbu (dry lemon) and orange rind, taking this masala all the way back to Persia where both these dried fruits are still used extensively in their lentil cooking,” he writes.