Cream Centre: Haven for vegetarians

You’ve got to be a cool cat just to get in at Cream Centre on a Sunday evening.
If not, you’ve just got to stand outside their Nungambakkam outlet, where there are a row of plastic chairs and meow with the rest of the crowd. If your inner child is into having washable tattoos painted on to your arms, there is a young man who does just this, with fabric paints and amazingly quick strokes of the brush.So, let it be said that for most of Chennai’s veg wannabes, Cream Centre is a place that rocks.
For some of us, however, the reasons for its popularity remain totally inexplicable. It’s true they have got their basics right. The staff is young and personable, they dash about giving the impression that they are on the ball, others lower down the rung, swing back and forth from the kitchen bearing their signature dishes, amazing channa bhaturas puffed up to look like desi hot air balloons, or platters sizzling with slabs of spicy panneer, or veg shashlicks, or even more enticingly, coloured drinks that come in curvy glasses filled with crushed ice.
They dodge the kids who invariably run about from multiple sets of grandparents to parents with sticky fingers demanding more ketchup like dodgem car drivers and keep assuring you that your order is being attended to at once.
Obviously, the trick here is to stick to the basics and go for the specials. These are of the high-cholesterol , deep-fried chaats, New Delhi-Mexican-Mumbai street food variety with additional inputs from Italy, by way of cheese and tomato puree. Just breathing in the air will make your lipid levels rise, but maybe that’s half the fun. We had made the mistake of taking their new menu seriously and opting for their Far Eastern delights.
Not only did this mean that we had to wait a good one hour just to get our starters, the ‘world’s best nachos’ corn chips doused in a creamy sauce, which was good, let it be admitted and then almost as long for the main meal. Mind you, we had tried to ask for the miso soup, that was on the menu but not available and agreed to settle for a lemon iced tea, an Italian-style Pizza margherita and after much thought, a Szechwan ratatouille.
Even as I write this, I realize how foolish it is to imagine that a ratatouille made in Szechwan could only be the phoniest of dishes, a messy potage of veggies doused with ketchup and sprinkled with fried rubber bands. It was, however , the pizza that made us gag, a flat barely-cooked pappad-like base with a thin layer of tomato sauce. We grabbed our bill and ran, but outside, the crowds were still waiting just to get a foot in into channa bhatura country.