Sometime on Friday night in Stavanger, Praggnanandhaa, Vaishali and their mother, Nagalakshmi, made their way to city centre for a slice of home. On any other evening, the trio would have been at the playing hall inside SR-Bank’s building. But with Friday being the first rest day of the 2024 Norway Chess tournament, the they headed to a South Indian restaurant called Spisoh, which is not too far away from the playing hall.
Once there, they gorged on dosas, chicken curry and Kerala parotta. Usually, both grandmasters are very conscious of what they eat when outside the country, restricting themselves to vegetarian food or having Nagalakshmi cook for them in their room.
But on Friday evening, for once those reservations faded away.
“The family looked at the menu for a long time and then Vaishali and Nagalakshmi had two dosas each with their favourite podi on top of it. Pragg had Tamil Nadu-style chicken curry with Kerala parotta. They said that they will come back,” beams Nitish Kamath, who is the one of the five owners of Spisoh.
The five friends who own the eatery all have regular day jobs in the energy and IT sectors, and started the restaurant as a side gig because of their passion for South Indian food. They joke — with some degree of seriousness — that their job is to make Norwegians eat masala dosas for breakfast.
Pragg and Vaishali are not the only Indian players who have been drawn by the speciality South Indian fare to the restaurant. Last year, another teenager from Chennai, Gukesh, found comfort in eating here while Humpy Koneru has also been a regular this year.
“Humpy has tried the chicken biryani one day, then tomato rasam and rice a few times. She’s also tried the Andhra Pradesh-style kodi veppudu (which is a street food with spiced sautéed chicken pieces). A couple of times she has dropped by late in the night after her game to pick up her order,” adds Nitish. “When Gukesh was playing at the event last year, they were always ordering aatu irachi masala (South Indian style lamb masala with roasted spices and sautéed curry). That was clearly their favourite. Day in, day out they were ordering only that. So when we would punch in the order, our chef would know it was Gukesh ordering. Most of the days Gueksh’s father would stop by to pick up the food, but on rest days Gukesh also came with his trainer Grzegorz Gajewski.”
Gukesh and his coach Grzegorz Gajewski at Spisoh last year.
The trio, along with Humpy Koneru, were also invited by the owners of the restaurant for a special sadhya lunch (banquet in Malayalam) on Saturday afternoon, where the owners replicated an authentic South Indian feel: for example, banana leaves were specially bought at a cost of 15 Norwegian krones (about Rs 120) for a single leaf from a speciality shop in Oslo (which imported them from Sri Lanka). Unfortunately, with the fifth round of Norway Chess happening later in the afternoon on Saturday, all three players excused themselves from the sadhya, where a 23-course meal awaited the players.
But the gesture from the restaurant owners is a reflection of the perks that India’s jet-setting chess players are starting to discover in their travels around the world: members of the Indian diaspora going out of their way to make the players feel at home in faraway lands.
Recently, when the five Indian players travelled to Toronto for the Candidates, many Indian-origin fans would show up at the venue to not just root for the players but also bring along offerings of love such as home-cooked traditional food for players like Vidit Gujrathi.
Running a speciality South Indian restaurant in the third-biggest city of Norway with a desi diaspora of about 2,000 is a tough job, with not all ingredients available readily. The restaurant owners have to specially order things like drumsticks, lady fingers — and banana leaves — from Oslo.
“For foreigners, Indian food is usually butter chicken, naan bread and tikka masala. So we wanted to popularise tastes from our homeland,” adds Nitish.