Modak and More
ALL OVER THE WORLD, PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ASKING JAVADEKAR WHERE THEY CAN FIND MARATHI FOOD
Indian cuisine sees a radical change every 200 kilometres—but most outsiders think of it merely in terms of north vs south. In his debut feature film, Delaware-based Ashay Dileep Javadekar sets out to bust this myth. Titled
Shank’s, after the fictitious gourmet restaurant run by Chef Shashank Joshi in the film, his hour-long feature aims to introduce the world to Marathi cuisine.
Javadekar has made six short films over the 12 years he spent in the US. His four-minute horror film Kevin, as well as the comedic The Script, made it to several festivals, including Cannes, Melbourne and Marbella. His debut feature is neither a documentary nor a mockumentary, but something in between. Mimicking the style of the Netflix series The Chef’s Table, Shank’s traces the chef’s journey and the risks he takes in order to get noticed. Javadekar’s use of extreme close-ups to highlight the pretty plates of puran poli or ukadiche modak are also reminiscent of the food documentary series. “I wanted to focus on the food, and if I had chosen a dramatic narrative format, it might have been difficult to show intricate details,” says the writer-director.
In the film, Chef Joshi’s idea of serving Marathi food is dismissed at first. He decides to break down the cuisine to its barest and reconstruct it for American diners, and presents a traditional Marathi
thali as an 11-course tasting menu. Sadly, rather than detail the complex techniques used to make dishes like
puran poli, Javadekar relies on a food critic, a culinary historian and the chef’s French wife to provide ‘white man’s approval’ for Marathi food as gourmet cuisine.
Javadekar hopes to release the film in Indian theatres, and has also submitted it to the Mumbai Film Festival. Screened extensively across the US, Shank’s made it to film festivals in Australia and Japan and was nominated for Best Film at the Bergamo Food Film Festival in Italy. It didn’t win, but Javadekar has already achieved his main goal. All over the world, people have been asking him where they can find Marathi food.