ON Thursday, October 19, two years ago, Tushar Sood – chef and co-host of the Seasoned Podcast – launched Guerilla Diner; a burger shop and taqueria. In the then delivery-only outlet’s first Instagram post, Sood declared: “Guerilla Diner is all about taking food underground, back to basics and focusing on taste when you take away the distraction of the commercial dining room”. Then, over the year through weekend drops and pop-ups with poi burgers paying homage to Noronha’s Corner – a food truck in Goa’s Vagator to a modern riff on momo-thuk after a momo-making lesson from an aunty in Darjeeling to Manmohan Singh’s economic liberalisation policies that brought McDonald's to India. Each menu was playful, an eclectic take on Sood’s travels, his training in world-class kitchens like Indian Accent, Toast & Tonic among others, and a treat from his childhood.
Cut 2 A History Lesson
The concept and name – Guerilla Diner – resonates with a growing global F&B trend: guerrilla dining. Everyone’s purportedly tired of overly-designed restaurants and bars, and feeling overwhelmed with all the innovative concepts and the feel-good vibes. In fact, they want fresh ingredients, honest pricing and solid food. And if this means sitting along the footpath of a busy street or gathering in a parking lot, so be it. Sometimes, these radical concepts are rendered routine when Noma’s René Redzepi decides to pack up in Copenhagen and move around the world to explore ‘local ingredients’ with mystery menu pop-ups is also guerrilla dining. But behind all the hype, there’s usually some heart-warming origin story.
The roots of this F&B movement can be traced back to the Cuban revolutionaries in the late 1950s. Fidel Castro, Che Guevera and the other compañeros spent nearly two years between 1956 and 1959 hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains. They were fighting to overthrow the strongman dictator Fulgencio Batista. Much like they had to get innovative in their guerrilla warfare techniques, they also enlivened their limited access to food to create “guerrilla cuisine”. Coffee strained through an old sock, boiled taro root gruel, boiled green bananas enriched with butter and salt, and a dish of thinly sliced chorizo, honey, lemon and a dash of Bacardi rum created by Raul Castro called chorizo à la guerrilla. This cuisine of making do with things available eventually led to the popularity of paladares, which are Cuban family-run restaurants where visitors are welcomed to their kitchen tables: serving the dual purpose of commerce and keeping their cuisine and culture alive.
Back 2 Burgers in Bengaluru
And then, nearly exactly to the year: this October, Guerilla Diner transformed from a cloud kitchen into a physical eatery with dine-in and takeaway options. Behind a wooden, deep purple facade, there’s a white butcher-shop tiled kitchen – that looks straight out of a retro comic book’s idea of a store-front; this burger shop and taqueria has decided to plug its grill.
Even on the Wednesday evening that we tried to grab a quick dinner, it felt like everyone in the city was there. We spotted a boutique jewellery designer, a curious PR person, a stand-up comedian, a bar owner and then some more. We managed to shimmy our way past two rows of people chomping down their orders on two floating tables and wooden stools to make it to the swirl of bodies in front of the cash register. Here, we asked for The Purist, Eggplant Parmigiana Hoagie, Carnitas De Pollo, Golden Fries and Nani’s Ice Cream Sando. And we’re given the token number: 46. Since 32 had just gotten its goodies, we were in for a long wait. Hearing the automated token number announcer and the red numbers changing on a digital board threw us back to waiting at banks with our grandparents.
And honestly, it took just as long as waiting at the teller’s counter. After an hour’s wait: we simply wolfed down our order. The smash burger with double beef patty, cheese, pickles, and mustard and the hoagie with breaded eggplant, tomato sauce, basil-ricotta cream doused and drizzled with mozzarella and parmesan were familiar flavours that expertly danced across our tongues. The bread wasn’t just the scaffolding keeping the stuff together, it was its own star: fluffy, foundational but with give. The tacos were simple parcels for the sharpness of the jalapeno and chilli cut by the smear of sour cream. The hand-cut fries were stout bats of chillies and carbs – little islands between the bites. And, the ice-cream sando inspired by Sood’s nani’s shahi ka tukda was a sticky, sugary mess with the toasted bread providing the jab of texture.
Napkin Notes
These tattooed, long-haired, sneakerhead chefs really deliver on the good food part of the guerrilla dining concept. But perhaps just like their Kannada translation, which reads, ‘Gorilla Dinner’, something about the spirit of these ventures has been traded in. Yes, it was a long wait, and slightly annoying, but I still.
In less than two months of opening, they’ve streamlined into a new online booking system for dining slots. Here too, in now an increasingly ‘Peak Bengaluru’ move: only the fastest finger will be fed. So all the best to one and all – may the one with the best typing skills win!
12/36, Cambridge Road, opposite Belle Vue’s Cambridge Hospital, Halasuru, Bengaluru – 08. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 5-11 pm. No walk-ins, only prior reservations, book here. Reservations open on Tuesdays at 8 pm.