Sliced up for the screen

Movies and series about chefs are hard to pull off. But when done right, with a focus on the kitchen, the food and the people, they make for bingeworthy viewing

- VIR SANGHVI

When I first interviewed Huma Qureshi four years ago, she was already a big star and, it was predicted, would rise even further. What I did not realise then, was that despite her success in mainstream (well, glamorous) roles, she would consciously-as Meryl Streep in the West, perhaps - try different kinds of parts, never repeating even the broad contours of a performance. This is hard to do in Bollywood, where roles for women are not as varied as they could be.

I was certainly not expecting to see her transform into a dumpy Gujarati lady as she does in Tarla, the new Zee5 movie on Tarla Dalal, the most influential Indian cookbook writer of the 20th century.

There another reason for my surprise. Huma comes from a celebrated family of restaurateurs, who run the respected Saleem chain of restaurants. She is not, what we Gujaratis would call, a dal-bhaatrotli-shaak kind of girl. And yet here she was, pretending to enjoy all the vegetarian food that Tarla Dalal cooked.

She says she was surprised herself by the things she had to say. "I had to try a vegetable biryani, to enjoy it and to say how delicious it was. I have been brought up to believe that biryani is always made with meat. When people compliment me on my performance, I say that if I was convincing when I appeared to enjoy the vegetable biryani, then yes, it was a good performance", she laughs.