After reading the headline some of you might have wondered whether AAP supremo Kejriwal is going international with his politics by possibly contesting the seats in London during UK’s snap general elections on 8th June. It might be a bit plausible considering Kejriwal does have some fascination with that city after he promised to develop Delhi along its lines.
This though isn’t the case and the Kejriwal we are going to talk about predates the existing one by decades and it involves Eggs and not Raita.
We are talking about a dish called Eggs Kejriwal.
In 1960’s Mumbai, a man named Devi Prasad Kejriwal was the member of the Exclusive Willingdon sports club in Mumbai. Devi Prasad was a Marwari businessman who could not eat eggs at home. One fine day he asked the Chef at the club to prepare a dish with fried egg on a toast, topped with cheese and green chilies. He then started doing it with a frequency which ensured that other club members took notice. Soon they stated demanding ”what Kejriwal was eating” and the name morphed to eggs Kejriwal.
For long the dish was prevalent only in small pockets of South Mumbai but in the last five years its popularity exploded. Now it boasts a presence globally with Dishoom in London and Paowalla in New York including it in their menu.
Its meteoric rise is complemented with its high popularity. At Dishoom they apparently sell a hundred of these per day across all branches. The dish has also been sited at menus in San Francisco and Bali.
A story summed up the dish as a reliable cure for a hangover which is solid enough to pass for breakfast but compact enough to morph as an in-between meals snack.
Adding another feather to its cap, the dish was featured among the Top 10 restaurant dishes of New York with the dish available at Paowala described as:
It’s a fried egg on toast under melted Cheddar that stands out from all others because of a throat-catching green chutney that has a glossy underpinning of coconut oil
In the 60’s when Devi Prasad Kejriwal would have first got up to request the in-house Chef at Willingdon to conjure up a dish with he had in mind, he would have hardly imagined that some 50 years later the exact same dish with his name would be a sensation across the ocean.
A nice way to leave behind your legacy. Time for a Raita-e-Kejriwal now?