Pit-stop at Peaches’

Sandhya Ramachandran decides to pause between mouthfuls and gets talking to the three young promoters of Chennai’s new and popular vegetarian world-cuisine restaurant – Peaches’.

Raghu Viswanathan, Venkatesh Kannan and Niranjan Tata never really thought they would start a restaurant together, ten years from the first day they met in college. Hours of coding and debugging later, in both college and the IT Company they worked in, the idea of starting something together was born.

It took them a while before they figured out what exactly they wanted to do. Niranjan reveals that they zeroed in on their choices of food, travel and entertainment. Venkatesh adds, “Then each one of us picked a topic and researched on it”. Since the three of them were foodies, the result was evident.

Raghu tells us that “the name Peaches was our first choice, but then, we wanted a few more choices and hunted for names again.” Funnily enough, they split responsibilities based on alphabets this time. One team of precise, well divided labour, alright!

So who is ‘peaches’, we plead, alluding to their teaser ad campaign that got them a lot of media attention and public eyeballs. Raghu and Venkatesh answer us in detail, “Peaches’ is the embodiment of an ideal woman to us. The concept of an ideal woman varies from person to person. There are different visualizations. In the same way, we have Peaches’. Peaches’ is what you want her to be. We wanted her to be someone that satisfied everybody’s need in terms of food.” Articulation indeed, just like their small but carefully planned menu.

So we get to what interests us the most – the food. We wanted to know the ideal three-course menu that we could order for the boss just in case we happened to land up at Peaches’. Niranjan took this one and has suggested we “start with the French onion soup. It is everyone’s favourite”. Aah! So the boss will begin the lunch in good spirits. He then says we must order their mushroom tortellini for starters, get some Phuket Paneer for the main course and indulge our boss in the time-tested gajar ka halwa and ice-cream to wrap up the meal. Safe and ever-reliable options, we agree.

We asked Raghu to pick out the meal at Peaches’ for our Peaches – meaning what we could order at a date – and he lists out, “Comfort food or what we call the ‘sarakku dish’(tavern snacks) of crispy American corn to begin with.” Good for conversations, we add. Then he urges that you order a creamy mushroom lasagna saying “you cannot go wrong with something that has cream, cheese and mushroom.” Ideal dish for the ideal date, we quip albeit a little cheesily. For dessert, he encourages the great hot chocolate fudge fundae. Hell, we’d order that even if we weren’t on a date!

Venkatesh however declares that the Somaras should be the ideal dessert choice. He indulges us in an interesting theory of immortality behind it. “The somaras comes straight from heaven, as its name suggests. Every drink adds a day to your life. So the sure shot way of longevity is to drop by Peaches for a daily dose of somaras,” he finishes. They had their fill, and have lived to tell the tale today. Maybe it is not all clever advertisement, maybe there is an element of truth. Why don’t we check it out for ourselves?