London: I recently helped curate a pantha bhaat - cooked rice soaked and fermented in water - platter here in London, replete with fried ilish (hilsa), daler bora (lentil fritters), and all. This was for a room full of Sunday pot roast loyalists paying good money for a dish that, a generation ago, wasn't considered good enough for the domestic help's lunch break.
Pantha bhaat is riding the wave of Instagram buzz around this once-humble, now hashtag-worthy dish back home in India. Turns out the internet has finally caught up to what grandmothers knew all along.
