Reclaiming cultural roots, via food: The Butter Chicken Odyssey, a Fringe review

If this captivating solo show were just a chronicle of Ramneek Singh’s epic two-year odyssey through some 50 (!) of the city’s butter chicken joints, and what happens to a signature Punjabi dish at their hands, it would still be a lot (and educational as hell).

As Singh explains, butter chicken is exotic, subtle, complicated, universally loved in theory but colonized and blandified for (white) North American appetites.  And he’s great company — funny, with a gift of the gab, and great comic timing.

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Ramneek Singh’s The Butter Chicken Odyssey, at Springboards New Play Festival. Graphic supplied.

As instigated and directed by the award-winning Edmonton-based playwright Collin Doyle, The Butter Chicken Odyssey is more than that. It’s a real live play, artfully shaped, not a culinary documentary. It’s a diary of self-discovery, cultural re-discovery really, triggered by having a little daughter who knows neither Punjabi nor her grandparents. His odyssey returns him to memories of growing up in multicultural Mill Woods, a first-generation immigrant kid who learned English by watching horror movies with his mom, then a teen steeped in pop-culture and fast food food (“unhealthy shit, that’s my thing”).

The price of assimilation is part of the story: a man who wants “to find the way back in” —  to his cultural roots, a sense of self. There are family arguments along the way; at 39, he’s still living in his parents’ basement, and he’s fed up with that life and reminders that they’d have preferred a doctor or engineer son than a food writer with thousands of followers. But he renews his appreciation for the “working-class heroes” of Mill Woods, immigrants like his folks, who put their own dreams on hold so their kids would prosper.    

The play is punctuated, episodically, by his accounts, built on a tower of pop-culture similes, of visits to butter chicken establishments (and their bathrooms) that he assesses, on a scale of zero (gruesome) to five (“the real deal”). Many things can go wrong with butter chicken: the gravy could have been sitting there “since before the Partition,” the sauce could be Campbell’s tomato soup, the chicken could have “the consistency of a Michelin tire.” Or worse.

He doesn’t spare himself humiliating moments —  boyhood bullying, or the “university dark years,” or episodes when butter chicken triumphs over his digestion. There’s overt racism in the gross online abuse he gets, and more subtle kinds when, as a brown guy “who grew up cheering for the Oilers,” he’s nonetheless persistently asked “where are you from? No, I mean originally!” by Canucks never satisfied with the answer Mill Woods.

We leave feeling we’ve had a chance to hang out with an inspired raconteur, with first-hand insights into the immigrant experience and a culture, on a quest to reclaim the past.

My favourite solo show at the Fringe so far, funny and heartwarming too.