At the Table with Cartel Madras
Cartel Madras doesn’t pull any punches. The rap duo’s quick-fire lyrics over addictive bhangra beats are filled with as many references to sex, drugs, and guns as their male counterparts.
Chennai-born, Calgary-raised siblings Bhagya (aka Eboshi) and Priya (aka Contra) Ramesh’s riotous shows and energetic, electric, unapologetic, dripping with expletives tracks, have garnered legions of fans, while unabashedly carving out space for immigrants, women of colour, Desi, and LGBTQ+ like themselves.
Their Goonda rap - a scorching elixir of trap, house and gangsta rap – has earned them big ups and coveted spots opening for heavyweights including Fetty Wap and Clipping.
Sub Pop EP Age Of The Goonda, boasting hypnotic earworms such as “Goonda Gold,” just dropped in November, but they’re already hard at work on an upcoming project.
The sibs recently relocated to Toronto and it turns out, they’re as passionate about food as they are about music.
Occupation
Rappers
Place of Residence
Toronto
The last thing you ate
Eboshi: Eggs benny with hash browns and coffee.
Contra: Madras chicken curry with jasmine rice.
If you were left to your own devices to make something at home, what would it likely be?
E: Ground pork burrito with onions, tomatoes, scotch bonnet, and too much hot sauce and cheese
C: If I was feeling gluttonous, I would make myself a coriander chicken stew, but usually I am making myself a wrap.
When staying at a hotel, what are you raiding from the mini fridge?
E: We tend to stay at hotels when we are touring, so probably Red Bull.
C: To be completely honest ,hotel mini fridges never have what I want.
Guilty pleasure
E: Extra buttery popcorn. Sometimes I go to the theatre just to get movie theatre popcorn with extra, layered, buttered popcorn.
C: Oxtail stew, the Jamaican kind. Tim's Potato Chips, Jalapeno flavour - This is only available in the US, so I am forced to stock up whenever I visit Seattle, like a maniac. And nachos.
Drink of choice
E: Dirty Gin Martini with an olive.
C: Paper Plane, on the rocks.
Favourite meal meal of the day and why
E: I like breakfast, I love breakfast food. Probably an offshoot of loving hardboiled detective tropes. I get excited when I smell bacon, or sausages. Toast is the best in the morning. I love trying breakfast classics at local diners and having an endless cup of mediocre coffee.
Or Happy Hour.
C: I really like an incredible dinner. I like having delicious food with a cocktail. I like thinking of food as something I can share with a group of people. I like that dinner can lead to more conversations and extend the time people spend together.
Favourite cookbooks to use
E: I tend to use the internet when cooking, because there are so many resources and personalized recipes that cater to every level:
Google - I am such a novice when it comes to cooking that I have several tabs open for every dish and every step.
YouTube - Chef John of Food Wishes has the most comforting voice in all of YouTube food. Watching his videos feels like a warm hug. Mandy of Souped Up Recipes is one of my favourite YouTubers. She has such a lovely way of explaining her recipes and is a delight to watch. Internet Shaquille is one YouTube channel that has “empowered” me in the kitchen. Really charming screen presence with non-intimidating culinary suggestions.
C: I spend almost all my time on the internet watching people cook. This is my secret. It is deeply cathartic, and in my alternate reality I am the head chef of a hilarious restaurant that is a mishmash of Tamil/Malayali street food, but also a dive bar?
So, with that said, my favourite cookbooks have been YouTube channels: Maangchi, Manjula’s Kitchen, an endless loop of Bon Appétit videos, Food Wishes, Rick Stein's Food Docs, grainy uploads of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations (also on Hulu). For actual cookbooks, I’ve been warming up to Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family by Priya Krishna. I love Momofuku: A Cookbook by David Chang and Peter Meehan, and also Alison Roman’s Dining In.
Favourite cookbooks just to look at
E: Hedgebrook Cookbook: Celebrating Radical Hospitality by Denise Barr and Julie Rosten. When we were invited to participate in the Hedgebrook Songwriter’s Residency in February 2019, we had no idea what a culinary adventure it would be. We got to spend all our time in individual cottages only convening at the farmhouse to have dinner with the other artists on the retreat. Dinner would be freshly prepared every day, and you would bring a basket full of empty jars to take your breakfast and lunch to your cottage for the next day.
The food and experience was incredible; local ingredients from the Hedgebrook farm and Whidbey Island and the comforting touch of a loving chef chatting with you throughout dinner while the fireplace roars in the adjacent library. We would always arrive at the farmhouse in awe of the food that was prepared for us - a part of the “radical hospitality” Hedgebrook prides itself in. After dinner we would always gaze into the Hedgebrook Cookbook to see what would possibly be served the next day.
C: All of the Forest Feast cookbooks by Erin Gleeson!!! Tiffin: 500 Authentic Recipes Celebrating India's Regional Cuisine edited by Sonal Ved, and The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt.
Three items that are always in your fridge
E: Eggs, Beer, and Cheese.
C: Mushrooms, Garlic, and Eggs.
Top three Toronto restaurants
E: This might be hilarious, but I love Fran’s Restaurant and Bar. When we first moved here in the summer, we lived really close to the College Street location, and I kept making my friends come with me. I really love a place that has good diner classics 24/7 - for the amount of times I’ve been there so far, I have no complaints. The Shore Leave might not count because it is a bar, but I had one of the most fabulous cocktails there. On Church St, close to Boutique Bar and Black Eagle, there’s a pizza place that might just be called Pizza or Express Pizza (Ed note: It is Express Pizza – 447 Church St.). Everyone in that area was really talking up North of Brooklyn, which was great, but this nondescript pizza place was incredible.
C: OKAYYYYYYYY, I have so many to put on this list, but at the very top is obviously Pai, then Maha’s, and this is more GTA, but Anjappar in Scarborough.
Go-to food and bev order at a restaurant
E: Can’t go wrong with a cheeseburger and an IPA. If the place looks promising, fish and chips.
C: Fries, and if they don’t have a cocktail list, an Old Fashioned.
Would you rather – Go to farmers’ market/nearest pub/food truck?
E: Nearest pub for a pint.
C: Farmers’ market.
Describe your kitchen
E: Usually, kind of messy and unattended to as I don’t cook very much. But of late, it’s in pretty good shape. I’m making a concerted effort to improve my skills and learn the basics and that has translated into me being much more mindful of how it looks when I enter and leave it. However, I am yet to master the art of keeping the kitchen in order while cooking - it’s a chaotic mess during the process.
C: My kitchen is organized to only reflect my own sensibilities - it has a lot of spices and a lot of teas. I like to keep my kitchen very clean, but my life usually involves several other people passing through my apartment, so it is almost always messier than I’d like it to be. I like my kitchen brightly lit with a lot of fresh vegetables.
Describe your cooking style
E: Untethered and highly amateur.
C: Veering through ambitious, anxious, frantic, fragrant.
Ideal food day: from the time you wake up until bed, what are you having?
E: This would be my dream food day full of gluttony and joy. It would probably end either with me passing out from exhaustion or a very bad stomach ache, and it would go as follows:
Wake up to light roast black coffee. Breakfast would include more of the same coffee, blueberry waffles with syrup, gravlax bagel with cream cheese and capers. If I’m up to it, I’ll have a sunny-side-up egg with rye toast with butter. I’d keep re-upping the coffee until lunch. Lunch would include beer-battered fish and chips with a blonde ale. Probably have to nap after that. Dinner would be a rare sirloin steak. Dessert would be blueberry cheesecake and then I would probably combust.
If I could eternally eat into the night, I would keep it going with classic al pastor tacos and cerveza.
If this day were to include sashimi, I would have to start with a totally different menu. Indian food day? Don’t even get me started, I might cry.
C: Okay, ‘ideal’ is a really loose word. Ideal fantasy? Or Ideal healthy? Two entirely different ends of the food spectrum.
My ideal fantasy food day is me eating three different Indian regional cuisines from morning till night. This would entirely lead to me being unable to move for the next few days. My lactose intolerance would also render me ill. I want a Tamil breakfast, a Malayali lunch, and a Rajastani dinner. I want black coffee four times a day. I want no desert, because I don’t care for it (unless someone were to magically make a tres leches cake or a Biscoff Shake). I want Mosambi juice as an in-between meal snack, and also tacos from Kensington Market.
I apologize if my food fantasy day leaves you shook - you asked for it.
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