The Two Brothers

The Two Brothers has to be a once-in-a-lifetime dining experience. Right at the heart of Prague, across from an Italian restaurant and down the road from a Korean ramen shop, because this is the time we live in now. One might think this is a stand-alone Indian restaurant in the old city, but one would be mistaken. There are more than 50 Indian restaurants in central Prague and its surrounding suburbs. A simultaneous celebration of the delights of Indian cuisine and a testament to the profound disappointments of the Czech.

The restaurant occupies the ground floor of an old residential building, old enough that the main entrance is wide enough to let in a horse carriage, a characteristic unique to old European homes. A series of rooms, varying in size and connected to each other through imperfect arches, seem to curl in on themselves. Some are big, and the majority are small, just large enough to accommodate a couple of tables. The multitude of spaces brings a sense of anticipation for the unknown. This was someone’s house, and these were the different rooms around the house, long before Prague became the destination of choice for British bachelor parties and medical tourists. We, too, may have been in Prague for medical reasons, but we refuse to accept the notion of ourselves as tourists. We don’t tour, we explore.

We like converted spaces, as they provoke the imagination and make up for a good story. Who decided restaurants must consist of a large cubic space with tables stacked in a tight order that maximises occupancy while also ensuring privacy and facilitating server navigation to enhance the client’s experience? We say to hell with efficiency. We prefer inefficient and charming; spaces that edge on the dysfunctional but triumph through will and charm. Repurposed rooms bring layers of memory; they color the present with a shade from the past and act as a judgment on what we would like to think of as “progress”. (Progress should be approached with much caution and severe scepticism. It should be encouraged to fail but not coerced.)

In the restaurant, majestic carved wooden chairs with red velvet upholstery and crystal chandeliers competed with a statue or a few of the elephant-headed boy god, Ganesh, regal elegance clashing with unabashed kitsch. Endless vintage portraits of obscure maharajas in huge ornate frames, dressed in elaborate robes, adorned with jewellery, crowned by impressive turbans, and sporting moustaches that transmit virility and masculinity. If only these dolled-up maharajas knew that one day, their images would become props in all Indian restaurants around the world! I can’t think of anyone less kind than time.

The staff, young Asian men, visibly proud, travelled through the arches, bringing food and cocktails to the tables. The proud waiters are a nice contrast to the standard Czech demeanour: distance, disillusion, and disinterest. Pride is a communal sport. One can’t be proud within, or worse, alone. Pride needs an audience - forced or willing, either will do - or else it’s just good old self-loathing. They, the waiters, looked like peacocks parading about between the different halls to be admired. I wondered if they were chosen for their high self-regard or if the history of the place printed its character on the impressionable young men. 

In the background, there was the sound of a sitar accompanied by Indian percussive tabla. The very same list of songs played in every Indian restaurant and most yoga studios across Europe. In hindsight, The Two Brothers is precisely what you expect from an Indian restaurant in Europe. I’m unclear why I called it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I blame my American wife and her inexplicable sense of optimism and unjustified enthusiasm. In fact, the only original thing about this restaurant is its name. Any self-respecting Indian restaurant outside of India is traditionally “Curry Something”, “Bombay Something”, “Kashmir Anything”, or the name of a spice of some sort. That is only if it’s not named “Taj Mahal”, which I believe has been on a moratorium list for a while and understandably so. 

The name, The Two Brothers, refers to two young Mughals from the year 1300 who left their father’s home in search of adventure. They walked through the Eastern and into the Western Steppe and crossed all of Afghanistan to settle in what is now North India once they found the perfect spice blend, only to die of the plague. That is an excellent story for the name. If only it had been true. In reality, the restaurant is named after two middle-class Indian brothers who came to Europe to study and decided never to leave. And there goes the last original facet of the Two Brothers, now reduced from a once-in-a-lifetime experience into just an Indian restaurant. A solid C+. 

Much like the opulence and glamour of the maharajas on the wall, time brought humility to this spot, however beloved. After all, the place fits every stereotype and fulfils every cliché - spectacularly so. This is not an indictment of the establishment; to the contrary, there is a delicious pleasure in the unsurprising and expected that only comes with the solidly average. If anything, this is an embarrassing revelation of the type of customers my wife and I are: ever in search of character, just a bit of it, supported by unyielding foundations of stereotypes. 

We liked the restaurant enough to visit it many times through our medical “holiday” in Prague. It was during the second dinner at the Two Brothers that we met a young Indian girl working as a waitress. She seemed lonely amongst the two managerial owner brothers and the army of young men skittering to and fro in their establishment. She wasn’t any less proud than the owners or the staff. If anything, she was prouder and more self-assured. Maybe that’s why she didn’t sport the same smirk everyone else did. It made her more appealing. 

“Hi, my name is Arushi, and I will be your server today.” 

“How very American of you, Arushi.” My comment was meant to tease my American wife. 

“I can shake my head a bit so I appear less American.” She shook her head playfully.

“Where do you come from, Arushi?”

“I come from Kenya.”

“That head shake did look positively Kenyan to me.”

“My parents moved to Kenya before I was born. I hardly go back home.”

“Home remains home, Arushi, more so when we are far away.”

“You can attach any definition to home with a certain gravitas, and that would be that.”

“Please do expand.”

“Home is an easy canvas to paint an image of wisdom.”

My wife and I looked at each other and knew this was going to be fun. That degree of spiky humor doesn’t make for a great waitress, but we live in France, where customer service doesn’t entail excessive smiling and over-familiarity. We appreciate those with rough edges, albeit more so in a controlled environment where we can stop playing once we tire of puncture wounds. 

As a birthday gift, my wife indulged me in my habit of striking up random conversations with strangers. She has grown to accept my fascination with people’s stories; occasionally, she enjoys it, and on special occasions, like my birthday, she might even participate. I had received my other gift earlier that morning in the fertility clinic. An embryo with our genetic code that combines our particularities and idiosyncrasies had traveled from a petri dish into her body, and we were nervous but hopeful.  

“I hope this child will appreciate our love for spicy food. The current one seems to be allergic to fun foods.” I barely finished the sentence when Arushi arrived with our aperitif. 

“Where are you guys from?”

“I’m American and he’s Egyptian.”

“That’s an exciting mix! You met in Egypt or the US?”

“We met in Paris. What about you? What are you doing in Prague?”

“I study engineering at Prague University.”

“That’s cool. He’s an engineer.” My wife pointed at me, presumably to avoid confusion with the other Egyptian engineers waiting for their Malai chicken.

“I didn’t want to be an engineer, but my father insisted.”

“You don’t look like a person who gives in easily under pressure, Arushi.” I teased her.

“He took advantage of me not knowing what I wanted.” She left us soaking in her honesty.

“Indian dads are not much different than Egyptian dads, it seems.” My wife remarked. A reference to how my own father coerced me into the profession. 

“I agree with her father more than I did with mine.”

“Why is that? Because she didn’t know who she was?”

“Exactly. Her father, in his loving way, decided on her behalf what she should be.”

“You won’t play Egyptian Dad with our kids.” This with a certain forcefulness underneath the playful eyebrows. “If they want to study history, or painting, or sociology, then we’ll support them.”

“Americans see sense in studying history, for they have none. Egyptians and Indians are different. We marinate in history. Too much of it.  We don’t need historians. We know who we are. Indian father of the year, if you ask me.” 

We needed a spicy debate. We were anxious and looking for distraction in low-stakes conflict. We knew why, but chose to blame it on the change of routine. 

At home, we have a spot where we celebrate every event worth celebrating. A restaurant we go to when we need to entertain or feel like splashing out or crave wholesome comfort. But we were out of town. Our spot, much like The Two Brothers, is solid in how average it is, though I would rank it slightly higher, a deserved B-. (Only because of the few raw dishes they serve. Had The Two Brothers served some raw meat or fish, it would have ranked the same, if not higher.) Neither of the two restaurants serves food with dried ice, foam, reductions of any type, and obviously no coulis. Any of which would send another food establishment spiraling to an entirely different level and render it a non-entry zone for us.

There was a window ledge resting just above our table, stacked with a few books. They were surprisingly free of dust, a detail I thought merited nudging the restaurant’s rating just a bit higher. But then I didn’t. I’m ungenerous that way. It had been rated, and that was that. I saw no point in applying mental gymnastics to assign a new rating to the Two Brothers. 

I opened the book to entertain myself while we waited for the food to arrive. We had a good view of the bar, which also served as the outpost for the two brothers to survey their enterprise. We saw they were different characters, but they got along. It was charming to observe. My wife told me about her favorite Indian restaurant in New York, opened by two brothers who later fell out so spectacularly that they split the two-story restaurant into a pair of competing restaurants with the same entrance. 

“I wonder if this will be the destiny of The Two Brothers?” I asked rhetorically.

“One can always rely on your ability to find the silver lining.” My wife, as a personal matter, does not acknowledge the possibility of rhetorical questions. 

“It was you who brought up the New York Taj Mahal restaurant. How am I to blame for this?”

“It was the two brothers working together. The split part wasn’t what came to mind.” 

“Don’t go full American on me. You need to indulge my dark humor.” I was hungry, and that tended to dim my view of human nature.

At that moment, Arushi came back to our table with the main course and laid the plates in front of us. She looked like she was about to say something. My wife waited patiently for her to speak her truth, but I couldn’t any longer. Like a child being held back from his candy for too long, I needed to eat. Before I could launch a volley of deeply probing questions, she spoke.

“We are alike, you and me,” Arushi looked at me. “Behind our smile is anger, but while you smile because you choose to, I smile because I have to.” And she went about her work as if nothing had happened. 

“Did you hear what she just said?”

“I was on the receiving end of this truth bomb, my dear.”

“That was eloquent.”

“She will make up for a very poetic engineer.”

“What engineer? She’s a writer, she just doesn’t know it.”