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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a vision quest. It’s a challenge. It’s a journey of discovery beyond the menu and into a South-Asian cultural inheritance. It’s an expedition into the woods (well, Mill Woods) to satisfy a hunger, to re-discover Punjabi cultural roots and reclaim identity.

It’s … butter chicken.

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Two years ago the intrepid food writer Ramneek Singh set bravely forth on a two-year odyssey to find the best butter chicken in Edmonton. Fifty-one restaurants, 51 servings of f butter chicken, and towering cholesterol later, The Butter Chicken Odyssey has become a solo play, created by Singh with the theatrical and dramaturgical collaboration of award-winning playwright Collin Doyle. And it gets its first live theatre audience Friday in a staged reading at Workshop West’s Springboards New Play Festival.

Singh’s lively food reviews, posted on Facebook and Instagram (“Ram’s Food Reviews,” @ramfoodguy), had already garnered him a huge social media following when his bright idea came to him. “I’m a huge fast-food junkie,” he says. “My dad raised me on McDonald’s quarter-pounders. Burgers, poutine, tacos….” He reviewed fast food of every kind (“if you’re telling the truth you’ve gotta be tough; you can’t hold back”). When he trashed Jollibees, the Filipino franchise, his review went viral, 70,000 people saw it, and he got death threats. Singh calls it his Mumbo No. 5 (Doyle is amused by this).

Eventually, Singh, at 40, got fast-food fatigue. “I was thinking of calling it quits,” he says. “I’m not bringing anything new to the table…. But about that time I had a daughter. And as she was developing speech and language I realized she couldn’t speak Punjabi, and it was my fault. I wasn’t speaking it with her. And it was my mother tongue,” says Singh who was born in Edmonton but didn’t know English till he was in kindergarten. His parents had arrived in Mill Woods in the ‘70s from India, and Punjabi was the language of the household.

Ramneek Singh, creator and star of The Butter Chicken Odyssey. Photo supplied

“I felt I needed to get back into my culture,” he says of his newly 40-year-old self, “and I figured one of the easiest ways was through the food…. I might be the only Indian food writer in Edmonton. But if not, I’m certainly the only Punjabi one. There’s a void here. So I did a deep-dive into Punjabi food — and had butter chicken 50 times.”

This, laughs Singh, who has a natural exuberance about him in conversation, “was instrumental in me being on cholesterol meds right now… I’m sure I’ll be fine in three months.”

Why butter chicken, of all the Punjabi culinary identifiers? “Its universally loved,” Singh says. “It’s also one of the most controversial and polarizing dishes because of the way it mutated over time for Western palates. It was really colonized by the West….” And, a birth-right stolen, the “bone-in authenticity” of a glorious, nuanced, and complicated dish, was leached out. “Chicken breasts floating in Campbell’s tomato soup: that’s not the real butter chicken.”

The Butter Chicken Odyssey “was my way of creating a conversation about how its authenticity was diluted over the years.” He thinks of it as a kind of cultural appropriation, so thoroughly claimed by the Western world that there’s a common misperception butter chicken was invented in England. Wrong. “It is an Indian food, invented in one of the most famous restaurants in Dehli (Moti Mahal).”

“We should be proud of it … and people treat it like it’s the neglected step-child on menus (the celebrated Indian restaurateur Vikram Vij in Vancouver refuses to even have it on his menu it’s been so bastardized). “But it’s a great dish if it’s made right.” Singh, who’s had dishes named after him in Indian restaurants, declares his own butter chicken “only passable, but I’ll get there…. I’d give it a 6.”

Still, “there’s only so many ways you can write about butter chicken,” says Singh. “How many times can you talk about fenugreek?” Gradually, his writer’s vision expanded, to embrace his childhood memories of Punjabi family life, of growing up amongst the families of multicultural Mill Woods.

And that’s when theatre happened in his life. Doyle, a playwright of blue-chip credentials (The Mighty Carlins, Slumberland Motel, Let The Light Of Day Through) and a fan of Singh’s reviews, reached out, on New Year’s Day. “This should be a play!”

“I wasn’t a theatre guy, not at all,” says Singh cheerfully. “I love movies but I’ve been to one Fringe play in my life.” Since many people have wanted to collaborate with him (“I’m a bit trepidatious”), he did some research. “I read some of his plays,” starting with Routes and moving on to The Mighty Carlins, both set in Mill Woods. “And I was ‘Wow, this guy wants to work with me!? This stuff is art. It’s brilliant!’”

“So we met at Zaika for butter chicken.”

Playwright Collin Doyle, dramaturg of The Butter Chicken Odyssey by Ramneek Singh, Springboards New Play Festival. Photo supplied.

“You could feel a shift in Ramneek’s writing as it got more personal,” says Doyle. What had started with reading Singh’s reviews on Facebook “just because I wanted to know where the best butter chicken was,” became a real appreciation of soulful writing. At the end of Singh’s odyssey, his “beautiful story about his bibi, the woman who babysat him in Mill Wood, cared for him, gave him language, made him embrace his culture,” sealed it for Doyle. “It was a gorgeous piece of writing.” And Doyle was struck by just how engaged he was by reading Singh on Facebook, a “disposable media” where stuff normally just slides off you as you scroll.

What the pair discovered was a whole set of unexpected, and instant,  connections. Says Singh, “we’re both film geeks, we both love the Beatles,” and this: they’re both from Mill Woods, and it’s a part of town that figures prominently in their work. “We both have a passionate love for Mill Woods…. To me, growing up in ‘90s it was a cultural utopia, a multicultural rainbow, every type of culture, all these working class parents, Vietnamese families, Korean families, all building something at the same time, moving from basements to apartments to houses…. And there was harmony there.”

Whether it’s referred to explicitly or not, “all my plays are set in Mill Woods,” says Doyle, whose family moved there in 1980, first the so-called “brown apartment” near Millbourne Mall, then public housing…. It’s one of the best places you can grow up poor.” Mainly because the neighbourhoods are built inclusively — “lower class, working class, middle and upper classes, all together. For a kid going to school, there was such a diversity of people, of income levels, of cultures.”

Both Singh and Doyle push back against “the myth,” as the latter puts it, “of Mill Wood being this violent dangerous place.” Remember the Kill Woods nickname? As Singh says, “I grew up with people talking trash about Mill Woods in the early 2000s, and ”media sensationalism, fuelled by racism, about “drive-by shootings and Molotov cocktails, brown-on-brown gang violence…. We were branded basically because of two murders six blocks apart….”

Post-butter chicken odyssey, Singh has a new quest. His Mill Wood Dreamer columns (with the Herculean goal of reviewing every single Indian and Pakistani restaurant in Mill Woods) are inspired he says by the famous video leak in which Connor McDavid is exhorting his team during the Panthers series. “What means something to me?”

After 30 years Singh had left Mill Woods (Glastonbury will never be home, he says), “and I started dreaming about it, my first memories of my parents, my childhood dreams, my Dad’s dreams when he moved there from India,” his memories of watching rented horror movies. “That’s how we learned English,” he laughs. “I know it sounds messed up…. We rented Child’s Play from the 7-Eleven. I don’t care what language you speak, that movie is terrifying!” he laughs.

And now there’s a play, getting “a test drive” as Doyle puts it, at Springboards before its next iteration at the Fringe. It occurred to Doyle to wonder whether Singh, an accomplished and engaging public speaker, could act. “We did a reading of the first act, and thank gawd, he could!” They both laugh.

“It’s not really acting for me,” says the genial Singh modestly.He’s more concerned with whether he can remember all his lines. Says Doyle, “it’s Ramneek’s voice … and the butter chicken odyssey gives it such a clear arc.” It begins with a question that someone asks Singh, “where are you from originally?” And “we go on this this journey. He answers that question by the end, and I think it’ll make people cry.”

PREVIEW

Workshop West Springboards New Play Festival

The Butter Chicken Odyssey

Written by and starring: Ramneek Singh, dramaturged by Collin Doyle

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: Friday

Tickets: (all pay-what-you-will) workshopwest.org.