A HOARDING put up besides a flyover in Calicut�s Kannur Road area that runs almost over Paragon Restaurant, says boldly, �The Arabian Sea rewrites our menu everyday. U-turn for today�s catch!� It is the creative enterprise of Paragon�s young restaurateur, Sumesh Govind. And the hoarding is no tall claim. Paragon is supplied with fresh fish four times a day. Early in the morning, at noon, then at 3.30 in the afternoon and finally at 8 in the night. �There are five fish markets nearby, but we also get the catch directly from the beach,� Sumesh says, grinning widely.

There is good reason for Paragon�s dependence on the catch of the Arabian Sea. Its menu of authentic and traditional Moplah food is made up to a large extent of seafood. �Our speciality is Fish Moilee, Prawns Dry Fry, Prawns Curry, Mussels Onion Fry, and Fish in Tamarind Sauce,� says Sumesh. The food is Muslim Malabari or Moplah, though Sumesh himself is a Hindu Thiya Malayali. �This place is known as a Muslim eatery. Non-vegetarian food is served from 6 in the morning to 12.30 at night,� he explains. �Paragon has been this way for the past 60 years.�

It is a large restaurant with wooden chairs and tables, family rooms, a partition between the ordinary dining hall and the air-conditioned, and an upstairs where Paragon�s staff of 145 live in quarters. Sumesh�s grandfather Govindan Panchkail, who was a government employee with a passion for restaurants, started it very daringly at that time. He also included a bakery in Paragon that Sumesh�s father, P. M. Valsan, shut down. �Our breads and puffs were very famous,� recalls Sumesh. �Also our Christmas cake. Calicut had very few bakeries in those days, so we were popular and successful. But my father shut down the baking division.�

When his father passed away, Sumesh was just 13, but he and his mother took over the running and management of Paragon. �That was 25 years ago and my mother was a very enterprising woman. She was the first lady in Calicut to run a restaurant and was criticised for what she was doing. But she was determined that the restaurant pass onto me. And after I finished my B.Com, I took over. Now I am here full-time. There is no half-way in the restaurant business, you are either fully involved or not at all,� Sumesh says.

While he is talking, Paragon�s kitchen is bustling with the early morning breakfast activity, and waiters rush around and pile the tables with aromatic and appetising Moplah food. Almost everybody is having fish (mussels and prawns) or chicken or meat although it is just 7 a.m. Eggs are ordered too, but not fried, scrambled or in an omelette. The Moplah way of consuming eggs for breakfast is to have it as a rich onion-based brown roast with thick Malabar parathas. The fish and prawn dishes are tangy, the mussels are spicy, and the early-morning diners polish off the breakfast without a thought, energetically kick-starting their day.

Sumesh produces the vast Paragon menu and displays its contents. �There are a lot of North Indian dishes as well,� he points out. �But they are not authentic North Indian, this is fusion food, we have Calicutised the menu!� And there are what is popularly known in the South as �meals�, a thali of fish or chicken or meat. The fish thali is popular at Paragon. The restaurant serves the Seer fish in a curry and the Pomfret in a fry. Besides which there is the Karimeen or Pearlspot, Kerala�s backwater speciality, and Prawns. �We do the seafood in various combinations according to the guests� taste,� says Sumesh.

The restaurant�s kitchen gets functional at 4.30 in the morning. Once the fires are lit, they are only put out at 2.30 next morning. Sumesh is very particular about the hygiene of his kitchen. It is a big kitchen and only the cooking is done here. He has a backyard where the butchery and cleaning of vegetables is done. Everything is fresh in the restaurant. There is no freezing of food. And all the masalas are ground and powdered daily by hand. �After 2.30 a.m. I have ten men who come in here just to clean up the kitchen,� he says to highlight the standards he maintains. �I think to run a restaurant, more than knowing cooking, it is important to know what clicks and what sells. Paragon�s menu has most of the dishes I like.�

The breakfast service also includes several vegetarian specialities. Like the vegetable stew that is had with appam and the kadala (brown gram) curry with puttu. Puttu is a rice flour and coconut cake, steamed in a bamboo shoot. It is sometimes mixed with coconut milk and sugar and had as a dessert. Though 99 per cent of the diners come for the Moplah non-vegetarian food. �Most are hearty meat eaters. And our meat is soft and tender, this is not tough, stringy government meat, but got from people who rear livestock,� says Sumesh.