Drunk on Petroleum

All good things begin with the knowing of names. And Zamu’s Place, for a place, we knew that had Irani/Parsi antecedents, had us pretty confident that it was named after Zamu and that he was some guy, probably the owner, who was loved sufficiently enough by his family and friends to have his name abbreviated into the Zamu we know today. Maybe someone even, who, after a long day of managing the culinary extravaganza that is Zamu’s Place from the counter, would go back to his friends for a game of Carrom while sipping on his orange juice, waiting for Sanjay Dutt to mouth some stupid inanity as Munnabhai. Thus, we were quite surprised, and pleasantly so, that ZaMu was actually a coming together of two names, Zal and Murad, the two sons of the man, Daraius Cursetjee who began this restaurant. The other word in the name is Place. This relatively innocuous word also has deep significance for this restaurant as it is, we learned, an oft forgotten and ignored part of the restaurant name wher

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a new era in dudes writing about food, or so we believe. What began as a partnership in gluttony (remember the Baked and Wired 28” Pizza challenge which the two of us, erm, annihilated) is now playing itself out to its logical conclusion, wherein we, Abbas and Pranav, go to our favorite food places and write about them. Since there has to be a name given to this partnership (because fuck, have you heard of dudes writing about food without getting their monikers in a twist?), we’ve decided to call ourselves, “Drunk On Petroleum”, after something one of our favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote. We were going to be called something serious and refined, maybe bordering on self-congratulatory even, but decided not to pander to these false notions of grandiosity of who we are. Of course, there’s also the logic that if we’re Drunk on Petroleum, we can permit ourselves a little fun too which is of nearly primal importance to those involved in this enterpri