We finished the Culinary Culture weekend in Bangalore yesterday and I should straight away declare an interest. Along with my friend Sameer Sain, I founded Culinary Culture. But this article is not going to be about wonderful chaps Sameer and I are, you so can rest easy!

Instead, I am going to write about things I learned this weekend.

1. The Hindustan Times did the first major honest restaurant awards in Indian history. We called them the Crystals. Some of the awards were voted for by the readers of HT City and some were an entirely subjective selection based on my reviews.

2. We got sponsors, of course, but it did not even occur to us to sell the awards. Little did we know what a racket the awards business would become or that we could treat the awards as a money-making business.

3. Others were more imaginative and more unscrupulous. Many other publications ( and I won’t take names here) have a rate card for how much it costs to buy awards. It’s all out in the open and there are different rates for a) an award, b) getting it presented on stage and c) getting a picture of the winner holding the award into the paper. Nobody feels the slightest embarrassment about this. Because nobody in the industry lets outsiders know that they have bought the awards they proudly display.

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