Popular dishes drop off menu as onion prices continue to cause tears

With onion prices hitting the roof, city restaurants, from roadside eatery to star hotels, have ticked some dishes off the menu.

Some of the items missing include onion uthappams, onion rava dosa and even the tangy onion raitas that accompany tandoori dishes. A few restaurants that tied up with online portals are now demanding Rs 10 extra for sliced onions. “The online sale of farm produce particularly onion has adversely affected the industry and middlemen are raking moolah.We have demanded a meeting with the Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami,” said N Ravi, president of ChennaiHoteliers Association.

“It is not the farmers who are making money, it is the middlemen who trade farm produced online,” Ravi alleged seeking the intervention of State and Union governments to curb online trading on essential commodities. “While the samosa and bajji sellers are mixing cabbage with onions, the biriyani outlets are the worst affected. Onion is an important ingredient for biriyani and the profits are cut due to increasing onion prices,” said Waseem Khan, proprietor, Royal Restaurants. For the past two months, the biriyani outlets are suffering, and frequent increase of price will only reduce the customer footfall, Waseem said.

However, high-end outlets claim that they will tide over the crisis with minimum impact. “The hotel’s restaurants follow standard recipes and cannot cut down on their onion usage despite its soaring price. What we do is ensure that there is no wastage of onions,” Ajit Bangera, senior executive chef at ITC Grand Chola, Chennai, said. “Since all kitchens follow standard recipes, we can’t change the amount of onion to be used, so that the quality of food remains unaffected. We just have to absorb the extra costs when we have to pay a premium price for an ingredient, as we cannot make customers pay for it,” he said.

According to Tamil Nadu Cooperatives department sources, the Sunday holiday of onion market in Karnataka had a ripple effect in Chennai and other cities in Tamil Nadu, reducing the overall supply by 30 per cent adding to the already inflated price. Every day, Chennai and neighbouring districts attract 70 to 80 lorries of onions, but it has reduced to 50 lorries on Monday, freaking out the buyers in wholesale markets, sources said. “Onion crops are highly resistant for crop diseases and infections and are easily cultivable in dry areas. The production of onion is associated with the monsoon pattern. In my views, the demand and the price rise are purely artificial during the months of November and December,” opine botany professor D Narasimhan, centre for floristic research, Madras Christian College.

Meanwhile, the State is taking all steps to ensure that the price of onion is kept under control and those who stock more than 50 tonnes of onions will be prosecuted by the State, cooperatives minister Sellur K Raju said. The State government is in touch with the Centre to bring down the prices of shallots, which is selling at Rs 180 per kilo and the cost of onion is ranging between Rs 70 to Rs 80 per kilo.