An all-time favourite drops down the food chain

After noodle ban, demand for Chinese food plummets

It seems that the ban on Maggi noodles, and now Top Ramen, has put people off Chinese food in the city.

“Normally, over the weekend, we see a huge crowd, with people often waiting for tables. Now, barely anybody comes in,” the owner of a famous Chinese restaurant in Adyar says.

Chinese restaurants typically do not use instant noodles, which have been banned.

“The people who come in only order rice; in the past one month, we have probably served only around 20 plates of noodles. Even when we assure them that we do not add monosodium glutamate to our food, they are wary of the food,” he says.

The same is the case with fast food joints.

The problem they say is the additive MSG. “We had all heard that MSG was bad, but did not realise how freely it was used in restaurants,” G. Pratham, a resident of Anna Nagar, says. MSG is used in the food industry as a flavour enhancer.

Proprietors complain that people who used to regularly eat noodles have now switched over to Biryani or fried rice because they think noodles are not “healthy”.

Surya, who runs a fast food joint near Adyar, says the outlet have had to drastically reduce the number of noodles packets it buys because there is barely any demand. “Earlier, we would use at least 10 packets a day, but now we use maybe two or three packets, with many of the patrons even asking to see the brand of noodles we use,” he says.

In other restaurants, the campaign against MSG has been on four years now. “For the past four years, the Tamil Nadu Hotel Association has asked that restaurants ban MSG,” R. Srinivasan from the T.N. Hotel Association says adding that though the Food Safety Act says MSG is not an approved additive, even Indian additives such as ginger are not listed as approved additives. The association has petitioned the Union government to include these additives.