Have a size zero Kareena pizza

It all started five years ago with a leading film publicist ordering a chocolate-cheese cake for Bollywood actor Bobby Deol from confectioner Milanda Jagtiani at Pali Hill in Mumbai.The three-tier cake, which has a baked lower half, with a liberal helping of chocolate on the upper tier and some other magic ingredients in the centre, became such a hit at the Deol household that repeated orders from them followed.Happy to comply with the continuous orders from one of Bollywood’s leading joint families (they consume a lot of cakes because they host at least two dozen parties each year) and thrilled with the growing numbers ordered by them, Milanda named the cake Bobby Cake. Now it is a part of her designer menu. Jagtiani caters to the Pali Hill elite and invariably gets asked about the cake named after the Deol scion.

At Urban Tadka, a middle-order suburban restaurant that is frequented by film and TV personalities, the menu offered Om Puri Ka Mutton Saagwala because the actor, who lives a stone’s throw away from this eating joint, patronised this eating place and the dish for years on end. “Currently, a new menu is being planned; but whether it will once again have the Om Puri dish is something we don’t know,’’ says restaurant manager Augustin.The internationally acclaimed actor continues to frequent this joint with his wife Nandita and son Ishaan but has apparently had a change of taste and now orders a host of other dishes; so the mutton saagwala has been relegated to the background in his list of food favourites.But superstars, dishy or otherwise, continue to remain items on food menus across the country, though some come and go like seasonal flavours.

When Sanjay Dutt frequented the Tada Court, a corner roadside joint in that area named a mutton dish after Baba. However, now both the joint and the dish have been forgotten.A popular Italian joint in Delhi recently introduced the size-zero pizza named after Kareena Kapoor. And the very flattered Bollywood diva said: “I love pizza and I’m kicked about the fact that someone thought about naming a pizza after me.’’ The actress says she was particularly tickled when her sister, Karisma Kapoor, and her gang of girls told her that they were headed to the pizza joint to have a size-zero pizza.During the height of Jeetendra’s stardom in the 1980s, Taj Coromandel in Chennai served a Jeetendra Thali. The Peshawari at the ITC in Chennai, where Rajnikant had dinner for almost a decade, served some “North-West Frontier cuisine’’ that was the Tamil superstar’s indigenous recipe.

Currently, Andhra phenomenon-turned-politician Chiranjeevi has pride of place on the menu of a popular dosa chain called Chutneys that is on Jubilee Hills.A waiter at Chutneys says: “People come here in droves, especially on the weekend, to eat the steamed dosa named after Chiranjeevi. Since the dish has become popular after its christening, it will have a permanent place on our menu.’’