'Mach schau, mach schau!' What you sell

Whether it's Nusr-Et owner-showman Nusret Gokce a.k.a. Salt Bae, or Nagpur's Dolly Ki Tapri ka hero Sunil Patil a.k.a. Dolly Chaiwala, there is a rising batch of food-providers whose USP is how they serve their fare, rather than what they serve. There is a larger lesson lying beyond the chunks of meat sprinkled with salt like it's an exercise in Catholic exorcism or Rajinikanth-inspired teasplaining: delivery mechanisms matter. Or, to put it in the words of millennial jargon: style over content, dawg.

We have been taught to consider style to be subservient to content. While selling a dud with flamboyance can work once or twice, perpetuating this strategy can be, well, dud-ly for long-term business, as disreputation spreads word to mouth at three times the speed and four times the space of good reputation. But in a world where there are far too many phuchkawalas lined up along your main street, style can be the differentiator between stopping by and passing by. So, scoff as much as you want by the antics of performing chefs and exhibitionist servers, the fact remains that the demand for what rowdy crowds at Hamburg's seedy clubs wanted from The Beatles in their very early days in the early 1960s-'Mach Schau, Mach Schau!' (Make Show!)-holds true to this day. To break out among all the din, put on a show, and get your product across.