One of the most relaxing things I would do when in the grips of the initial plague months was watch food documentaries. As I didn’t have the ingredients or skills, watching these shows helped me feel like I was connected in some way to what was on the screen—I could sit and savor with the narrator despite being hundreds of miles away and months in their future. But while that narrator may have a dozen or so years of knowledge to pull from, they can’t compete with thousands of years that a figure like Bakasura, one of the more infamous rakshasa in Hindu mythology, possesses. This is where Ram V and Filipe Andrade take the world in their new series, Rare Flavours.

With thousands of years of culinary knowledge and an appetite for everything delicious, why wouldn’t someone want to make a documentary on all of the foods they’ve loved? It’s only a natural inclination for Rubin Baksh as he gives up his life of making pastries and coffee in a cafe to pursue something more adventurous. Instead of leaving that sedentary life, he wants to instead show and celebrate the cuisine that has been around him his whole life—all of the flavors, smells, and textures that make up Indian cuisine. It’s why he enlists a reluctant Mohan, a man who had originally given up on his film making ambitions, to help him achieve this goal. This all comes as Rubin is being pursued by a pair of unknown men who do seem to know about his rakshasa origins as well as his own inclination to eat the odd person here and there.

This intersection between comics and the culinary isn’t all that new—we’ve had a fair amount of comic cookbooks and series that have focused on the topic. But many of those had been focused on a more instructional aspect—naturally combining comic’s visual abilities with varieties of recipes. What V and Andrade do here with Rare Flavours feels more akin to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Where recipe and story intersect is the driving force behind these pieces. While Esquivel begins each chapter with a recipe before weaving her narrative into the instructions, V and Andrade let the recipe find its way naturally into the story. While we don’t get exact numbers for their masala chai, we do get a taste of its history and people who brew it nonetheless.

Rare Flavours is a perfect biscuit of a first issue. It’s the kind of story that you want to sit down with tea to enjoy—despite the people eating. But it’s also a story that makes you want to go out and try something, be it a masala chai or something else local and unexplored. It’s a series imbued with curiosity and knowledge as we want to follow in Rubin and Mohan’s footsteps and eat alongside them as the former dispenses the stories and tastes he’s collected over thousands of years. 

Get excited. Get tasting.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.