LIVING FOOD
EXPRESSION OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2010
FOOD LIVING
EXPRESSION OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2010
Facing page: Vineet Bhatia has stirred Indian cuisine out of its complacency with his ‘evolved’ take on the traditional. This page: Bhatia’s evolved Indian on a plate.
Photos: Lisa Barber
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Haute & evolved Not content with the ‘shopping capital of Southeast Asia’ title, Singapore is now looking to woo foodies with a slew of new restaurants by celebrity chefs from around the world. Last month, Vineet Bhatia, the first Indian to be awarded a Michelin star, held a three-day showcase there of his ‘evolved Indian cuisine’. Gavin Nazareth meets up with him and also checks out some of the other new openings. The waiter places a rectangular platter in front of me, on it a masala crab cake served with a dollop of crab chutney, topped by a smidgen of mustard caviar. A contrast in flavours and textures, the cake is crisp with a soft, warm centre, the creamy chutney teasingly spiced, and the caviar – mustard seeds lightly fried in oil – adds a crunch and a hint of bitterness. It’s a delightful prelude to the meal to come. My dining companions and I are seated in the chic Yantra, located on Singapore’s Tanglin Road. It’s a fine dining restaurant that offers a Northern Indian menu designed to stimulate the palate and indulge the senses with
inventive recipes and alluring flavours. But what has us salivating in anticipation tonight is the five-course “Essence of Splendour” meal created by guest chef, Vineet Bhatia. He is one of a handful of Indian chefs to have blazed a trail across the global culinary firmament, re-thinking the cuisine and elevating it from its greasy relationship with cut-price curry houses to an epicurean experience, by adding to the recipe a modern presentation and his own unique twist, while maintaining the core values. Think “grilled chilli garlic lobster, dusted with cocoa powder”, and “classic lamb shank Rogan josh with North Indian spice, 24-carat gold leaf and roasted cashewnut khichdi,” or “cumin-infused chocolate and saffron cheesecake with cardamom ice cream”. Or even like our next course which is “oven-baked herbed sea bass, tandoori crushed potatoes, South Indian Moilee sauce and crisp okra”. All intricately plated. Culinary creations that have earned him,
the gastronomical equivalent of the Oscars, an accolade every chef covets, the Michelin Star, His first star came in 2001 for Zaika, a restaurant he co-owned on High Street Kensington, the first ever awarded to an Indian restaurateur. He then moved on to start Rasoi Vineet Bhatia in Chelsea, and five years later earned the second one. His third came late last year for Rasoi By Vineet at the Mandarin Oriental in Geneva. Today he oversees 12 restaurants around the world, including Ziya, which replaced Kandahar in Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel, recently rebuilt following terrorist attacks in 2008 and where
he began his career. But the path to success was not always littered with glittering stars. As the legend goes, he arrived in London to work for a restaurant in Chelsea with just £7 in his pocket, where horrified at the “macho hot and spicy food” dished out there, he set about changing the model. “I wanted to showcase Indian food in the right manner. London is the curry capital of the world and had a huge curry culture in those days. When I started doing roghan joshs and gajjar ka halwa (carrot based confection) the proper way it is cooked, I was told this is not right. I was asked ‘where is the oil, the capsicum and onions in the roghan josh…’ You don’t put capsicum, but that’s the way the curry houses make it, because the people cooking there are not really Indian, they are from Bangladesh. I stopped calling the dishes by the classic names describing them instead as ‘slow-cooked Kashmiri lamb shank’, just to make it sound a bit exotic. And they would say this is nice… and I would say, yes, this is your roghan josh,” he tells me as I sit enjoying the epilogue to his five-act gastronomic theatre, a sumptuous “blueberry and black cardamom panna cotta, roasted pistachio ice cream”. “It took us a while but I think we cracked it,” he says, the satisfaction evident in his voice. “The biggest thing for us was when we got the Michelin star in 2001, because then people took you seriously. It changed my life, gave me a big boost, and that’s when we started pushing the boundaries a lot more, because we got confident. I started plating food around 1999 to make it look nice. But it took us a while, al-
most three years, before we could correct it. Now there is no stopping us. We do exactly what we want to do and people appreciate that. I think Indian food has evolved over the past decade dramatically.” His upward spiral not only attracted droves of devotees, but harsh criticism from detractors as well, who accused him of ‘Frenchifying’ Indian cuisine, or dressing it up in French nouvelle cuisine drag. But what most critics fail to take into account is that the sub-continent’s cuisine is one big melting pot, a fusion of culinary traditions and cultures that has been on the simmer over a 4,000 year-old timeline, with the Aryans, Monglians, Persians, or the Mughals, the Greeks and Romans, Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, the British, French adding to the recipe. The Portuguese introduced the tomato, the red chilli and vinegar among other things; the Mughals brought the pilafs, biryanis, the naans, kormas and kebabs; the Chinese offered the stirfry, cooking utensils, aniseed and tea; the list is long. In fact the term “Indian
cuisine” is too generic, and fails to pay tribute to the country’s enormous diversity and variety, a country where the cuisines varies even more than its languages and traditions. But despite this diversity, the cuisine has flat-lined for decades, abetted by restaurateurs around the world, who tarted up their culinary showcases with store-bought furniture, boring maroon linen, cheap Mughal miniatures, and hackneyed brass tableware, their menus focusing mainly on North Indian or Mughlai dishes. Something Vineet was not willing to do. Flushed with the success of his three-day culinary showcase at Yantra, he explains why he calls his food “evolved Indian”. “It’s something I coined myself – modern evolved Indian. I was the first person trying to create food like that, because I was very disillusioned with what was happening in the UK, and even in India when I was training as a very young chef. I did not like the heavy oil and gravy bases,” he says. “Nobody ate food like that at home, but you had to serve it in the restaurants, as the diners want to feel luxurious. But I did not believe in that.” Culinary innovation, he adds, was also frowned upon by the senior chefs he worked with. “The European chefs would come to work in our hotels and they would be praised. I would ask why we couldn’t use the same techniques on our food. And I would be told to shut up, that I was a kid; that Indian food should never change. Once when I did tandoori lobster and
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