a restaurant in St Lucia and has been working on a cookbook. “I want to present different cuisines to the home cook,” she says, “and to use the media to familiarise the Western palate with spices and influences from all over the world.” —Sarah Khan
TRUE BRIT
When Maunika Gowardhan was growing up in Mumbai, she learnt from the two biggest cooks in her family—mum and grandma—that when it comes to food, the most important thing is quality. “Even if we were just having rice and dal, we’d make sure to add a dollop of ghee so it became really delicious,” she tells me over coffee at a smart French café in London’s Fitzrovia. Living next to the coast certainly provided the now UK-based private chef and food writer with plenty of quality fare: the freshest pomfret and prawn, along with (her favourites) sardine and mackerel.
These ingredients have made it into Gowardhan’s recipes, which appear on her blog Cook In A Curry (recommended by the New York Times) and are created for her niche clientele as well as various supper clubs and pop-up kitchens. Gowardhan, 34, decided last year that she wanted to work more with restaurants, doing one-off events. She approached well-known restaurateur Terry Laybourne (“a demi-god in the north east of England”), and he agreed to let her make a four-course menu for a guest list of 90 at one of his venues. Laybourne was certainly taking a risk on Gowardhan—who did not train as a chef and has no formal cooking qualifications—but it paid off. What followed was a chance to give a demonstration for the Cinnamon Club—one of London’s most wellrespected Indian restaurants, headed by Vivek Singh—and in May this year, Gowardhan held an Indian Street Food Supper Club for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day, which involved
COOK OUT
Maunika Gowardhan says people are interested in her food because they haven’t seen dishes like hers before
CHEF’S TIP
Maunika Gowardhan says, “One of the things I learnt from my mum was that when cooking chickpea curry, add a teabag and let it simmer for about 15 minutes. Do this at the end, to deepen the colour and add a smoky flavour.”
hosting an event at Oliver’s restaurant, Fifteen. She’s now organising a two-day pop-up night market, inspired by the way street food is presented in India, with Oliver’s team and other London restaurants.
Gowardhan has a genuine passion
for food. When asked about restaurants she admires in London, she recommends The Wolseley “for a hearty English breakfast” and Lebanese chain Maroush. When in Mumbai she likes to visit Highway Gomantak. Gowardhan’s personal favourites are equally wide-ranging: curry pakoras “fried in thick batter, with the curry cooked separately”, pineapple and cracked black pepper chutney, Marathi mutton masala and Malwani crab curry, “which reminds me of home and growing up in India.” Her foray into private cooking and, later, blogging, originated in her desire to recreate the cuisine she desperately craved after leaving India. Arriving in Cardiff, Wales, to pursue a business degree, Gowardhan later moved to Newcastle, where relying on word-ofmouth recommendations, she started working as a private chef. This still takes up half her time. “It gives me the
chance to offer bespoke menus,” she says.
Gowardhan’s uniqueness lies in her approachability. She explains, “People are interested [in my work] because they haven’t seen these dishes before. The food I make isn’t complicated, so they want to find out more. They already know a bit about spices and how to make a curry—I’m just turning it up a notch.” The chef is also on a mission to bring proper Indian food to the UK, and “educate people about regional cuisine in India. The vastness of the country isn’t understood— the differences between Gujarati and Bengali cooking, for example.” Before her parents got married, her father was a vegetarian, and even avoided onion and garlic. Her mother changed all that, of course. Gowardhan could indeed have inherited these powers of persuasion, and before long, UK diners may discover a world of Indian cooking beyond tikka masala. —Allie
BiswasMUMBAI LOCAL
You won’t find Nicole GonsalvesPereira serving arepas at Mumbai’s Café Pico—she can’t find the right kind of Venezeulan flour for it. That would be sacrilege, in her books. This little decision tells you a lot about the 33-year-old chef, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu and some of the best restaurants in England after she started out in Mumbai about 15 years ago.
Working at establishments like Rules in London and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at the Savoy Grill helped Gonsalves-Pereira refine her methods. Is Ramsay as intimidating as he is on TV? “Pretty scary. His protégé ran the place, but he’d pop in often, and usually someone would get screamed at. The protégé, Marcus Wareing, was just as scary. Pans were frequently flung across the kitchen. Make a mistake and Marcus would yell at you, his face inches away from yours. I worked 18hour days for one-and-a-half years.
But it really contributed to my career.”
Two years ago, Gonsalves-Pereira and her husband moved back to India so that their three-year-old daughter could spend more time with her grandparents. The move worked out well for the chef, too. Today, she is not just top chef but also head of product design at Nilgai Foods, the gourmet food company that runs the café at concept store Le Mill in Mumbai. It’s her job to research, innovate and bring new things to the table, narrowing it all down to recipes that work with seasonal local produce and food that’s nutritious. “We don’t use the term ‘healthy,’” she explains, “because that means different things to different people. But we make things light and balanced.”
Popular plates on Gonsalves-Pereira’s menu at the Le Mill café include Korean pancakes, the Bulgarian shopska salad and the afiza salad. This last Ethiopian lentil mix was given a
Chef’s tip
Nicole Gonsalves-Pereira says, “If I’ve got some fresh juice left over, I reduce it with a bit of sugar to make a glaze. I then use it for desserts, for flavouring rice or just as a decorative reduction with food. It works with any kind of fruit juice.”
bit of a bite with the addition of broken wheat at Café Pico, but like all her innovations, it stays true to its regional flavours. “We do import some ingredients, but I have to be convinced they are authentic. On the whole, I prefer to use seasonal, locally grown produce If I can’t find an ingredient, I might make a substitution, but I won’t change the recipe.”
Café Pico’s menu originates where its chef’s love for travel and food intersect, spanning everywhere from Acapulco to Tobago. And because we often seek comfort in food, there’s plenty of that, in the form of gnocchi, meatballs and cheesecake. GonsalvesPereira is taking her talent to new outlets, beginning with Café Pico’s recent counterpart Phoenix Market City, Mumbai. More outposts in cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai will follow, she assures us, so we can keep travelling the world on her plates. Krishna Menon n
