Top Of The Toques

So, if discovering ‘Mr E’ is as easy as ordering consomme anywhere from Ho Chi Minh city to Ootacamund, who then are our own Escoffiers? The souffle rises when we check out the haute action Indian chefs have been up to recently. This year Ananda Solomon with his Pomfret in a Plantain Leaf knocked out all the world’s greatest chefs at the prestigious Peter Knipp chef competition in Singapore. Vineet Bhatia has two stars from Michelin. Last month, Puneet Arora fed British chefs humble pie when he was judged International Chef of the Year at The British Meat International Competition. World Gourmet Summit invitee Hemant Oberoi is back and firing up a Masala Art restaurant for Mumbai. Rahul Akerkar’s Indigo, after making it to the Conde Nast hotlist, has also won the elite Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

Here then are our bets on the top of the toques in India: 10 chefs, six cities, the old guard and the young turks, over a 100 cuisines between them and no Sanjeev Kapoor. For, grind your teeth Mr Khana Khazana, you owe your success to telegenics. "A perfect play, rewind and repeat machine for recipe-delivery" is how gourmet heavyweights diss Kapoor. Before dicing on, let’s get one thing straight: in a professional kitchen it is Commis aka ‘apprentice-level-cooks’ who cook. Chefs? They sniff the fish, press the meat, shout out the KOTS(kitchen order tickets) and come out and genuflect before guests on nights when servers promise pappardelle to homesick Italians and the kitchens have already run out of it.

All of which boils down to the moot question, what do chefs really do that sets them apart from cookie cutters? Try Rahul Akerkar’s unorthodox Kingfish with Panch Amrut sauce. Its sweet-sour quasi-brahminic gravy acquaints Brahmins and others with fish like this for the first time in existence. Master of a repertoire that’s entirely his own, Akerkar blithely admits he is a guy who has grown up loving what he now calls "bleah foods" like white bread sandwiches smeared with tomato sauce.

Praveen Anand does great parts of his cooking in libraries, cleavering his way through tomes of southern history to resurrect unknown facts about Maratha history with food, like the Meen Shunti—"the myth-busting fish kabab that was made for Shivaji when his empire swept south into Thanjavur". In Mumbai, Ananda Solomon has hopped on to the Konkan Railway, "to uncover traditional community masalas and souring agents for seafood for the Konkan Cafe". And, it is efforts like these that have rocketed our chefs into carte blanche restaurants—where they’ve planned everything, right from the kitchens, interiors, cutlery to the washing detergent.

Once cooks who started out as conquerors of our oesophagi, they are now masterchefs paid to fulfill our appetite for spectacular dining. Selling cuisine that feeds not just the stomach but also our gastronomic souls. In today’s boiling cauldron of consumer culture, chefs are selling fast as culinary celebrities recognisable to readers of Page Three. Confectioners of their own fame, akin to fusion Maharishis, they can now make guests and entire tables levitate in the eyes of society when they stop and ask, "Is your Chateaubriand pink enough for you, Ma’am?" It’s another matter that the right shade of tender pink costs anything upwards of Rs 2,000 after they recommend a vintage bottle of Burgundy. But then who said great chefs come cheap anywhere in the world?

United by a scientific temper, most of them would have been surgeons, wielding scalpels instead of carving knives if it hadn’t been for a dramatic twist of taste. They’ve spent more hours of their lives facing fires than they have with their families. Working in a 50°-blaze, in kitchens that have little or no natural light, since bay windows and views are reserved for guests. And they pride themselves on what must be the most painful "Insiders’ Awards" in any industry, burns, gashes and scars that they wear as medals. And all of them, save one, when they hear Outlook wants to feature them in a story about chefs lean forward on their egos and ask conspiratorially, "Who else is on the list?"

But, before we get right to the top of our list, here’s what we discovered about the state of chefdom in India. The only available book featuring chefs is Jiggs Kalra’s Prasaad, Cooking with the Masters, first published in 1986. Some of the men in white hats who were credited as "Supporting Cast" at the book’s end, are masterchefs today. Indian chefs have barely wielded their pens yet, which is quite unsavoury considering that food writing is the fastest-growing category in publishing abroad. We are also Food Network-less, not for us the 24-hour US-based channel where chefs like Jamie Oliver and yes, even Padma Lakshmi, cook live in lobster-printed trousers. Our desi Upper Crust food magazine pithily divides a few pages per issue between their inner circle writers and chefs. "Foodies" get howled out as groupie-ingenues who often can’t name the ingredients in their free meals. One chef speaks with horror of a food editor whose nose seems permanently stuck in a wine glass crying out asking, "Help! What’s a caper?"

Pitted against all this, one wonders where our chefs have come from and what makes them cook like they do? Ghulam Rasool, the son of a farmer in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, arrived in Lucknow with a box of laddoos, hoping to become the shagird (disciple) of Haji Shah, khansama to kings and nawabs. Says he, "My father said cooking was a kala I should learn. I spent years cutting onions and peeling garlic before my guru even allowed me to lift a ladle." Ritu Dalmia confesses, "I begged chefs to allow me to cook in their kitchens and have worked abroad at Locanda Des Angels and La Tante Claire." Born in a strict Marwari Jain family, Ritu turned veg after wringing a chicken’s neck in Italy but still makes herself taste the seasoning on wood-fired tiger prawns, a Diva speciality.

Faridkot boy Hemant Oberoi is a catering college grad who refused his first job offer from the Oberoi Hotels when they wanted him to change his name, worried that people might confuse his lineage with theirs. He then joined the Taj and has gone on to being one of their best-performing assets, guaranteeing sales worth Rs 300 crore on food and beverages annually. Now official chef to A.B. Vajpayee on his trips abroad, every night after feeding the PM, Hemant ventures out in search of new food. It is during his line of duty that he has created and served the provocatively political dessert called Himalaya-ki-choti (The Peak) to Vajpayee and Musharraf during the Agra Summit.

Driven by the search for great ingredients, the hallmark of all great chefs is to be a master procurer who has cultivated suppliers for everything, from edible flowers to pomegranate molasses. Says Oberoi, "Our annual budget for importing foods like foie gras to truffle oil runs into Rs 3 crore and that is after encouraging local farmers to grow what I need, cutting imports on asparagus et al down to nil."

As Chef de Cuisine, Madhu Krishnan is second in command when it comes to the fortune of 11 kitchens at Mumbai’s ITC Grand Maratha. Here, she swaps coffee spoons with cinnamon sticks so you can hand-stir aroma into your brew. Restaurant standards like "fish and chips" get dropped and she serves up instead fillets of rock cod coupled with crab claws. All this, while also making sure recipes are photographed and displayed on posters in the kitchens—complete with plating and serving instructions.

For women like her, success hasn’t come easy in this tough-swearing male domain. Madhu has "gone through having to heft up 50 kg stockpots without grunting in front of my male colleagues to being felt up by a fellow cook". Now, a multilingual abuser, she like other women in professional kitchens, is as deft at searing the tenderloins of calves as the lascivious tongues of male chefs.

But, for chefs of either sex, the most feared person is the lab assistant, paid to wander into kitchens and run swabs over chopping boards, hands and food platters. Fingernails with salmonella? Fruit plates with bacteria? A nick from knife gone unreported? All lab results go directly to the GM. At the ITC Hotels, reputed to have the highest standards of hygiene, the rules are like baseball—two warnings and on third strike you’re out—out of a job and your chef whites.

Loath to share accidents, it’s the mishaps that chefs speak of, typically dating back early years. Ghulam Rasool remembers eating crow once when a GM said "Look, Ghulam there is a cockroach on the doctor’s plate." Says Rasool, "Doctor sahib carefully moved the tiny cockroach to one side with a spoon. When, almost by reflex I picked it up and put it in my mouth, chewed and then laughed it off saying ‘Sir, yeh to baghari hui methi hai’ (it’s just roasted fennel)." He adds, "Cockroaches are not tasty to eat and so I gargled for a good one minute in the kitchen, but at least I saved our face." The same "Ghulam" went on to become the first person Rajiv Gandhi asked after whenever he landed in Lucknow.

Having swung out of the kitchens and connected with fame, what’s next on the carte for chefs? When will they dare to serve kidneys, trotters and tails with the same verve as they do in India’s small eateries? For as cheap as those cuts may be, it’s the sublime cooking of them that is truly haute cuisine. Chefs complain that glitterati diners forking out Rs 500-plus per head are happier cutting into the familiar and mundane chicken rather then quail. Luckily though, the future does hold out great seasons of flavour, for our chefs today are both deep-thinking and well-funded artistes—who know better than us that performance and ingredient-driven cuisine is on the rise. So grab your forks. Here’s hoping the next act for vegetarians will be blue potatoes and for meat-lovers a paya jelly appetiser clear enough to show reflections of Escoffier.