‘MY DREAM IS TO OPEN A RESTAURANT IN INDIA, BUT IT WON’T BE IN A CITY’
On November 14, Garima Arora became the first Indian woman to head a Michelin-starred restaurant, GAA, in Bangkok. “That day we celebrated, but the next, it was business as usual,” she says. The star is a push to innovate more, she adds, and to work on her dream to open a restaurant in India.
“The dream is still a distant one, given the complications, the bureaucratic maze and the corruption. Just getting a liquor licence is such a long, expensive process.”
India doesn’t yet have a Michelin-star restaurant. But that’s because Michelin doesn’t yet have a guide to a city here, or the country.
These guides are a series of books first published around 1900 by the French tyre company Michelin. In a world of very few cars, they were initially meant to encourage people to drive, and so they included maps, tips on car care, listed where to stop for fuel.
By 1920, they began to list hotels and restaurants in Paris. As the guide became more popular, Michelin hired gourmands to visit restaurants in secret and rate them for the guide.
The first stars were awarded in 1926. Over nearly a century, they have come to be considered the final word on restaurant ratings. And yet, until 2006, there were still only Michelin guides for Europe. Since then, the guide has expanded its scope to include cities in North America, South America, Japan, South Korea, China and parts of south-east Asia.
Indian chefs have headed Michelinstarred restaurants outside India (remember, a star is for an establishment, never a person), the first being Atul Kochhar’s Indian-cuisine restaurant Tamarind, and Vineet Bhatia’s Zaika, both in London, in 2001. After him came Vikas Khanna’s Junoon in New York, Kochhar’s Benares in London, Gaggan Anand’s Gaggan in Bangkok, among others.
But never to a restaurant headed by an Indian woman. Is that because the professional kitchen is not really conducive to women’s growth? “The kitchen in general is a challenging place,” says Arora, 30. “It was a tougher place to work for women some 15-20 years ago. Now, in general, efforts are made to make the atmosphere more cooperative and focus on the strengths of each person.” gian chef did the same, saying he wanted to be able to serve fried chicken if he liked, without worrying that he was disappointing customers.
In 2011, an Australian chef heading a restaurant in London reportedly called the star a curse because of how it raised expectations among customers. And this year, for the first time, a three-starred restaurant in the running was left off the list on request, after Sébastien Bras, the French chef of Le Suquet, said he wanted to start a fresh chapter without the pressure of being judged all the time.
The secret judges responsible for Michelin ratings typically check for quality, craft, the personality of the chef reflected on the plate, value for money and consistency. They try not to be snooty — stars have been awarded to a dim sum chain in Hong Kong; a streetside noodle bar in Tokyo, a street food stall in Singapore.
But for chefs, a lot of the stress comes from fear of losing the star — celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay likened it to losing a girlfriend.
Arora, incidentally, worked with Ramsay, in Dubai. “It was my first experience in a professional kitchen and there was a lot that I learnt from it, the primary thing being that though a restaurant kitchen looks chaotic, it’s organised chaos fuelled by speed,” she says.
She also worked at Noma, repeatedly ranked the best restaurant in the world, and she says it is here that she learnt how cerebral cooking can be.
“It changed me. I realised that as much is done with the hands as with the mind,” she says. “I still look at every process — from pickling to making curd — differently as a result of that experience.”
So what’s next? “I really want that restaurant in India,” she says. “But not in my home city. In fact, not in a city at all.”