THE THREE SHADES OF TAAPSEE

business woman: Taapsee has set up The Wedding Factory, a wedding organising company, along with her close friend and younger sister Shagun.

sportsperson: The actress plays squash and owns a badminton team, Pune Seven Aces.

social reformer: She feels strongly about the women empowerment and education, and supports an NGO in Mumbai.

outside the film industry. Within the industry, she bonds well with Vicky Kaushal and Saqib Saleem. “I’m social, but I don’t believe in friendships with an agenda, so I prefer to keep away from filmy parties,” she says.

However, Taapsee has her own mental Mumbai-delhi battles to power through. “Besides the lack of space in Mumbai, it’s the condition of roads that affects me,” she says.

Floyd Cardoz was a classically trained European chef who had cooked at Gray Kunz’s Lespinasse, one of New York’s hottest French restaurants, before he teamed up with Danny Meyer, the great New York restaurateur, to open Tabla, an upmarket restaurant that combined Indian flavours and French techniques with a more informal section on the ground floor (The Bread Bar). Tabla was ahead of its time and Floyd eventually moved on; he is now a partner and mentor at the Bombay Canteen and O Pedro.

There was also Raji Jallepalli, whose food I never ate but who I once sat next to at a formal banquet in Washington DC. Raji, who was originally from Hyderabad, ran her own restaurant in Memphis Tennessee, she told me. I asked her what her food was like and the dishes she described sounded a lot like French food with Indian spices. But she was a wonderfully engaging person and I enjoyed hearing her stories about serving Indian food in the American South.

Raji was also a consultant to New York restaurants: first Surya and then Tamarind. Her food was well-liked. Writing in The New York Times, William Grimes described it as ‘Indian fusion cooking’

adding that “her penchant for applying French techniques to Indian cooking further complicates the picture”. (Sample dishes: Spiced venison chops with cranberry sauce and Cornish hen with tamarind and garlic soup.)

Sadly, despite their talent, few Indian chefs had much impact on the New York restaurant scene.

But of the few chefs serving Indian food with flavours that came straight from our homes, nobody impressed the critics quite as much as Suvir Saran. He was chef at Devi, which got a Michelin star and rave reviews from such influential critics as Gael Greene. (I think Devi may even have been the first noneuropean restaurant in New York to get a Michelin star.)

Though Saran was clearly well-known and much liked in elite New York circles, nobody in India seemed to know much about him. Most Indian chefs who cook abroad have started out with the Taj, Oberoi or ITC chains or have gone to catering college in India so there is always somebody you know who will say “we started in the kitchen together’ or “he was in my class”.

But no: nobody in India seemed to have studied or worked with Saran.

Except for the odd speed-bump (the botched opening of

Veda, meant to be his Indian debut), Saran went from success to success. There were three well-reviewed cookbooks, he judged TV competitions like Iron Chef, took part in some himself (Top Chef Masters) and went on to open Tapestry, which featured dishes from over a dozen countries.

Somehow (though I praised his food on these pages, nearly two decades ago) we never actually met till he moved (mostly) to Delhi last year to become chef and partner at a multi-outlet (restaurants, hotels, bakeries etc.) operation in India.

As Saran told me his story, it became clear why no Indian chef had ever worked with him before he left for New York. Saran is not a catering college product. He is that rarest of all Indian chefs: selftaught with a foundation given to him by the family cook. He won his Michelin star with dishes he had created himself and with no help from the kitchens of the Taj or the Oberoi.

Saran went to New York as a student in the 1990s and attended the School of Visual Artists. He then began a career in luxury retail becoming a buyer for two of the fanciest stores of that era; he bought home furnishings for Bergdorf Goodman and was Merchandising Director for Henri Bendel. Later he become a manager for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift stores.

The cooking thing happened side by side and usually outside of office hours. He began by cooking for friends (it is fair to say that at a relatively young age, he had successfully infiltrated what might be called New York’s jet set), which led to assignments to cater for high profile events where he was noticed and written about.

Next came the opening of Devi where he threw out all the rules

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