GAGA for GAA
TThe first thing you don’t notice at Gaa is the Michelin star. The only sticker on the door has the words, ‘2018 Michelin’, but that’s from being recommended in the Michelin’s Red Book’s Plate/ Assiete section the previous year. Garima Arora, the 32-year-old Mumbai-bred chef of Gaa, in the news since mid-November 2018 as India’s first woman to win the coveted Michelin star, isn’t making a big deal about it. At Gaa, it’s business as usual.
The decor at Gaa won’t catch your eye either. The sliding door lets you into an unostentatious, minimally prettified place, more repurposed house than star-rated restaurant, with dim areas broken by bright halogen-lit zones, the secrecy of a taverna with the promise of a members-only banquet. Small flights of stairs lead away at different angles into basements and mezzanines, creating the alternative reality of an M.C. Escher painting.
You also might not see much of Garima Arora herself. She’ll usually be bustling about in her basementkitchen with her army of multinational chefs, crafting the meticulous masterpieces that have made Gaa an overnight sensation in the brutally competitive, maledominated world of international cuisine. In Bangkok, that competition consists of 27 other Michelin-starred restaurants, including the legendary Gaggan, which stands 20 steps away across the courtyard from Gaa.
India’s latest celebrity chef is short and brisk with intense black eyes and a restrained impatience. My interview with her was sketchy and short; I think she really needed to get back to her kitchen. But in inter-
views such as Bloomberg and CNN, she has positioned Gaa as drawing on culinary cooking styles and ingredients of India and Thailand.
You might detect influences both Indian and Thai within Gaa’s fixed 10-course or 14-course menus. The overall effect, however, is of being joyously ambushed by unexpected flavour fairies, textures and colours.
For instance, betel leaves, a post-prandial chew in India and an active ingredient in Thai cooking, are served both at the top and the bottom of the menu. A single green betel leaf, thinner than a khakra, crisped in a film of duck stock seasoned with herb salts is served within a potted shrub of straw branches.
The betel leaf at the end has a dual personality, half chocolate and half ethereal fennel powder. I thought I had crushed a sweet rose petal, and I had. The leaf is dotted with rose chutney and silvered cardamom.
Three other dishes stood out—the chilled soup of raw guava, roselle and fermented mulberries that started our evening. Guavas are a national snack in Thailand, but you don’t often see the pink-cored ones common in India. The soup sets a high bar for the rest of the evening.
The sixth menu item, simply called Corn, brings you roasted baby corns, kept piping hot within a swaddle of green husks and kernels rubbed with lemon, chilly powder and black salt, exactly as sold on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai. A clever cut around the base lets you slide the husk off, drawing the corn out like a sword from a scabbard.
The indubitable show-stealer is the unripe jackfruit served with dime-sized rotis and pickles. Sweet yellow jackfruit flowers are popular snacks in Thailand, but several Indian states put the unripe jackfruit to creative use. Its robust, meaty taste makes it a popular vegetarian alternative to mutton in biryanis. If the starting dishes were airy super-bites, this one is a main course.
Making experimental food taste as good as it looks is a balancing feat few modern chefs master. Garima’s intense, single-minded focus on what’s plated at Gaa puts her on a culinary high-wire. The result is food that bewitches your eyes first, and then utterly seduces your tongue.