THOMAS ZACHARIAS’ INDIAN TAKEAWAY
As he scours the country for its regional cuisines, Thomas Zacharias is proving that there is a life for leading chefs beyond restaurant kitchens
IIf you have an interest in food and are on Instagram, it’s likely you are already following chef Thomas Zacharias. The former executive chef of The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai has the kind of feed that will first make you salivate and then want to cook. It might also make you want to hit the road. When travelling through India to discover ingredients and recipes in its nooks and crannies, Zacharias uses the hashtag #ChefOnTheRoad. His recent posts from Uttarakhand also prove he is as fond of people as he is of food. The chef clearly likes his journeys. His own—from working in European restaurants to championing regional Indian cuisine—has been both rewarding and eventful.
Growing up in a foodloving family in Kochi, Zacharias says his grandmother played an important role in shaping his relationship with food: “Ammamma had an almost otherworldly skill of transforming people’s moods through her food.” After completing a hotel management degree from Manipal Academy in 2007, Zacharias took a course at The Culinary Institute of America in New York and then worked for a year at Le Bernardin, Chef Eric Ripert’s threeMichelin starred restaurant. “Despite a visa offer from the restaurant, I decided to return to India because I was bullied in the kitchen. It was not reflective of the entire kitchen, of course; it was just one guy, and, honestly, I didn’t stand up for myself either,” he says.
It was at Olive Mumbai that Zacharias found his feet as a sous chef. After three years, on a fourmonth trip around Europe, he had an epiphany. “At Osteria Francescana, chef Massimo Bottura was telling me how his grandmother inspired him and how he was celebrating his regional cuisine. It struck me that here I am spending all my life’s savings learning about European food when I have this incredible cuisine heritage back home that I haven’t explored,” he says. Zacharias returned restless. Providentially, chef Floyd Cardoz was hunting for a head chef for a modern Indian restaurant he was opening with entrepreneurs Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage around the same time.
Zacharias threw his hat in the ring. Despite not having cooked Indian food professionally, he impressed the trio with an 11course meal. “I remember a Skype call with Chef Floyd when he asked me ‘what would you want as your final meal?’ I said, ‘My grandmother’s duck curry.’ He always said that was one of the reasons he hired me,” says Zacharias. The Bombay Canteen opened in February 2015 and changed the face of modern Indian dining. Zacharias had a big role to play in both the restaurant’s menu and its success. He remembers going on several road trips then, too, diving deeper into regional cuisines, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu, and from Gujarat to the Northeast.
The Covid19 pandemic brought everything to a shuddering halt. “Losing chef Floyd took the hardest toll; he was a father figure and it was so unexpected,” says Zacharias. (Cardoz died of Covid in New York in March
ON THE NIGHT OF FLOYD CARDOZ’S PASSING, THOMAS ZACHARIAS COOKED FOR HIMSELF—A CHORIZ AND BEAN STEW— TO HONOUR HIS MEMORY
2020.) Finding it hard to cope, Zacharias went off social media for two weeks and made an effort to reconnect with cooking. “I could never cook for myself, but the night of Floyd’s passing, I made a choriz and bean stew as a way to honour him,” he says.
Realising that many people were beginning to cook for themselves during the lockdown, he started a ‘#CookingWithTZac’ video series on Instagram. “I have always felt recipe videos are too manicured and scripted. I wanted to show that even a professional chef might make mistakes and that is okay. There was an engaged audience who wanted to learn recipes and I realised that I could continue spreading my vision of getting people excited about regional Indian food,” he says.
After nearly six years of helming the kitchen, the news in midDecember 2020 of Zacharias moving on from The Bombay Canteen surprised many. “It was something that was on my mind for a couple of years. I didn’t want to remain a chef in a kitchen my entire life but wanted to explore what else I was capable of doing. I call it a midlife existential choice,” explains Zacharias. Lately, he has been spending time with his family, something that had been on the backburner. “I have a few ideas (for the future) but it’s too early to talk about anything. Whatever I do next will be an extension of my work in celebrating Indian food culture, but it is unlikely to take the shape of a restaurant,” he says. ■
—Prachi Joshi