INDIAN MODERN
AFTER DECADES IN THE DOLDRUMS, THE INDIAN KITCHEN IS FINALLY COMING INTO ITS OWN, WITH BOUNDARY-PUSHING TAKES ON REGIONAL CUISINES THAT CELEBRATE THE DIVERSITY AND RANGE OF THE COUNTRY’S CULINARY HERITAGE.
After decades in the doldrums, the Indian kitchen is finally coming into its own, with boundary-pushing takes on regional cuisines that celebrate the diversity and range of the country’s culinary heritage.
IN MUMBAI, AND The Bombay Canteen is packed. The crowd is young. The conversation is loud. The cocktails are flowing. And— here’s the surprise—the food is Indian: the remixed, rebooted, and regional form dubbed “contemporary” or “modern” or “nouvelle” (but never “fusion”!) by the country’s hottest chefs.
A few years have passed since I last visited Mumbai (“Say Bombay!” my Indian wife, Shailaja, admonishes), and a lot has changed. The last time we were here, we scoured the city for a good Maharashtrian restaurant and found only Trishna, a stuffy old favorite that specializes in seafood dishes from the state’s Arabian Sea coast. Just as in Delhi (where we live) or Bangalore or Kolkata or any other Indian metropolis, the city’s top tables were serving Italian or Mediterranean or Japanese or Vietnamese. And the joints doing Indian were doing it badly, serving up a dumbed-down menu of Punjabi and Mughlai dishes ( dal makni, palak
paneer, muttar paneer, chicken curry, mutton curry) or a comparably bastardized and truncated version of South Indian fare. (On a separate jaunt to Kochi, we discovered that just about the only place you could get real Keralan food was in the toddy shops.)
Over the last six years or so, however, Indian restaurants have witnessed something of a revolution, and “local” cuisine is now the hottest thing going. According to New York–based celeb chef Floyd Cardoz, who co-founded The Bombay Canteen in 2015, that’s down to the emergence of a new, more confident generation of well-traveled Indians and the example set by Indian expat chefs helming acclaimed restaurants in major metropolises like London and San Francisco.
“It started out as a kind of frustration for me. Indian food in India was relegated to small cafés and those restaurants they call ‘hotels’ in Bombay and Delhi, and Indian ingredients were slowly dying off,” says Cardoz, a five-time James Beard award nominee for his work at Danny Meyer’s Tabla in Manhattan. “I thought, how do we change this perception of Indian food not being cool? That’s how the idea of The Bombay Canteen came about.”
Across Mumbai and across the country, other innovative and entrepreneurial chefs were working to reinvent and expand Indian cuisine in different ways, from playful to gourmet. Perhaps first among them was chef Manish Mehrotra, whose Indian Accent restaurant turned The Manor—an unassuming boutique hotel in an out-of-the-way location in New Delhi—into the capital’s hottest dining spot when it opened in 2009. (The restaurant has since relocated to the swish Lodhi hotel in the heart of the city.) Soon, the top luxury properties of India’s major metropolises were all competing to create the buzziest contemporary Indian restaurant, from chef Hemant Oberoi’s Varq at the Taj Mahal in Delhi to Harish Rao’s Avartana at the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai.
“Nothing succeeds like success insofar as restaurants are concerned,” says food critic and author Marryam Reshii, who characterizes the movement as a “deep dive” into Indian cuisine following a brief flirtation with international ingredients.
So-called “modern Indian” cooking can take both traditional and unexpected forms and ranges from fun to formal. But virtually all of the best restaurants involved have eliminated family-style serving bowls in favor of plated dishes or tapas-style small plates, recognizing that the way Indians eat and socialize has changed dramatically. That was evident the night Shailaja and I dined at The Bombay Canteen, where the tables around us were interspersed with young couples on dates, a work dinner or two, and a few groups of friends rather than the big, multigenerational family gatherings that gave rise to dumbed-down Indian and the dreaded “multicuisine” restaurant in the first place.
Kerala-born executive chef Thomas Zacharias—a partner in the restaurant and one of the most influential chefs in India today— wasn’t in the kitchen the night we visited. But on the phone a few weeks earlier, he had spoken of his interest in the Slow Food movement, so I was keen to see how he was reviving outmoded ingredi