SUNDAY 22 | MARCH 2015
NANDINI D. TRIPATHY
Born into the third generation of a family of chefs who have drawn praise from people like Prince Charles and Gordon Ramsey cannot have been an easy ride. Dipna Anand, however, seems to have been set on making it a ride to remember. “I think, it would be safe to say that cooking runs in my blood,” she says as she begins to talk about her journey from being a brilliant student of catering, hospitality and food technology in the UK to the winner of the coveted British Curry Award announced by British Prime Minister David Cameron, authoring the official cookbook of her family’s wellknown Indian restaurant, Brilliant, along the way and now being the proud copyright owner of two brand new flavours of icecream in the UK: gulab jamun and jalebi.
“I’ve grown up around the restaurant business, watching my mum cook at home, my father cook at our restaurant and also manage it to the best of his abilities. When I was young, my brother and I used to accompany him and help out whenever we could. I used to always pay keen attention to everything that happened there, watching my dad delegate responsibilities and tasks to people, look after the customers… he would often give me and my brother little tasks to do, like laying the tables, stacking the bottles and that really brought out my passion for the food industry,” she recalls, revealing that although she had always known that she wanted to be a part of the hospitality industry in some way or another, she had never actually envisioned herself as a chef!
She goes on, “My university education was in the field of hospitality and catering. I felt that I needed to have sufficient knowledge about how to run a successful hospitality business, if my brother and I were to one day take over the responsibility of running Brilliant. I was always fond of food though, winning a lot of awards even in school and college during my studies in food technology. It was while I was pursuing my Masters when a professor requested me to teach a class of students at the same university the finer points of Indian cooking. I thought I’d give it a try even though I had never taught cooking before. Today, I’ve been teaching at the University of West London as a lecturer specialising in Indian cooking for seven years. This particular phase in my life was tantamount to my becoming a professional chef and eventually coming into the public eye,” she shares. Her innovations with her own restaurant’s menu, introducing healthier recipes for delicious Indian dishes without compromising on taste, drew a lot of public attention as well as praise. Ask her who in the international culinary circuit has been her greatest source of inspiration and she responds promptly, “My biggest inspiration is my father. Growing up, I’ve watched him go about his professional and personal life impeccably — I’ve always wanted to be like him in everything he did. Even today, you’ll see him at the restaurant clearing the tables or washing the dishes whenever the need arises. For me to see something like that is really inspiring, because he’s the owner of the business and yet as involved as any of its employees at every possible level. To see the smile on his face when he held the first copy of my cookbook Beyond Brilliant, was a moment that I count as my life’s greatest achievement so far.”