India’s 10 Best Young Chefs

Some are already household names, but these are the men and women who will rule our culinary future

WBLUMENTHAL WAS PORTRAYED AS THE ECCENTRIC BRIT WHO MADE CRAZY DISHES LIKE BACON AND EGG ICE CREAM AND SNAIL PORRIDGE

e went past the generation of Ananda Solomon and Manjit Gill. Then we encountered the current generation where Manish Mehrotra is the king and such chefs as Manu Chandra and Ritu Dalmia are the stars.

But who are the leaders of the next generation of young chefs? Some are already well-known. Himanshu Saini and Hussain Shahzad are the clear leaders of the group.

But surely there must be others who have been less written about? Here is my list of the young chefs who will dominate Indian restaurants in the years to come. This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many talented chefs whose food I have not tried.

And some obvious candidates have to be excluded either because of age-criteria (Avinash Martins, for instance, who just missed the age cut-off) or because they don’t currently run restaurants: Thomas Zacharias, Gresham Fernandes, Prateek Sadhu and many others.

But for what its worth, these are the chefs I would put my money on. Please note that this is my own personal list and it is in no particular order.

Himanshu Saini: One of Manish Mehrotra’s most successful protégés, Saini may well be his successor. He currently oversees the food at Dubai’s Tresind and runs his very own, smaller, more prestigious Tresind Studio. The restaurant has one Michelin star and Saini is already high on lists of chefs to watch across the world. My guess is that his restaurant will do even better in the next list of the Middle East’s 50 Best Restaurants than it has done already.

Saini cooks modern Indian food and though his roots are in the Indian Accent kitchen, his style is now very much his own after years of cooking with the world’s top chefs at collaborations across the globe.

He makes it to this list because he also runs Tresind in Mumbai. I have excluded chefs who run restaurants abroad to the detriment of Himanshu’s contemporary and fellow Indian Accent alumnus Saurabh Udinia who would be on the list if he did not only cook at Singapore’s Revolver.

Hussain Shahzad: Shahzad has trained all over the world (including a stint at New York’s Eleven Madison Park) but his breakthrough came when the late Chef Floyd Cardoz picked him to open O Pedro, the fun but brilliant Goan restaurant in Mumbai. Shahzad turned O Pedro into such an island of excellence in Mumbai’s BKC complex that at least two great chefs who I have accompanied for dinner there came away very impressed: Gaggan Anand and Massimo Bottura.

He now also looks after O Pedro’s sister restaurant Bombay Canteen and has managed the difficult job of improving the already excellent food served at the Canteen. I would have to eat more widely to be certain but my sense is that if you take Manish Mehrotra out of the mix, Hussain is the best chef cooking full-time in India today.

Pooja Dhingra: Until Pooja Dhingra’s generation came along, pastry was something best left to dour men in hotel kitchens. Not only did she introduce a new style and a new flair to pastry, she also introduced an international approach and made baking glamorous.

Quite apart from her own patisserie skills (which are outstanding), she deserves recognition for having transformed Indian attitudes to pastry and inspired her generation.

Nikhil Nagpal: Avartana is to the South what Indian Accent is to the North, a restaurant that re-invents cuisine. Except that in the case of Avartana, the chefs concentrate on South Indian flavours. Their avant-garde approach has had huge success in otherwise conservative Chennai where any tinkering with dishes is frowned upon.

Nikhil Nagpal was part of the original team — along with Executive Chef Ajit Bangera — who opened the restaurant and now that Bangera has moved out of Chennai, Nikhil has taken over the restaurant putting his own stamp on the menu. He is the brand custodian of Avartana and will handle future openings such as the Calcutta operation.

Rahul Gomes Pereira: A classically trained European chef, Gomes Pereira (called Picu by everyone) first made his reputation at Delhi’s Jamun before taking over as culinary head of the group that runs it. His inclusion on this list however is largely due to the way in which he has returned to Goa and revived the great (but disappearing) dishes of Goan cuisine with flair and more than a little originality in the local outpost of Jamun.

Auroni Mukherjee: One of the disadvantages of cooking in Calcutta is that you never get the national recognition you deserve. Auroni Mukherjee, a former advertising copywriter, stepped into the kitchen because he loved food and thought he could create something different. Though he cooks only at the small Sienna Café on top of a store, he turns out some of -the most original and delicious food in India without anyone outside Calcutta noticing.

Niyati Rao: A former Taj chef and, like so many other young Indian chefs, a one-time intern at Copenhagen’s Noma, Rao has surprised everyone with the excellence of her food at Mumbai’s Ekaa. She knows all the classic techniques because of her Taj training but her food seems so effortless and so much her own that she will emerge as one of India’s greatest chefs if she keeps to this path: she is still in her twenties.

Vanshika Bhatia: She trained briefly at Gaggan Anand’s Bangkok restaurant before going on to work all over. But ever since she has set her mind to making it in India, Vanshika has displayed an astonishing range, doing creative vegetarian food at Gurugram’s Café Omo, running a successful pie shop in Delhi and launching a delivery hot dog operation. Her versatility makes her special.

Mythrayie Iyer: Only in India would as talented a chef as Mythrayie be as little known. She was also a part of opening team of Chennai’s Avartana (like Nikhil Nagpal) also interned at Noma (like nearly everybody else) but has found her own voice at Bengaluru’s Farmlore under the benevolent and experienced eye of the restaurant’s founder chef Ebenezer Johnson. Her food is creative, precise and respects Indian flavours while being open to global influences.

She won the Rate My Plate competition organised by the World’s 50 Best and was invited to the awards in London this year. And next year, she will fly to Cape Town as the regional finalist for the San Pellegrino awards competition.

One to watch.

Lakhan Jethani: He is the odd one out on this list because there is nothing particularly Indian about his food. He is the chef at Mizu, currently Mumbai’s hottest Oriental/ Japanese restaurant.

Though market demand has forced him to put sushi on the menu, his real interest is in other kinds of Japanese food where he has pushed the envelope, teaching Mumbai to go beyond junk sushi and rip offs of the Nobu menu.

Technically proficient and eagerly adventurous, he is all set to take Japanese food in India to the next level.