FORK IN THE ROAD
Coordinators, supply chains that reach into the Western Ghats — restaurants are intensifying R&D as they seek to stand out. The results are surprising, delicious, desi
Every week, Thomas Zacharias, executive chef and partner at The Bombay Canteen, introduces his staff to a new Indian ingredient. They discuss its nutritional value, its uses in traditional recipes, and ways to include at their Mumbai restaurant. Zacharias calls it the Indian Ingredient Programme. Over the last three months, they’ve researched the Harshil Rajma from Uttarakhand, Kachampuli Vinegar from Karnataka, and two types of lime from Himachal Pradesh.
The first was a juicy, sour lime called Galgal, traditionally used in pickles and chutneys. The team tested it in yogurt and it’s become TBC’S Shrikand & Desi Granola. Topped with oven-roasted strawberries and candied bits of the second Himachali lime, Kimb, it sits on the restaurant’s Sunday brunch menu.
“In the West, big restaurants like Noma have food research labs. We can’t afford that,” Zacharias says. “This is my way of involving the team in menu development, data-gathering, and in celebrating the diversity of India’s native ingredients.”
As restaurants in India evolve, and diners become more willing to experiment, those looking to stand out in a crowded market are investing in R&D to seek out ingredients with interesting origin tales and unique flavours, combine heirloom recipes with modernist techniques, or dig up unusual heirloom recipes.
This is neither easy nor cheap — it means travelling to distant regions, forging relationships with small-scale growers, revising menus frequently.
Which is why chefs are creating fulltime posts for sourcing coordinators; designing Indian vegetable calendars and hiring menu consultants.
“Restaurants today are more willing to break away from the menus of the past,” says Manu Chandra, chef-partner at Toast & Tonic (T&T), with outlets in Bengaluru and Mumbai. “So it becomes important to add a layer of excitement, offer something diners will most likely not see elsewhere.”
At T&T, Chandra’s team makes the concentrated syrups and tonics that are infused in their gin cocktails, in-house.
The restaurant also cures and smokes its own pork for its Andouille sausage, which is served on a sourdough toast made using flour that is milled in-house.
INGREDIENTS
“Earlier, chefs would import a lot. Now, they’ve realised that freshness lies in local produce,” says Delhi-based restaurateur and chef Marut Sikka, who owns Delhi Club House (DCH), which recreates gymkhana and club cuisine.
At the hotel Andaz Delhi by Hyatt, executive chef Alex Moser and his team travelled to Uttarakhand for products like the Kumaoni pickles, rock salt and the Timur or Sichuan pepper that are served as accompaniments with dishes like the Barnyard Millet Khichdi, at the restaurant Annamaya.
At Masque, a fine-dining restaurant in Mumbai, you’ll find Kalari, a variety of Kashmiri cheese, served with rice pancakes and a date-and-walnut chutney. “This is a dish of the Bakharwals, a nomadic tribe with roots in the Valley. We get our Kalari from them, via a friend-cumtrader,” says chef-partner Prateek Sadhu.
The effort, Sadhu says, is to identify flavours that will evoke a memory or create a memory in the mind of the diner. For instance, the Raisin Glazed Quail, Yakhni is finished off with salt and oil extracted from the leaves of spruce trees in Pahalgam. It’s the restaurant’s way of recreating the earthy, umami scent of a cold, winter morning in the mountains, Sadhu says.
TWEAKS
Taking a traditional dish and adapting it to a restaurant environment can be tricky.
DCH found that its Dak Bungalow Chicken Roast was getting too dry by the time it got to the table, so they’re now combining the roast technique with the sous vide, where an ingredient is vacuumsealed and cooked in a water bath at a precise temperature. To ensure the kitchen could churn out kulchas quickly and yet keep them uniform, they added a temperature sensor to the inside of the tandoor.
Similarly, quick service restaurant (QSR) chain Nukkadwala by Vatika Group, which has 11 outlets across DelhiNCR, found it had to tweak the traditional recipes for, of all things, the samosa, if they wanted it to taste uniform and stay crisp as it made its way from their central kitchen to their various eateries and customers.
“For a chain serving in bulk quantities, standardising the taste is important. We
The narrative attached to every dish — whether for its recipe, ingredients or techniques — adds to the social and moral cachet of a restaurant. Typically, the restaurants with the best narratives were the older ones… like Mumbai’s Irani cafés. By investing in R&D, the new restaurants are able to get this kind of cachet within three or four years. ROSHNI BAJAJ SANGHVI, food writer and critic 91-YR-OLD PRAKASH & CO SERVES UP COLONIAL HILLSTATION HISTORY WITH RELISH
away from Prakash’s shop. American writer Stephen Alter and his cousin, the late actor Tom Alter, who were students at Woodstock, would no doubt have sampled Prakash’s peanut butter. “Till 2004, we would directly supply 40 to 50 kg of jam and 100 kg of peanut butter a month to Woodstock. Now we sell through their canteen contractors,” says Prakash.
Most of the well-known hotels and restaurants in Mussoorie and Landour such as The Savoy, Rokeby Manor,
The Landour Bakehouse and Ivy Café, use his products. The shops at the touristhangout of Char Dukan (a cluster of four shops) serve Prakash’s honey and jams with the Landour staple – honey-gingerlemon tea with bun-omelette.
For his own breakfast, Prakash favours his orange marmalade; his wife likes their apricot jam.
Prakash & Co is also a stopover for things other than food. Got a sore throat and need a cough drop? They’ve got it. Raining in Landour? They have brollies! Prakash says with a chuckle: “As Mr Bond wrote in Mussoorie & Landour: Days of Wine & Roses, if you want something and Prakash’s doesn’t have it, you probably don’t need it!”