The best Indian chef in the world
Gaggan Anand has nothing but contempt for chicken tikka masala, said Sheila Marikar in
The New York Times. The most famous Indian chef in the world complains that “Indians have let their food be defined by what the world wants from them” rather than by the complex, strongly flavored fare they actually consume in their homes. This, he explains, has prejudiced his Eurocentric colleagues against his inventive Indian cuisine, and made earning their esteem difficult. “As a chef, it’s a disgrace that I sit with Japanese, French, and Italian chefs and they talk about fine dining, and I’m like a donkey, just sitting there,” says Anand, 42. “They will always value a French dish more than an Indian dish. They don’t care what techniques you use. I get so angry.” Anand grew up in the slums of Kolkata in India and now operates out of Thailand, where his restaurant last year was awarded two Michelin stars and was named one of the best in the world. He says the pandemic has forced him to focus on a neglected local market, because the foreign foodies who made up much of his clientele are no longer flying. “We ignored our immediate 50 kilometers for a decade because we were in the fame run,” he says. “Our reservations were full; we didn’t give a [expletive]. We are now more connected to the community, to foodies who may not have been able to afford us.”
When Frampton realized he was broke
Peter Frampton can recall the moment when he became just another “disposable teen idol,” said Jim Farber in TheGuardian .com. In the mid-1970s, his unique, jazz-influenced guitar style and good looks briefly made him the hottest rock ’n’ roller in the world. “I realized that instead of the front row being a mixture of 50-50, male and female, in the audience, it was all females at the front and the guys are pissed off at the back,” he said. “The guys would jeer at me.” His double album Frampton Comes Alive was so enormously successful, he says, that “it affected me mentally.” Now he was a rock star under enormous pressure to repeat that success. After a near-fatal car accident in the Bahamas, he became addicted to the morphine that doctors had prescribed for his pain. Frampton already had been abusing drugs for years, helped, he said, by a now-dead manager who procured as much cocaine and weed Frampton as could consume to distract him from the ongoing theft that the man perpetrated. “I had less than nothing,” Frampton says. “I owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was kept high. He didn’t want me thinking about what was going on. It was criminal.”