2019’s biggest food trend may see chefs bringing their own culinary cultures to restaurant kitchens

There is no butter chicken on the menu. The maah ki daal (as dal makhni, black lentils, was correctly called in Punjabi homes before it got restaurantised) is sans the overload of cream that makes it so famous or infamous. There are no clichés like sarson ka saag, mustard greens cooked to death in oil and ginger and garlic, either.

Instead, at Curry Singh Kitchen, a small, 30-cover restaurant in Gurugram, tucked away from flashy malls and prime real estate, chef Reetika Gill serves up home-style turnips, cooked with just turmeric and cumin, gently sautéed radish greens in season that the chef has just bought herself from the local market, and a meat curry that your mother may have cooked on Sunday had you grown up in a middle-class Punjabi home.

This is food that is very different from the clichés of restaurant-created Punjabi food that the world recognises as “Indian”. This is food that Gill grew up eating; recipes cooked by her mother and grandmother.

Chef Prateek Sadhu, the co-owner of Masque, and his mother Teja Lahori Sadhu cooked together at the restaurant during an event to showcase traditional Kashmiri Pandit food such as maatz and katlam

And this is exactly the kind of food that she is now keen to feed diners at large. What makes Gill’s restaurant debut with Curry Singh Kitchen interesting is that she is no home chef — instead, she is professionally trained and is the daughter of chef Manjit Singh Gill, corporate chef at ITC Hotels, one of the senior-most and wellknown chefsin the country today.

“I studied in New Zealand and can cook international dishes well, too. However, I realised that none of that was food that I could relate to. This food is me. The Punjabi identity is me.

Chef Reetika Gill was inspired by the homely cooking of her mother, Sally Gill. Reetika’s restaurant, Curry Singh Kitchen, does not serve usual restaurant dishes like butter chicken.

And I am very proud to cook food that I also love to eat,” she says, as we sit on wooden benches one cold winter evening and share a hot and hearty meal cooked by the chef that does not leave us with a calorie overload and regret later.

Reetika Gill is not alone. A clutch of younger Indian chefs is looking inwards to their own culinary cultures, to the foods their mothers, fathers and families cooked, as inspiration to develop their signature styles that become evident on their restaurant menus.

Indian restaurant food is in the midst of an inward-looking moment. If the future is based on the present, 2019’s biggest restaurant trend will be the cultural transference of “maa ke haath ka khana” — flavours of the much-vaunted “my mother’s cooking” — from homes into restaurants.

Like Italians, Spaniards and people from other culinary cultures around the world, people in India have always prized “mom’s cooking” over everything else, irrespective of regions and communities. Yet, the eating out culture in the country, ironically, created and served food completely different from what was deemed as “homely”.

Restaurateurs and chefs argued that consumers wanted to only pay for dishes that were different from what was cooked at home. In the process of creating restaurantised Indian food, gravies were bastardised, spicing became indistinct bung-it-all-in affairs to compensate for the freshness of ingredients, heavy cream and dried fruits got added to make dishes richer and “restaurant appropriate”.

This was food that no one ate at home but became signature “Indian”. Now, the wheel has come a full circle and the trend reversed.

As chefs go back to their roots and diners deprived of flavours of home thanks to work, travel and the globalisation of the palate look for nostalgia, the new year is going to see more momentum for this inward movement.

In Mumbai, the much-feted chef Prateek Sadhu, head chef and coowner of Masque, has been gradually turning to the Kashmiri Pandit food of his childhood. When Sadhu started Masque two years ago, the idea was to do a menu based loosely on “Indian ingredients” that had either been foraged or grown in farms that the chef had a direct connect with.

The restaurant that offered only tasting menus, a tour of its kitchen between courses, and technically-perfect dishes highlighting seasonal ingredients was undoubtedly an ambitious and brave new entrant into the usually clichéridden world of Indian restaurants.

Identity Through Food
Over, the last few months, instead of the lose all-round focus on “Indian ingredients”, Sadhu’s work has become more precise, drawing inspiration from Kashmiri ingredients and flavours that he remembers eating at home. “I think, initially, we were trying to define who we were and it was also about struggling to find my own identity,” says Sadhu, who had trained at Noma. In a process of personal and professional evolution, he is now on a path of rediscovery of his roots.

Sadhu’s family had to flee Srinagar overnight in 1990. He was five and still has memories of sitting in a truck with whatever belongings could be hastily assembled. The family moved to Delhi eventually and Sadhu remembers his mother cooking offals (that were his maternal grandfather’s favourites), maatz (a mince dish cooked with just yoghurt, fennel and cardamom), tripe with turnips or even just dried vegetables during winter. “It did not make any sense for my mother to be cooking dried, preserved vegetables during Delhi winter.

In Kashmir, where everything is snowed-in, it would make sense. But not in Delhi, where you get all kinds of produce.

But it became a ritual because that was her way of staying connected with her heritage,” he says. This strong sense of identity is what is reflected in Sadhu’s cooking these days. A new dish on his restaurant menu is inspired by the gushtaba, topped with a morel-yakhni (yoghurt sauce).

The dish is technically sound — the mince is churned (instead of beaten as in a gushtaba) to make it lighter and aerated. It is inventive but the flavours of the yakhni are the same as Sadhu remembers from his mother’s cooking.

In fact, in September, his mother Teja Lahori Sadhu cooked alongside her son at Masque to showcase traditional Pandit food, to mark the restaurant’s second anniversary. “There is so much to Kashmiri food than the wazwan; ingredients, flavours and cooking techniques. I am discovering these and this journey has changed me as a person, too.
  Chef Regi Mathew hired Shiela Michael, a 68-year-old grandmother, to only make kudampuliyitta viral meen curry at Kapa Chakka Kandhari

I am in a much happier space now,” Sadhu says. If food is art, it is important for a chef to delve into issues of personal identity to be able to create a signature style that defines him — the person and the professional. Younger chefs, long influenced by what top chefs in different countries were doing, seem to be finally making these journeys of self-discoveries to find a language unique to themselves.

Chef Rahul Gomes Pereira of Passcode Hospitality — which runs restaurants such as PCO, Sazerac and Jamun — says he was influenced by chef Daniel Humm (of the New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park, now fourth on the 50 Best list). But “the beauty of being influenced by him is that he forces you to find your own style,” says Pereira.

So, Pereira looked inwards, at the food of his own Goan family. “Every summer holidays, we stayed in this large ancestral house with the extended family. Every day was devoted to food, and not just my mother, but different matriarchs cooked their specials.

It was almost like a competition and we the children were the helpers in the kitchen. From butchery to curing meats, everything was done in the house and I inevitably learnt all this,” he adds.

Three years ago, the chef who is fondly called Picu, decided to set up an eponymous restaurant, Picu’s, in Goa, focussing on local ingredients and techniques and employing only Goan women. That did not work out and he joined the Delhi restaurant company. “Initially, I had to work on western menus for different restaurants but I had discussed my thoughts on the kind of restaurant I wanted right at the time of joining,” he says.

Jamun, the Indian restaurant he has won so much acclaim for, opened precisely a year ago, with crowd-sourced recipes. While at the heart of the restaurant is the chef’s Goan heritage that plays out in its best dishes, several women of various communities and regions have cooked in the kitchen, demonstrating their recipes, some of which have been incorporated into the final menu.

My best meal of 2018 was undoubtedly at Kapa Chakka Kandhari in Chennai, an understated understated restaurant that has escaped national attention but has been doing phenomenally well since it opened earlier this year. Helmed by chef Regi Mathew, the restaurant serves non-restaurantised Kerala dishes. There is no Malabari paratha or generic fish curry.

Instead, the recipes have been collected from not just Mathew’s mother but many different “ammas, achammas and ammummas” in different villages of the state, as the menu mentions.

Edita Cotta is not a trained chef but heads the Spice Studio kitchen at the Alila Diwa Goa. She grinds her own spices for dishes such as okra caldin

You have hard-to-find regional dishes such as the fluffy Ramassery idli, steamed in a cloth, native to a small village near Palakkad; ellum kappa, tapioca cooked with buffalo rib bones and meat in home-made spices, which is an alternative to the biryani; and the kudampuliyitta viral meen curry, a Syrian Christian fish curry cooked in earthenware.

The last is in fact cooked by Shiela Michael, a 68-year-old grandmother, whose sprightliness belies her age and who Mathew employs full time at the restaurant to make just that dish. "These are specialised dishes and will be lost if we do not protect and popularise them," he says. So much is the idea of "mother's cooking" and the research around family or village recipes ingrained in the ethos of the restaurant that the menu is signed off with the line "with blessings from all the mothers".

Chef Rahul Gomes Pereira does Goan food at Jamun, inspired by the recipes of his mother and other matriachs in the family, who he would help during his summer holidays from school

At the newly refurbished Spice Studio at the Alila Diwa Goa, chef Edita Cotta will cheerfully rustle up her okra caldin for you. It is a bestseller on the menu that is dominated by homestyle Catholic Goan food from the south. Cotta is not a trained chef but a grandmother who now heads the restaurant's kitchen and is known to the entire staff as "our grandmother". She grinds her own spices, cooks and feeds guests in the same way as a matriarch would.

As more and more Indians grow up alienated from their own food cultures, there is a distinct movement taking shape, led by chefs going back to their own roots. At the same time, the diversity of our food cultures means that what's in the karahi never gets boring. As the cauldron keeps simmering, the new year is sure to bring in more of these new-yet-old flavours to our plates

Source:-https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/food-entertainment/food-services/2019s-biggest-food-trend-may-see-chefs-bringing-their-own-culinary-cultures-to-restaurant-kitchens/67307479