Just when you thought the alginate bath and the liquid nitrogen cylinder were being pushed to the back of the cupboard, there’s another wave of restaurants setting out to serve ‘modern’, ‘inventive’ and ‘experimental’, especially in Indian cuisine. Might we be clinging to a trend that’s clearly past its ‘best before’ date?
I’ve dined at Indian Accent, Delhi, and been to one of Gaggan Anand’s pop ups in Bangalore. You cannot but applaud the skill and mastery of technique these chefs possess. And, as Rohit Khattar says of his star chef at Indian Accent, ‘Manish can never put out anything that’s less than utterly delicious.’ Modernising Indian food in India is tricky. We have a strong, emotional connection with the food we’ve grown up with, the dishes our grandmothers and mothers cooked and to which we turn when we need comfort or reassurance.
This may be personal, but I cannot stand to see my curd rice tweaked and turned into a crisp containing activated charcoal. Curd rice is to be cool, creamy, pure white, like the innocence of school days when it was your packed lunch. Similarly, I blanch at the idea of wee, microwaved idlis topped off with coconut chutney ‘air’. Would Parisians allow such messing around with their jambon-beurre?
The issue is not with the modernizing of traditional dishes. It’s with the purpose behind such efforts, which call for the use of emulsifiers and pH meters. If a restaurant menu retells a culinary story, celebrating its cultural and historical context, it might serve to take the Indian food movement forward. Most often, though, one sees chefs with a limited understanding of the tradition, coming up with modern editions that have no other purpose than to be different and to please the Instagram foodie.
Chefs who haven’t invested the years it takes to understand a cuisine and who may have but a passing acquaintance with Chef Manish Mehrotra set out to create modern Indian. At their best, the result leaves you wondering what the point of it was. At worst, it becomes a culinary abomination, like this dish I watched being put together – a tandoor-cooked chicken breast stuffed with stringy mozzarella, served in makhni ‘sauce’ with mint chutney foam and microgreens, in an apparent ode to butter chicken.
Research has shown that in times of economic slowdown diners tend to order food they need rather than discretionary dishes. Chefs who are perfecting their techniques to make spheres, orbs and jaljeera caviar to pop into a golgappa may wish to heed the words of the charming and wise Madhur Jaffrey who told me in an interview, ‘The masala dosa is perfect as it is, why deconstruct it?’
