Chef Julia Komp is famous in Germany’s culinary circles. She is the country’s youngest woman to helm a Michelin-starred restaurant. In 2016, at the age of 27, Chef Julia earned a star for Schloss Loersfeld near Cologne, which she headed. Now, upscale diners in the Indian metros and Bangalore know of her, too. Chef Julia was here, cooking dinners at Ottimo restaurants in ITC Hotels across the country.
Small groups of diners – the German chef prefers no more than 40 guests – paid big bucks and sat down to six-course meals. The dinners were a taste of what the coveted star represents as a culinary standard. Chef Julia’s style has been variously described as French and Nordic. These she imbues with flavours from Asia, the Orient and, particularly, Tunisia, a country she has been holidaying in since childhood. The lamb is accompanied by Persian lime and the chocolate dessert is inflected with cardamom and rose.
Her focus is on the best local ingredients and simple, yet elegant cooking techniques. The flavours are clean, pure, frequently fruity. Each plate is exquisitely built and includes small touches – little sharks cut out of carrot sheets and lentil puree moulded into a hamsa – that evoke a smile. It’s evident this young, but prodigiously talented chef with a unique approach is creating every plate and attending to every detail. That’s what made this series of dinners a memorable experience for diners.
Consider, then, the reality here. Even the best name chefs seem not to have the bandwidth to pay that sort of attention to what they are serving up. Our restaurants are large, the number of tables high and set menus which compel diners to trust the chef haven’t quite caught on. Still, going by how quickly the Julia Komp dinners were sold out, there would appear to be a demand for more indulgent, sophisticated food experiences. As an industry, restaurants should be able to cater to that niche, too, no matter how small.
I asked the affable Amaan Kidwai, General Manager of the ITC Gardenia and himself a seasoned F&B professional, if he foresaw small dining spaces with top notch culinary offerings appearing on the scene. ‘Unlikely’, he said. ‘There aren’t enough takers to make such concepts a viable business.’
So, pop-up experiences would be the way to go. They allow restaurants to collaborate with the best chefs and deliver dining experiences to wow the discerning customer, occasionally, if not all the time. Sure, restaurants are businesses like any other, but they are also entrusted with determining how well a city eats and are custodians of urban food cultures. They have the responsibility to infuse the eating out scene with excitement and to raise culinary standards in the long term.
