Michelin-starred and critically acclaimed, with a slew of successful restaurants, books, consultancies, and brands under his belt, the Culinary Ambassador for Great Britain has got Indian cuisine the recognition it deserves. He’s been hailed as the father of India Modern and still leads the way to new twists on taste and plating today.
When his latest food creation post dropped on Instagram, it garnered more than 1,80,000 likes and fuelled 500+ comments in just a few days. A striking looking rose jalebi on a tres leches base, the decadent dessert created quite a stir. More than anything, the thought hit me — why hasn’t anyone thought of a rose-flavoured, differently coloured jalebi before this! And that, for me, is what sets Chef Vineet Bhatia apart from all the other culinary masters out there. The fact that he continues to create new and surprising elements and put them together in what seems to have been a pairing waiting to happen.
Somewhat like his famous chocolate samosas that brought him so much acclaim from customers that every time he opened a new restaurant, patrons pressured him to put them on the menu. He’s moved so far beyond them now, with his initial idea having been recreated (read copied!) by several chefs, but people still remember him for that first light bulb moment. Chef Bhatia has certainly had more than his fair share of these.
When I first tasted his gourmand tasting menu in Ziya at the Oberoi Mumbai in 2015, I was impressed with the way he presented the first course inside a broken coconut shell balanced on a pile of snow-white pebbles. Each of his seven courses had this visual vibrance as well as some really interesting juxtaposition of flavours, textures, and various regional Indian cuisines. While one referenced Maharashtrian tomato saar, another had curry leaf prawn, and a third had a lamb chop wearing a halo of a delicate saunf-embellished makhni sauce. As he puts it, “People say my food looks very Western. But I always say, ‘If you eat with your eyes closed, it’s India on your palate!’”
Chef Bhatia has been making waves ever since he first moved to the UK in the early 1990s and started working in Indian restaurants there. He was initially taken aback when he saw what passed for Indian food abroad. Which is why he was determined to change the narrative. Opening his own restaurants, he was able to do this effectively. He tells us how. “Everybody enjoys classic Indian food and so do I. But what makes people come to your restaurant? What is your USP? And this is what I learnt from an early stage… that you have something cutting edge, which is different from the pack.”
He explains, “Mom cooks at home, it doesn’t have so many masalas and spices and oils. Unfortunately, when you go to a restaurant, the food is quite heavy on those fats and masalas, and everything almost tastes the same. When I went to the UK, I started doing classics but in a very light manner. A lot of the people in those days were so used to eating in curry houses, they never understood Indian cuisine at all. I was told this is five-star cuisine, it will never work in Europe or London.”
Despite being labelled a probable fiasco, Bhatia stuck to his guns. Getting rave reviews from the country’s top newspapers gave him the boost and assurance he needed. He not only reeducated the Western world about the classics, but also found people appreciating and enjoying the flavours. “Subsequently, what happened was, that instead of putting the food into a bowl or making it look like a brown stew or a red stew, I started putting it into various kinds of serviceware and making it look interesting. Now that was the precursor for what you call modern, progressive cuisine, because no one was doing it in those days, in 1992-93,” he says.
In fact, he was one of the first chefs to start thinking of how to make food look beautiful. “That snowballed into putting Indian food into various kinds of tasting menus or set up into courses, which had never been done before.” He recalls his first menu which had five courses. “Everybody said, ‘how can you have a five course Indian meal?’ But I said, if you structure it correctly, there’s enough protein, enough starch, enough carbs, and vegetables to complete the entire meal and still feel light. The food was very refined. And that has now somehow triggered ‘progressive Indian evolved cuisine’ and everyone is on the bandwagon and now trying to make sure that they can do it too,” he chuckles.
The redoubtable food critic Vir Sanghvi had said a while back of him, that he was, in some ways, the father of modern progressive Indian cuisine. “If you look back and see. we were probably one of the very first people to do it. I don’t know if I was the first person or not, but one of the first few guys around the world to have looked at Indian food in a new avatar,” Bhatia acquiesces.
It has changed the dynamics of Indian cuisine around the world. Bhatia says, “You can go into any mega city now and you’ll have restaurants which are doing food which looks beautiful. I do find that very satisfying. It’s also very flattering, because many times you find your own staff, chefs who have been through your kitchens, and they take that ethos with them.” It’s true. When I stayed at the One&Only Le Saint Géran in Mauritius, a meal at Vineet Bhatia’s restaurant there was tagged as one of the absolute must-dos. Down the years, his restaurant Rasoi in London, UK, and Geneva, Switzerland, have been awarded Michelin stars. He’s also expanded his horizons with a big presence in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Currently, he has 11 restaurants, including his signature ‘KAMA by Vineet’ at Harrods, London. In India, you can take measure of his vision when you eat at Ziya at The Oberoi Mumbai as I do often.
After acing it in kitchens, books, TV, OTT, Instagram, what next? His adventurous spirit has him cooking up a storm at Everest Basecamp, in the Arctic and even the Antarctic! He’s created a line of dehydrated spice mixes that will bring his flavours to every kitchen and has been teaching an online course with the BBC that will arm would-be cooks with all the techniques. But that Vineet Bhatia verve that ignites the imagination and leads to intelligent innovation? We think that is a special spark that just has to come from within.
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