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For the
last month or so, I have been helping Air India (which now means the
old Air India plus the old Indian Airlines) with its inflight
cuisine, largely as a labour of love on the part of a passenger of
many decades standing. While that adventure will have to wait for a
future Rude Food (let the menus be introduced first!), one of the
more enjoyable by-products of this exercise is that I have been
interacting with the two most influential chefs in the recent history
of Indian cuisine.
If you are a foodie or are
involved in the food business, then neither Satish Arora nor Arvind
Saraswat will require any introduction. For the rest of you, this is
who they are: Satish Arora became executive chef of the Taj Bombay
(which then constituted the entire chain) in 1973 when he was just 26.
He was the pioneer of a new
generation of catering college-trained chefs who transformed the way
kitchens were run. Arvind Saraswat was Arora's contemporary at the
Delhi catering college but started out as his junior at the Bombay Taj.
Arvind's period of glory began
with the opening of the Delhi Taj in 1978. It continued through the
opening of the Taj Bengal in 1989 and various other hotels.
Between them, these two men have
changed the face of Indian restaurants forever. If you go out for
dinner today, it is a fair assumption that at least something on the
menu will be directly attributable to the influence of either Arora
or Saraswat.
Of the two, I've known Arora for
the longest period of time - since 1976 in fact. At that stage, he
was a young chef struggling to prove himself in the Taj kitchen.
Arora is now the elder statesman
of his profession, but he still remains the same sort of person:
happiest when cooking with his hands, eager to please and ready to
experiment. I met Arvind Saraswat a little later (when the Taj Palace
opened in 1982) and he was already being referred to as the best chef
in India because of the success of the restaurants at the Taj Mansingh.
Arvind is as uneager to please as
Satish is eager. In demeanour, he resembles one of those romantic,
aloof, aristocratic French chefs (he is good looking enough to have
modelled in Taj ads in the 1980s where he pretended to be a customer
rather than a chef) who treats cooking as a cerebral exercise and has
a detached contempt for those members of his profession who do not
meet his high standards.
In the 1970s and 1980s when Arora
and Saraswat reigned, India was a very different place. Food and wine
imports were either banned outright or discouraged by prohibitive duties.
Indians had no experience of
eating out. When our parents went for an Indian meal they went to a Kwality-style
Punjabi restaurant.
When they wanted Chinese, it was
bland Cantonese cuisine (massively adapted for Indian tastes) that
they were served. French cuisine was largely unknown and represented
by a strange animal called 'Conti' for Continental, which consisted
of the stodgy dishes that chefs in the west had long since stopped making.
It was impossible to get an
authentic pizza in India because nobody had access to Mozzarella or
any other kind of Italian cheese. Pasta meant macaroni with processed
cheese or spaghetti with keema curry.
Of today's hotel chains, it is
ITC which prides itself on the quality of its Indian food. The
Oberois don't give a damn and are busy closing down their Indian restaurants.
And the Taj is astonishingly
reluctant to take credit for the revolution in Indian restaurant
cuisine. But it was almost entirely the Taj group's creation.
When they first started serving
Indian food in the Apollo Room at the Bombay Taj in the 1960s,
customers complained that it tasted nothing like the stuff they were
used to at Gaylord, Kwality and Volga. The Taj was the only hotel
chain not to be run by Punjabis (think about it: the Oberois are
Sardarjis; ITDC was Punjabi-run; ITC was run by Punjabis from ITDC
and the Oberois; and everything else was owned by people called
Lamba, Ghai or Gujral).
So its then management (chiefly,
the Tatas, Ajit Kerkar and Camellia Panjabi who despite her name is a
Sindhi) persisted with the formulation of a different cuisine. By the
time Tanjore opened at the Bombay Taj in 1972 (on Arora's watch), the
chain had made it clear that it was not going to go down the
Kwality-Moghul Room route favoured by the Oberoi group.
The kababs were made by cooks
from Old Delhi. The cuisine included the recipes of home cooking.
And there was a strong regional
bias to the menu. No longer was the kitchen run on the basis of three
curries to which you added mutton, chicken tikka, cream, dahi, more
cream and a garnish of hard-boiled egg.
This was real Indian food,
rediscovered by people with a feel for the cuisine. The Taj followed
it up with other innovations.
Till then, all five star hotels
had been copies of Delhi's Oberoi Intercontinental which was pretty
much a standard Third World Hilton /Sheraton/Intercontinental
property with a menu flown out from middle America. It was Arora's
kitchen that first started serving dosas and idlis on the room
service breakfast menu.
(Till then, you got eggs, steak
and pancakes on the American pattern). So it was with the coffee shop menu.
The new Taj in Bombay was
designed by Dale Keller who also designed the new Oberoi hotels.
Unlike the Oberois, however, the Taj customised Keller's designs.
For instance, he had recommended
that the coffee shop be called Canopy. The Taj took the basic idea,
hung Rajasthani and Gujarati drapes from the roof instead and called
it Shamiana.
(That version of the Shamiana
died some years ago, alas.) Arora took on the challenge of creating a
coffee shop menu that went beyond the chicken-in-the-basket and club sandwich.
The Shamiana's Indian section was
full of unusual dishes, many of them sourced from the streets of
Bombay. The mutton and egg gotala of Mohammad Ali Road was adapted
for the menu and so were many Gujarati and Parsi dishes.
Walk into any Indian hotel today
and you will find that they are serving dosas and regional Indian
dishes in the coffee shop and on room service. No hotel restaurant
would dare serve a Kwality-type Indian menu today.
(Even the Oberois were shamed
into closing down The Moghul Rooms and replacing them with ITC rip-offs
called Kandahar). All this would have been impossible if Arora and
the Taj had not broken with precedent and dared to create a different
kind of hotel cuisine.
Each time you see a pav bhaji on
a menu or order an aaloo puri for breakfast, you are paying tribute
to Arora's influence. Sadly, the Taj did not persist with one of
Arora's greatest innovations.
He invented the chicken tikka
sandwich a full decade before it went on sale all over England.
Unfortunately he only put it on the room service menu and called it,
with a staggering lack of imagination, the Room Service Special.
(By the way, he does a terrific
chicken khurchan sandwich which the Taj flight kitchen loads on to
Indian Airlines flights at tea time). In that era, chefs did
everything and dabbled in every kind of cuisine.
Arora had started out as a 'Conti
chef' (at Delhi's catering college, he was the chief chamcha of the
great Roger Moncourt who would come and lecture to the students) but
quickly adapted to Indian food. In 1973 when the Taj opened the
Golden Dragon and brought Sichuan food to India, he suddenly had to
learn Chinese cooking as well.
The Hong Kong chefs who ran the
restaurant were temperamental and frequently walked out. Arora
trained his own cooks to make the same food.
One day, when the chefs stalked
out, the kitchen operated as though things were normal. No guest
could tell the difference.
The chastened Chinamen returned
and the Taj had no more trouble with them after that. It's funny how
Arora and Saraswat are both inextricably linked to the story of
Chinese food in India despite having had no interest in the cuisine
to begin with.
Like Arora, Saraswat was a 'Conti
chef.' Unlike Arora, however, he had the opportunity to go and work
at the best restaurants in France, England and Italy.
He was startled to handle quality
ingredients. He still remembers how shocked he was when he saw chefs
in England adding cream straight to the pan.
In Indian kitchens in those days,
you could never take that risk because the cream had been adulterated
and diluted and would very likely split in the pan. Saraswat became
chef at the Rendezvous at the Bombay Taj, probably the only genuine
French restaurant in India.
Certainly, he was the only Indian
chef who knew what nouvelle cuisine was because not only did the Taj
send him to Michelin starred restaurants in France but such legends
of the 1970s as Paul Bocuse came and cooked at the Rendezvous. When
the Taj readied to take on the mighty Oberoi Intercontinental in
Delhi in 1978, it assembled the strongest ever team that any hotel
could have had.
Ramesh Johar was general manager
and Arvind Saraswat was chef. It is a measure of how seriously the
Taj took the challenge that Saraswat spent several months cooking in
Italy before opening the Casa Medici.
Then, Kerkar, Camellia, Arora and
Saraswat drove across Italy stealing the best dishes from every
restaurant. Haveli, the Indian restaurant, represented a particular challenge.
Could a hotel serve non-Punjabi
food in a Punjabi city? Saraswat scoured India for recipes, many of
which (such as achar gosht, introduced for the first time at Haveli)
were completely unfamiliar to Delhiites. At the coffee shop, Machan,
Saraswat brought some of the Shamiana's greatest hits but also added
trademark dishes of his own such as the Burmese Mah-Mi soup which is
still on the menu, decades later.
But the real importance of the
food at the Taj Mansingh lies in the influence it had on Chinese
cuisine in India. The Golden Dragon had made Bombay's Cantonese
restaurateurs sit up and take note - Nelson Wang says he invented
Chicken Manchurian because guests suddenly started asking for spicy
Chinese food, having eaten at the Dragon.
Sweet corn soup with crab meat
simply did not cut it any longer. But, five years after the Golden
Dragon had taken Bombay and Madras (a Dragon opened in Madras in 1974
at the Taj Coromandel) by storm, Delhi was still immune to the spicy
flavours of Sichuan.
Chinese food at such restaurants
as Chungwa and Fujiya was dull and stodgy. The epitome of Chinese
cuisine was Mandarin at the Janpath hotel which served acceptable but
entirely inauthentic Chinese restaurant food.
Arvind had some experience of
Chinese food - he was executive chef of the Coromandel in Madras
which had a Golden Dragon. But he was never terribly keen on it.
Nevertheless, from the day the
House of Ming, the Dragon equivalent in Delhi, opened its doors, he
realised that Sichuan cuisine would be the hotel's calling card. Many
of the flavours we now associate with Chinese food in India and
certainly, the thick red gravies that mix so well with rice, first
travelled to north India via the House of Ming.
Within months of the restaurant's
opening, every Chinese restaurant in Delhi had begun to put the new
dishes on the menu. As most of the ethnic Chinese restaurateurs in
the Capital were India-born and bred, never having travelled further
east than Chowringhee, they had no idea of how to recreate the
flavours of Sichuan cuisine.
So they upped the chilli content,
made every sauce red and threw in lots of cornflour. In the process,
the bastard creation that is junk Chinese in India was born.
Arora gave up running the Bombay
Taj. Arvind first oversaw the opening of the Taj Palace and then
opted for a less hands-on role.
Both chefs were given grand but
largely meaningless designations. They first became Chefs Culinaire
(Arvind confesses that he made up the name and sold it to Ajit
Kerkar) and then Directors of Food Production, a bizarre title that
makes them sound like assembly line managers at a Maggi noodles factory.
But neither stopped cooking or
inventing. Arora created the big budget banquet that the Bombay Taj
now specialises in.
Arvind turned up in Calcutta in
1987. I lived in the city then and assured him that people in
Calcutta did not eat out.
He opened three wildly successful
restaurants that were packed out night after night and laughed in my
face. In his own way, he changed the eating out culture of Calcutta
as well.
I suspect that for the last
decade or so the Taj group has not known what to do with its biggest
stars. Arora turned the flight kitchen around and while it has been a
pleasure to deal with him again over the Air India meals, I always
feel that his employers wasted his talents in the later phase of his career.
Arvind is a great teacher and the
Taj used him to train chefs. Plus he wrote two books that are now
standard texts for chefs.
But he never got to open the
Indian restaurant that he had dreamed of. (He had even designed the
menus.) But I guess that the kind of influence these two men have had
brings its own rewards. Within the Taj they used to complain that
both Arora and Saraswat never encouraged juniors.
I did not agree. In those days if
you went to a Taj restaurant, liked the food and asked to meet the
chef, the man who had actually cooked it would be sent to your table.
These days, at most five star
hotels, the executive chef himself turns up and pretends he's cooked
everything. And I think that time has proven me right.
Wherever in the world you go, you
will bump into ex-Taj chefs who will tell you that they learnt
everything from Arora or Saraswat. These chefs have no reason to lie.
And to be consistently rated as
gurus to whole generations of chefs is a greater reward than any
designation or pay rise. Then, there's the food itself.
Of how many chefs, anywhere in
the world, can it be said that they changed the way in which
restaurant menus are written? Auguste Escoffier, perhaps. Paul
Bocuse, in a certain era, you could argue.
And that's about it. But every
time you eat at an Indian hotel, each time you order a Sichuan meal,
and whenever you see a regional dish on a North Indian menu, you
encounter the influence of Satish Arora and Arvind Saraswat.
Who could ask for a greater legacy?.
Editor's
Note : Puneet Arora has long
been treading in his father's footsteps as a truly great chef. He has
worked for G.K.Noon and his companies, firstly Noon then Bombay Halwa
for many years creating and refining dishes for mass production. With
so much experience and ability it is not surprising that he is now
off to Thailand to be top man at a new food production operation that
will stretch his many talents.
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