Gargi Gupta chats with Hemant Oberoi about experimenting with cuisines and writing a book.
It is a good hour past the scheduled time for this interview when Hemant Oberoi, Executive Grand Chef of the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, walks into Wasabi at the Taj Mahal Hotel in the capital. He was at the Taj Palace — the group’s other five-star hotel in the city — where he was overseeing additions to the menu at Masala Art. As corporate chef of the Taj group’s luxury division, Oberoi is clearly a busy man.
Taj’s well-oiled PR machinery and Wasabi’s famed food, however, make up for the star chef’s absence. The Delhi Wasabi is marking it’s third birthday this week with the launch of a new Omakase (Japanese for “chef’s choice”) menu, and senior chef Vikramjit Roy has given free play to his ingenuity — combining ingredients such as blue cheese, purple sweet potato and cheese fondue unusual to Japanese cuisine, with the traditional tamari soys and misos — to dish out to a six-course meal that follows in the steps of “fusion cuisine” developed by Masaharu Morimoto, the legendary chef who’s lent his name, his menu and brand equity to Wasabi.
“But how far can you innovate with a cuisine without its becoming something else altogether,” I ask Chef Oberoi, who has joined us midway through the third course, an excellent kinome and sansho crusted foie gras. After all, Oberoi is himself a fusion artist — he was the one who fashioned the vegetarian menu at Wasabi, when few could have imagined sushi without fish. And he’s widely been credited with pioneering “alternative Indian” cuisine — Cali-Indian, a mesh of Californian and Indian foods, at Apollo Bar, and contemporary north-Indian at the restaurants under the Masala franchise. It was he again who set off the Pan Asian cuisine-fad with Side Wok in 1999.
“You have to know the traditions first,” the answer is firm and immediate, delivered in Oberoi’s characteristically gentle, soft-spoken tones, “before you can bend the rules. There are no short cuts. When we were revamping the menu at Golden Dragon, we travelled all over Sichuan province.”
Much of Oberoi’s flair for innovation comes from research, travelling to far off places to look up little-known cuisines. And it’s a continual process of discovery. Only last month, Oberoi was in Kolkata sampling the fare at six homes in the city. “They cook their malai chingri along with the heads,” he muses at the discovery. Of course, in north India they would never accept that.”
Much of this research, and experiments with cuisines, has found its way into The Masala Art: Indian Haute Cuisine, his book that is already available in the stores, although it hasn’t been formally launched yet. “And no it isn’t a recipe book, although it does have some recipes,” Oberoi is quick to qualify.
More From This Section
Coming back to Wasabi, have Delhi-wallahs warmed up to its new-fangled take on Japanese cuisine, I ask. Is it even the best-performing restaurant at the Taj Mahal hotel? “Machan, being a multi-cuisine, 24-hour diner does best here, followed by House of Ming and Varq, and then Wasabi. But you must remember that the cost of ingredients in Japanese cuisine is very high, as much as 40 to 50 per cent of the cost of running a restaurant,” Oberoi explains. Wasabi also no longer gets its fish daily from Tokyo, as it did when it first opened; it is imported from Europe these days.
The conversation over the long drawn out lunch veers to Oberoi’s family. “My two sons are both in this business; the elder is assistant manager at the Bombay Brasserie [London’s oldest Indian fine diner] and the younger is a trainee at the Taj.” That’s three chefs in the family, surely enough to start a business? “You never know,” the chef smiles.
As of now, there’s the new hotel that the Taj group is opening in Morocco that’s on top of his agenda.