Indian chef Gaggan Anand sets his eyes on a new culinary adventure

His restaurant is ranked Asia's best and among the world's top five, but a restless Gaggan Anand has more to offer

It’s 11:30 pm and I seem to have surreptitiously crept into Gaggan Anand’s celebration party at his new natural wine bar called Wet in Bangkok. Barely 24 hours ago, Anand’s eponymous restaurant in Bangkok’s dingy Soi Langsuan lane had been voted the “world’s fourth best restaurant” at the definitive annual restaurant ranking extravaganza — the World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards — in Singapore.

For the last five years, Anand, 42, has been the only Indian chef to make the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, topping its Asian sub-vertical four years in a row. The fourth position now makes it the only restaurant from Asia to ever achieve such a high rating, affording it legendary status in the culinary hall of fame.

Dressed in a loose black David Bowie T-shirt and gym shorts, Anand spends most of the night behind the bar playing DJ, and his classic rock playlist features the likes of the Foo Fighters, Queen, David Bowie and Red Hot Chili Peppers. “My team creates these wonderful dishes and I just put my name on them and take the fame,” says a modest Anand when I go up to congratulate him. His team is made up of 90 chefs and assistants who cook twice each night for 45 guests — a 2:1 ratio only a few restaurants in the world can boast of. 

 

Securing a reservation at Gaggan is a whole different ball game. The restaurant opened in December 2010 to mixed reviews. Just six months later, favourable word of mouth in Bangkok ensured that it was full every night. Almost a year later, international foodies began to hear of an Indian chef cooking “molecular gastronomy” in Bangkok and a waitlist was established. In mid-2015, Anand was approached by David Gelb, the American director who had made the successful documentary film Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Gelb was directing the second season of the hit docu-series Chef’s Table for Netflix that documented the stories of chef’s doing incredible things around the world. The likes of Massimo Bottura and Grant Achatz had appeared in the series earlier and the show was gaining a dedicated audience. “Would Gaggan allow a film crew to follow him around in Bangkok for a month?” Gelb had enquired in an email. 

“After Netflix, everything went crazy. We would receive thousands of emails every day from around the world. For a couple of days our website even crashed,” recalls Anand. “I had just one member checking reservation emails then and I had to hire a team of eight people after that.” The episode on Anand’s journey was a runaway hit, becoming the only one in the series to be nominated for an Emmy Award. Gaggan became a household name, with a waiting list now extending to six months. Foodies from around the world would first secure a reservation at the restaurant and then plan their travel to Thailand. 

But a lot has changed since, particularly Anand himself.

Born in Kolkata and influenced by his mother’s cooking, Anand completed catering college in Thiruvananthapuram and joined the Taj Group of Hotels as a junior trainee in New Delhi. Here he was introduced to the world of fine-dining and learnt to make classic French sauces like Béchamel along the way. Clearly ambitious and overly expressive, he soon found that he was a misfit in the large bureaucratic structure of Indian hotels. So he moved to Bangkok, with no money, but secured a job at a contemporary Indian restaurant called Red. Wanting to learn more, he applied for an internship at the now defunct El Bulli, a Michelin three-starred restaurant run by chef Ferran Adrià in Spain. It had won the World’s Best Restaurant title a record five times and was known to have the most cutting-edge kitchen, experimenting with scientific methods that later defined the term “molecular gastronomy”. 

On his return to Bangkok, Anand set up his own restaurant and tried to apply what he had learnt at El Bulli to Indian cuisine using methods like spherification and playing with liquid nitrogen. The food was known as “Progressive Indian” but due to commercial considerations, he played it safe initially. Perhaps his most famous dish — and the only one to remain on his menu from the beginning — is the “Yogurt Explosion” that recreates the flavours of dahi chaat, one of his favourite dishes growing up. He presented it in a sphere that would explode in the mouth. Today the dish has been copied by almost every modern Indian restaurant across the world. “They may call it something else, like Dahi Sphere, but it is my dish,” says Anand.

He continued serving such modern variations of Indian street food for the next couple of years in a menu that featured 25 bite-sized courses. It all seemed to be going well. The restaurant was always full and awards, like two Michelin stars, kept coming in. But there was a problem: Anand was bored. 

He finally had commercial security and was now in a position to take risks and push his own boundaries. So he began to travel incessantly and fell in love with Japan. “I have been to Japan 84 times in the last five years,” he proclaims. Japanese techniques and ingredients began showing up on his now much-copied “emoji” menu, which he terms the “universal language of food” where guests do not know exactly what they are eating as each dish is explained only by an emoji.

Gaggan in Bangkok has been voted the ‘world’s fourth best restaurant’

He says his food today is “cuisine agnostic” and involves ingredients and dishes he fell in love with on his travels: like the bluefin tuna “O toro sushi” dish, the most expensive Japanese fish with the highest percentage of fat, which he sears gently with a blow-torch to give it a melt-in-the-mouth texture. But an Indian restaurant serving Japanese sushi was not enough for him. He wanted to be even more provocative. “I had to change the definition of fine-dining. The restaurant experience should be fun, not stuck up and pretentious. Ninety per cent of the dishes at my restaurant are eaten by hand,” he says. “We even have a dish called ‘Lick It Up’ which you can only eat by licking the plate. I have fun watching the biggest foodies in the world who eat at every Michelin starred restaurant come here and lick my plates!” he chuckles.

In 2017, Anand shocked the world by announcing that he would shut his restaurant in June 2020. Critics termed it a marketing gimmick and his friends warned him that it would be a suicidal career move. But he was adamant. “In 2020, it will be 10 years of the restaurant. We have achieved more than we set out to and all good things must come to an end.” 

Anand will move to Fukuoka in Japan, where he will start from scratch and build what he terms “the most inaccessible restaurant” in the world along with business partner and friend Chef Takeshi “Goh” Fukuyama. “We will be open every alternate month with a new menu and direction. The months that we are closed will be used for R&D where we will experiment with new dishes,” he explains. He is even toying with the idea of creating rooms adjoining the restaurant, which guests must check into the day before their meal and for the next 24 hours the restaurant will prepare them for the dining experience to come. 

Nobody knows if the new venture in Japan will succeed, but it is evident that Anand is not motivated by money. He has turned down offers to open multi-million dollar franchises in New York, London, Dubai and also India. Brands routinely offer him astronomical sums to endorse their products and offers to cook at private gatherings, including big fat Indian weddings of billionaires, are aplenty. Not many chefs would be able to turn their back on all of this. 

With only a year to go, Anand is making succession plans for his Bangkok restaurant. His long serving Indonesian head chef, Rydo Anton, will take over the space but the restaurant will no longer be called Gaggan. 

Anand has other successful ventures in his empire, too. He has invested in a group of young, talented chefs and partners like the Suhring brothers, the identical German twins whose restaurant has been awarded two Michelin stars. Anand also co-founded Gaa, which is helmed by one of his former head chefs, Garima Arora, who was rated Asia’s Best Female Chef this year. And there’s more: earlier this year, he set up his long-time Serbian head sommelier, Vladimir Kojic, with a wine bar in Bangkok. “These guys are the future. They have been with me in good times and bad, and now it’s their time to shine,” he says. 

As the night winds down at the celebration party in Bangkok, I watch as Anand takes a seat away from the crowd. Alone in the back of the bar, he plays his favourite song, “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, and discreetly sings along to the chorus: “If everything could ever feel this real forever. If anything could ever be this good again.”