Chef Arvind Saraswat of the Taj group tells a hilarious story of the time he had spent at New York's Culinary Institute of America (CIA) for a course in advanced professional cooking. When he returned to New Delhi's Palam airport, seeing his suitcase was liberally plastered with stickers from the institute, customs asked him a few stern questions about his activities in New York. Twenty four years later, Saraswat's plush cabin in the bowels of New Delhi's Taj Palace Hotel is crammed with gold, silver and bronze medals for the Olympics. Of the culinary variety that is. The venue was the studio kitchen at the Taj Palace, and the players were chefs from each of the chain's hotels all over India, Nepal and Sri Lanka in what was a never-seen-before in India cooking competition.
There are several ways of holding a culinary competition. This year at Singapore's month-long food festival, participating chefs were given a black box with ingredients. They were expected to put together a meal using all of them. The black box competition as it has come to be known, tests one's ingenuity to the limit, but is not really of relevance to the Taj group. Instead, the one the Taj Group has hit on _ this year at any rate _ is to call three chefs from every unit and ask them to prepare a four-course meal within 90 minutes. The meal is rated on four criteria, only one of which is taste. The audience in the studio kitchen comprises a panel of judges, all expectedly food expeerts, yet only one from within the Taj group.
Most participating chefs are of the level of commis, chef de partie and sous. Used to working away from the glare of the spotlight, the ever-present band of press photographers and television cameramen in the studio kitchen cause beads of perspiration to break out on the brows of most participating chefs. Most of all, however, it is the presence of Chef Saraswat himself in the studio kitchen that is the cause for quaking hearts: no detail however trifling, escapes his eye.
More From This Section
"I started faxing all the units in January 2000" says Saraswat, who admits that most of the last four months have gone into the enormous preparations for the competition. Each hotel in the chain could send one team of three chefs in any of the events relating to Indian, Chinese, French, Italian and Thai cuisine.
While many general managers and executive chefs held hasty competitions to determine which cuisine their hotel would represent, Taj Coromandel's Executive Chef hand-picked Sous Chef Fabian Ravi. "It's probably because I've represented the hotel before and know the ropes," says a delighted Ravi, clutching his silver medal. Ravi, who heads the Patio kitchen in Chennai was in no doubt of the cuisine he'd showcase: French. Putting together the menu, however, was less trouble than forming a team. "Work schedules being as hectic as they are, it was a major exercise in logistics for three of us to practise together." Three chefs practising cooking sounds like an oxymoron except that for Ravi and the other participants of the 45 teams in the competition, it was rigorous.
"First we had to decide on a menu. Not only did it have to be up to scratch in terms of taste and presentation, it had to be put together in the stipulated time. Which meant that we had to walk the tight-rope between being too lack-lustre and overly complicated." Ravi and his team broke up the preparation for the meal three ways, and memorised them just like actors in a play. "Working in concert is vital," explains Ravi. "In those 90 minutes, I've just about got time for my part. I can't be monitoring the other two."
Achieving clockwork precision may seem an unnecessary detail in a hotel kitchen where chaos seems to reign, but nothing could be further from the truth. The judges were given four criteria to evaluate each of the four entries in a meal: mise-en-place (orderly pre-cooking preparation), professional preparation, presentation and taste. Surprisingly, the single largest component of marks were awarded to preparation rather than taste. "The way a team cooks - getting one step out of the way before going on to the next, will ultimately reflect on the taste," says Saraswat offering a little-known insight.
Says one judge, The Oberoi's executive chef Jean Marc Gonzales about the competition, "It's an excellent idea to motivate kitchen staff, but a little more transparency could be built into the exercise. For one, the recipes could be made available to the judges; for another, we should be allowed to tell the team where they have gone wrong."
The whole exercise, which occasionally threatened to turn into a nightmare for Saraswat, had a single objective _ to standardise the culinary repertoire of the Taj group. The studio cooking or `hot kitchen' as it's known was but one of the components of the Olympics. The other two, held last Thursday, were the cold kitchen and an exciting quiz competition based on knowledge of food and beverage.
In a glittering day-long ceremony, attended by the top brass of the chain, the team spirit of the Taj group came to the fore. It's an exercise that other chains may take up before long. Among proud teams who had won medals, it was clear who the star of this year's Culinary Olympics was: Chef Arvind Saraswat himself.