The best chefs believe that the food counts more than the brand
Here is the central paradox of running a restaurant: the most successful restaurants have to be run by experts who understand that this is, first and foremost, a business, and the best restaurants have to be run by businesspersons who are, first and foremost, passionate about their food.
One of the reasons why I’ve stayed an Indigo fan, for instance, loving both the deli in Andheri and the flagship in South Bombay, has to do with its chef, Jaydeep “JD” Mukherjee. We’ve never met, formally speaking. But on my first visit to Indigo, at a time when cold-pressed virgin olive oil and thinly sliced parma ham were relatively unknown in India, I ate my way through their then-legendary breakfast buffet. It was so good that my companion and I asked tentatively whether we could meet the chef, just to thank him.
JD took time off to show two complete strangers around the place. You could tell from the pride he took in the freshness of their ingredients that Indigo’s passion for food wasn’t just a PR exercise. Two years later, at a time when Indigo could have — like so many other Indian restaurants — rested on its laurels, JD was there supervising the kitchen at the newly opened Andheri deli. I’d ordered the steak sandwich, and though the steak and the bread were excellent, the caramelised onions were over-sweet. On the comments card, we referred to the over-sweet onions in passing.
As we were leaving, JD shot out of the kitchen. “Let me,” he said, “explain about the onions.” He went with some passion through a defense of his chefs. Together, we worked it out: this particular batch of onions had so much natural sweetness that they had, effectively, become onion marmalade — in a way not intended by JD or his chefs. “I can fix that,” he muttered, diving back into the kitchen.
I don’t mean to single JD out. He’s up there with Ananda Solomon, Imtiaz Qureshi, Urbano de Rego and a score of other chefs whom we all admire for their ability to balance the business demands of running a restaurant (or several restaurants) without losing sight of the passion for food that first brought them into the trade. But the two brief encounters I had with JD stay in my mind as an example of how to get it right.
Sustaining that passion as a legendary chef achieves success is that much harder. I’m a fan of Gordon Ramsay’s TV shows. There’s the swearing, there’s the naming of turkeys after fellow chefs Nigella, Jamie and Delia, there’s the high-octane drama — and besides, any chef who rides a Ducati Desmosedici is gold in my book. But his gastropubs in London are overpriced disasters: they bring to mind the possibly apocryphal criticism by Mario Batali that Ramsay’s cuisine was “dull and predictable”. I don’t think Ramsay’s lost his passion for cooking — it’s just that his empire’s become too large for him to be able to stick his nose into the kitchen as much as he once could.
This is a paradox chefs wish non-chefs could grasp: it’s relatively easy to cook great meals once in a while, but not so easy to train chefs across a chain of restaurants to share your passion. In Thiruvananthapuram recently, I had a deceptively simple and astonishingly good meal at a book fair. Manning one of the food stalls was a young student called Varun, who was serving kappa (tapioca) biryani to a fast-moving, eager queue. Using just a frying pan and a tiny stove, he blended freshly-cooked tapioca with a mutton curry, topping it with a final garnish of coconut oil and fresh pepper — standard street food, but excellently done. We wolfed down our portions; the aroma and the taste couldn’t have been matched by the finest restaurants.
But if Varun had had to serve the same meal, at the same quality, every evening for the next 365 days, he might not have been able to create magic. Often, as in Ramsay’s case, even the best chefs falter under the pressures of the restaurant business. It’s only sometimes, as in JD’s case, that they continue to believe that the food counts more than the brand. n
(Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based freelance writer)
