Dinner is served

Arati Menon Carroll meets a freelance consultant in the business of whipping up delights.

N ow you identify with a rat?" howled Samta Gupta's friends when she walked out of the latest Disney-Pixar release Ratatouille spouting admiration for Remy, the plucky protagonist. This specialised menu planner is used to drawing raised eyebrows.

From starting a cafe in Delhi at the age of 22 to migrating to New Zealand to start Auckland's 101st Indian restaurant and then eschewing a "boring" five-star kitchen career for a nomadic existence of freelance menu designing for hotels all over India, Gupta's career choices have comprised a string of unprompted, passionate gambles.

All, of course, rooted in her undeniable love for good food. This hotel management student ran Cafe Mulakat out of Vithal Bhai Patel House for nine years before the Lok Sabha cancelled her lease agreement.

The coffee house, dreamed up by Gupta's capitalist-by-career, socialist-by-bias father, played host to politicos, artists and media persons "" Sitaram Yechury, Medha Patkar and Vir Sanghvi were regulars "" who all swore by Gupta's moong dal ki pakodi.

"At the age of 22, you want to do everything. I ran a week-long potato food festival, for god's sake," she reminisces. Gupta's stint at running a second fine-dining restaurant at Mehrauli a few years ago proved fleeting when illegalities cropped up.

Gupta then migrated to New Zealand where she set up Turmeric Pot, with a menu that fused north Indian, south Indian and South-east Asian flavours. Locals took to her basil murg tikkas and kuzhi paniyaram (rice and urad dal dumplings from Kerala) with gusto but by then she had decided to come back. "I realised how efficiently things work abroad. I started, ran and sold a restaurant, and made money in a space of three months," she chuckles.

Back in India and having decided to shed all ambitions of starting any more restaurants, Gupta began charting out a career in menu consultation.

She scheduled a meeting with Francis Wacziarg of Neemrana Hotels. "I was petrified but Francis was just starting Barr House in Matheran and hired me for a two-week period to design a menu and train the cooks."

That set the ball rolling and today Gupta is on an annual contract with several heritage hotels and restaurant chains including Neemrana Hotels, Khimsar Fort Palace and Ajit Bhawan in Jodhpur.

Her preference is for small but distinct properties, leaving the five-star hotels to her competition that although scant usually takes the form of larger catering service teams with rigid offerings. "Nobody else actually lives out of the hotel for weeks dreaming up menus after conversations with staff and scouring local markets."

"It's not all fun and games. There's also the more mundane kitchen audits, inventory planning and costing to be done," she cautions. The better part of her time, of course, is spent in the kitchen cooking for, and with, staff.

She gathers most of her culinary ideas from street food vendors around the country who, she says, are the best source because they are so honest. As are the rustic cooks at boutique hotels, quite unlike guarded five-star chefs.

"There is so much more I learn from them about local ingredients and authentic flavours," she says. Gupta believes in making judicious use of local produce so when designing the menu for a hotel in Mussoorie, for example, she substitutes zucchini for pahari kheera, and creates an iron-rich soup from a local menace "" nettle.

Presenting final menus for tasting at the end of each two-week stint is always nail-biting. "Sometimes owners will bring along discerning friends and there is zero room for error," she says.

Do those days turn her into a bit of a Gordon Ramsay from Hell's Kitchen? "It's hard not to be hot headed in the kitchen when you're standing in front of tavas and tandoors all day," laughs Gupta, who admits to letting expletives fly when vexed by indifferent kitchen staff.

Gupta's a minimalist when it comes to taste. "I believe there should be only one dominant flavour in each dish," she says. And so, even when catering to the taste buds of foreigners long accustomed to the riotous chicken tikka masala approach to Indian food, she tickles their palate with more delicate flavours.

She talks excitedly about brand new concoctions like black pepper minced chicken dumplings with sweet chilli sauce and Mangalorean masala prawns coated with beer tempura batter.

Unlike most creative minds, Gupta is not troubled by restrictive budgets. "The most important lesson I can impart as a consultant is flexibility. Even within constraints, you can surround yourself with available resources and come up with the best possible menu," she says.

Still, she adds, cut-throat competition in the business means restaurateurs are having to refresh their product every so often. And that means more work for people like her.