Maximum city, maximum taste

FOODIE

Chef Max's Italian roots have made him a devotee of fresh, locally sourced ingredients.

Chef Massimiliano Orlati is bleary-eyed and slightly surly. Just the night before, Olive Mumbai launched the season's new menu, with the usual fanfare. To Olive's clients, he is Chef Max, and on celebratory nights like this, he is expected not just to raise the bar on the inventive menu but also to conduct himself with the flourish of a celebrity chef, lots of air-kissing included. He left home, an Italian town near Venice, in 1980. After years spent in Brazil, Tunisia, Mauritius and other locales, he's starting to feel the worse for his nomadic ways. "I'm getting older," he says with a wan smile.

Two years ago, when he left his job with the Taj group to take over as head chef at Olive, he had large shoes to fill. Olive was one of the reigning destinations for food and atmosphere (adjudged "world's best new restaurant" by Condé Nast Traveller in 2004), but competition was building. "For me the food will always be the reason customers keep returning."

And so, his chief contribution has been to closely control the freshness of every ingredient. "I have one freezer and that's for the pastry chef, otherwise everything comes in fresh and as far as possible organic." It helps that most raw materials are now available in India, yet Olive bakes its own bread, makes its own cheeses and grows its own rocket, cherry tomatoes and parsley. "The only things still hard to locate are fresh truffles and portobello mushrooms," says Max.

There's plenty for the seafood lover on the new menu; Chef Max couldn't wait for the monsoon to get over. In fact, it's a meat-eater's delight with quail, foie gras and guinea fowl, all cooked in the North African bedouin-styled Tabuna grill. "Indian palates are evolving but the quail is still a flop item," Orlati laughs. Yet it's a constant on the menu, because that's just the kind of chef Orlati is.

He's grown to love the city he works in. "It reminds me of Rio de Janeiro: the friendly people, the rains, the chaos, all except the level of crime," he says. For Orlati, eating out is for food not fashion, and so he eschews expat favourites like Trishna for neighbourhood eateries like Soul Fry.

It's his upbringing that's responsible. Orlati's grandmother started a restaurant on the two-hectare family farm 60 years ago, and three generations later family (and neighbours) are still running it, using only the freshest, seasonal ingredients, grown on-site. "The only things we buy are sugar and flour," he recollects.

Three decades after the English language, and the promise of a world unexplored, stole him from that idyllic but provincial existence, it seems like Orlati just might be drawn back to it someday soon.

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Favourite Recipes

Tomato Mozzarella Salad
16 mozzarella bocconcini
16 big cherry tomatoes
50 ml olive oil
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
8 fresh basil leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
8 bamboo skewers

In a salad bowl toss the tomatoes, after they have been washed, with olive oil, salt and pepper, basil and mozzarella bocconcini. Take the skewers and alternate two pieces each of tomato and bocconcini with a basil leaf in the middle. Place the skewer in a plate and pour a few drops of balsamic vinegar on top or to the side.

Epadata Chicken
1 boneless chicken
50 gm honey
250 ml oil
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp chopped coriander
1 tsp garlic
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the chicken into one-and-a-half-inch pieces. In a bowl marinate the chicken cubes with all the ingredients together and keep for two hours in the fridge. Make four skewer-loads and cook in a charcoal grill or tandoor.