One of the most abused terms in the world of fine dining has to be “fusion”. It may now be acceptable to cook your pasta with a dash of cumin at home — and admit as much. Or to raid your refrigerator at midnight to come up with your own versions of sandwiches, hummus with paranthas, or even spaghetti bolognaise — using Maggi noodles and left-over mutton curry, as Mumbai-based restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani, who owns the Mocha café chain, admits to rustling up.
But ask a chef, and one of the most mocked terms in his dictionary is likely to be “fusion”. Even accomplished chefs who are almost never going to ruin a dish just because they’ve let their imaginations run on a bit shy away from the term. So, their food can be “experimental” or “modern”, or even “cutting edge” — choose your adjective — but never “fusion”.
Yet, in the right hands, fusion has great potential to turn ordinary dining into a wow experience. Last week, I got first-hand experience of this when I met chef Manish Mehrotra from Tamarai, London, a restaurant that specialises in South-east Asian (and Chettinad) food, with a twist. Chef Mehrotra used to head the kitchens of Oriental Octopus at the India Habitat Centre (and other outlets in the NCR) and was back in town to give final touches to a “contemporary” Indian restaurant that Old World Hospitality has set up at The Manor. Despite his impossible schedule and the fact that none of the OWH kitchens are equipped to send out a Tamarai meal, he took me through a tasting. And what an experience it turned out to be.
Think sushi — in this case an unusual salmon roll filled with curd rice, topped with salmon roe, garnished with curry leaves. As a concept it is simply mind-blowing. And so playful that you wonder why no one in India has thought of bringing it here, particularly for the benefit of all those squeamish about “raw” Japanese. While you may argue that the spicy rice inside overwhelms the subtlety of the fish, it is a Tamarai hot-seller. The second starter: A tofu roll infused with lemon grass and coconut flavours. “No one likes tofu here or in London,” says the chef, so this was meant to make it more palatable. It satiates every Indian’s desire for a “hot” (deep-fried) snack, exploding at the same time with unexpected flavours.
But what is the secret to successful fusion cooking? For Chef Mehrotra, the touchstone is taste. His ultimate guiding principle, he says, is that the “food should be tasty and value for money”. To coat the tofu roll, for instance, Mehrotra uses Japanese hand-cut bread crumbs for better texture. For the totally awesome main course, New Zealand — Scottish in London to save the carbon miles — lamb in a yellow Indonesian curry, the lamb is slow cooked in coconut milk over a grill. The result is the right texture accomplished with the grill maintaining a steady temperature, but also that the fatty smell becomes non-existent.
Finally, there’s flair. Flair versus method is an old debate in cricket as in Bollywood: Kapil Dev coming into bat without his helmet; Aamir Khan retaking to move a glass of water from the table, you get the gist. So it is in the world of food. You can be a truly sincere student at the catering school but the difference between a cook following exact measurements (and that too is important) and a gifted chef will always be an intuitive understanding of food. I see this in our own chef as he serves up the dessert — a delicious coconut and palm sugar crème brulee. The counterfoil to this — in London — is an elderflower sorbet to cut the sweetness. Since that is not available in Delhi, the chef instinctively skewers some grapefruit that’s there in the kitchen and presents it alongside. It is perfect. No, fusion needn’t be confusion always.
