The reluctant foodie

Thai Wok owner Natasha Chaudhri makes two quick and easy recipes.

There is such a thing as a reluctant foodie. Restaurateur Natasha Chaudhri, who runs the immensely popular Thai Wok in Delhi, Bohemia in Mumbai and Congo in Goa with her two partners Shilpa Gupta and Payal Jauhar, claims not to be a gourmet chef, despite her success at feeding people gourmet Thai food for the last six years or so.

Says Chaudhri, "My love for Thai Wok is the activity that goes around here. My job is to standardise the raw material in the kitchen. My dad is the real foodie." She elaborates, "In my house, we don't just eat fish. If fish is being cooked, you first go fishing, then the fish has to be trout, and the way it is cooked..."

The falsity of Chaudhri's protestations of not being a cook of any merit is exposed as soon as she enters the kitchen. Her skill with both the recipes that she cooks for us is evident in the way she puts it together and in the final proof""that is, how the dishes look and taste. And on both these counts she scores a perfect 10.

She says of her success in the kitchen, "I understand food but I am not driven to cook." Part of the reason for this lack of drive she puts down to her belief in the fact that if there are experts to do something then that task should be left to them.

She says, "When I was in art college, my father told me that you can also be the facilitator, not necessarily the creator." Chaudhri has taken this advice seriously and has, apart from creating these restaurants, an export business as well.

Her take on running two diverse and demanding businesses is that "if you are educated and can make a difference, then you should."

The export business started apropos of nothing except for the minor detail that she and her partner Gupta are both art college graduates and wanted to put that degree to use.

Says Chaudhri, "Shilpa has a way of spotting business opportunities. She was the one who thought that we should start this restaurant and then she out of the blue talked of starting an export business." Both ventures, needless to say, are big successes.

Chaudhri's own preference when it comes to eating is the simple fare of dal-chawal, and she says that she is happiest when she has that on her plate. She says, "I have very simple tastes in food."And her choice of cuisine for this column is Thai, which is simple to cook.

She says, "When there are people in the restaurant demanding food the kitchen can be very stressful, but because Thai food is quick to cook we manage, especially since everything we cook is fresh. We don't keep any curries ready-made."

This emphasis on freshness and the manic situation in the kitchen on a busy day is another reason that Chaudhri has picked up these recipes. She says, "I would be asked to stir this curry when the restaurant would be very crowded."

The Thai Wok trio have been through a series of adventures (for instance, they ran out of gas at 10.30 in the night on the day they opened the restaurant, and there were diners baying for their food) but with each such escapade, they seem no less determined to succeed. And they have "" just the way Chaudhri manages to impress us in the kitchen.

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FAVOURITE RECIPES

Raw papaya salad (som tam)
200 gm julienne raw papaya
30 gm carrot
20 gm whole peanuts without skin
20 gm crushed peanuts
1 piece sliced tomato
6 tbs sugar syrup
5 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp light soya sauce

Toss the grated raw papaya and carrot in the dressing with the above ingredients. Add the peanuts for garnish.

Penang chicken curry
200 gm chicken breast boneless, sliced
Penang paste (easily available in any market that stocks Thai ingredients; ask for Namjai)
Kaffir lime leaves
20 gm coconut milk
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp fish sauce
A handful of cashewnuts
Red and green peppers finely sliced

Heat the penang curry paste in a pan. Then add kaffir lime leaves and coconut milk. Now add the chicken and sugar and fish sauce. Then add coconut cream and cook till creamy. Garnish with cashewnuts and red/green bell peppers that have been finely sliced.