Celebrity restaurateur Bill Marchetti is settling down after a wildly experimental life, discovers Kishore Singh
He may not be the anarchist he likes to call himself but there’s a lot of muck out there that’s likely to stick to him, and right now, over fried rice balls stuffed with cheese and pesto — part of his new Sicilian menu — he’s proving that he isn’t much of a stickler for rules. In the private dining room of Spaghetti Kitchen in New Delhi, the chandelier has been dimmed so it’s difficult to spot even his bulky frame. Outside, the rest of the restaurant is pleasantly lit.
The reason the celebrity chef is hiding is innocent enough — he’s having himself a puff, which is banned in restaurants — but when he first came to India to work, he was accused of hiding for other reasons, having fled Australia, it was alleged, to abandon his wife as well as his restaurant Latin and an Aus $1 million debt. “I was in the middle of a nasty divorce,” Bill Marchetti isn’t shy of his past, “it was that year’s second-most important break-up” — at least in Australia, the first one being of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — and so when the food promotion that was ending at Mumbai’s ITC Maratha Sheraton was winding down, he simply accepted the GM’s offer to stay back.
There are two things you must know about Marchetti. One, that he was already well-known in the world community of chefs, and had offers, back then, to work in Japan, or China, and perhaps other exotic places too. And two, that he was familiar with India since 1981 when he had first started to come here as part of his “spiritual period”, to sack up at the ashram at Ganeshpuri for three-four months at a time. “From Karl Marx and Lenin to spirituality,” he laughs, “it was something you did back then.”
Back then, of course, meant first wife Cheryl, experimenting with nouvelle cuisine, and finally taking over Latin in 1984, to make it one of Australia’s most happening restaurants — a huge leap for someone who was born to a German mother and Italian father before the lot of them boarded a ship halfway round the world to migrate to Australia. That was 1968, Marchetti was 14 and had already apprenticed at an Italian restaurant on the Adriatic coast, and here they were, the Marchettis, in Melbourne. “It was a cultural backwater,” he remembers, “the end of the world. There were no supermarkets, and nowhere to go out and eat.”
Or, at least, there was Florentino’s, which attracted Melbourne’s best crowd, and where young Bill got a job, but which he realised soon enough, resembled nothing remotely Italian by way of fare. And he was determined he would make a chef, so he quit to work at other places, developing his own kitchen and cuisine meanwhile. “I had to work with suppliers, with growers,” he reminisces, “I got into the spirit of changing things, of creating various industries to supply that demand.” Australia itself was changing, opening up to the world — and was soon at the start of a culinary revolution, which is when Marchetti’s Latin happened. “Here was Italian food with Australian ingredients,” he says with relish.
As Latin prospered and Marchetti’s fame spread — the restaurant featured regularly in good food guides, and he was honoured with the Insegna del Ristorante Italiano by the Italian President — he also signed up as a lifetime member of the Liberal party, not surprisingly, really, since the father of his second wife, Fiona Snedden, later Melbourne city councillor, was in politics: Sir Billy Snedden was a Liberal leader, and now, inspecting the new Spaghetti Kitchen in Mumbai, he sighs, “I miss the politics side of things.” Though he still finds politics — “from the local to the global level — exciting”, he’s no longer involved in it. His divorce and debts pretty much put an end to that, at least in Australia, so much so that he now considers “India home”.
If India in 2001 was an echo of Australia in the 1980s, Marchetti knew how to develop the market, particularly since he found, in his first major task, of turning around ITC Maurya Sheraton’s rooftop restaurant West View, which had a history of failing with every makeover, “My repertoire had shrunk to 5 per cent. And that because, he says with a shudder, “God had sent me to chicken hell!” He was used to many good things on his menu, seafood, hare, venison, a good steak, “but in Australia you never put chicken on the menu, it’s what you have at home because it’s simple and fast to cook”.
For five years, at West View, he delivered grills and fine-dining to a city where it was still an alien concept, before stepping off to do his own thing. There was talk of opening a delicatessen with a Delhi restaurateur, of shacks in Goa — but Marchetti says he is “a big city boy” and could never settle there — and so he joined Panindia Foods to create a chain of Spaghetti Kitchens in Delhi and Mumbai (where a second opened recently at Nariman Point and a third is to be launched in Powai next month): “My mandate,” he explains, “is to develop five Spaghetti Kitchens each in Delhi and Mumbai, three each in Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata, and develop the tier-two cities thereafter.”
“I’m not aiming at fine-dining,” he points out, pointing to the upper middle-class price points on the menu over a course of sea bass braised in tomato, capers and olive oil, the chandelier lit to full glow now that the offending cigar has been put away. “In India, the rents are massive. Here, you have to be business-minded and realistic, not just a restaurateur,” which he finds less difficult ever since he’s embraced the Indian way of life, no thanks in part to his companion who has introduced him to her family. Though he splits his time evenly between Delhi and Mumbai, “Delhi is home because my girlfriend and her whole extended family live here. There are aunts to meet, cousins to see off at the airport, uncles to collect — stuff that I love. A town becomes home because of its people, and this is what makes Delhi home for me.”
Meanwhile, as in Australia, he’s helping to develop the local ingredients industry, setting up supply lines with the help of importers and local growers, “currently working to get oysters in the right condition from Chennai and Kochi”. Replicating the restaurant, he says, is “surprisingly easy, the basic structure is in place”, though it does mean he’s wearing out his shoes on site visits and feels “like a bum” travelling from city to city, and then location to location.
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Though you might not suspect it — he started working when he was just 13, after all — he’s a voracious reader: “Cookbooks, airport junk, biographies, Amartya Sen, good literature,” he sums up, “I enjoy reading since I didn’t have any education.” And the other great passion is travel, whether heading off for an annual holiday “to family” in Uttarakhand, or getting on to a train all the way to Bangalore “to get a sense of the place”. “I want to see much more of India,” he says, “I’ve seen a fair bit but not nearly enough.”
One thing he does avoid though is the expat lot, “Goras who complain about maids and servants when back home they’d be doing their own cooking and cleaning and loading their own washing machines,” he smirks. Not that he’s above laughing as he imagines Indians see him as he personally drives around Mumbai in his black Scorpio with its Delhi number plates. “The people, even the cops, see an ugly bearded gora at the wheel,” he snorts, “they get out of your way fast.”
When he’s not scaring the good people of Mumbai, he’s back home in Delhi, having a dal-chawal-sabzi lunch with his chefs, or rustling up a simple meal of pasta and grilled fish at home. “There’s more than enough here to keep me going for the rest of my life,” he says with a hint of satisfaction, “I don’t think I’ll ever have the time to get bored.”
