It is almost taken for granted that Shombit Sengupta will choose a French restaurant and he does. Royal Club in Bangalore's Leela Palace hotel only opens for dinner, but they happily accommodate their regular guest for lunch with BS. We get our first taste of things authentically French right away when he starts talking to the maitre de restaurant in French and learns that this very Indian-looking person is a student from the Lyon school of the famous French chef Paul Bocuse, writes Subir Roy.

Shombit's face lights up as he reveals that he had in his time done the branding of Bocuse's gourmet packaged foods for the US. Bocuse, one of the finest chefs of the 20th century, was among the first to come out of the kitchen and become a public figure. This sets the benchmark for what we will discuss for the next two and a half hours — things ideated to a very high level of refinement, world class and often French. ...  Read