| It’s a big boast, and not many would have the temerity to make it. Marut Sikka, food impresario, for all his politically-correct soundbytes, is not given to flaunting much (putting aside his weight, of course), yet he doesn’t shy away from the admission that he’s the best in the business. “I don’t have competition,” he says, “no one else is doing what I’m doing.”
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| For now, Sikka is cooking lunch at the Vasant Continental’s Indian kitchen, Patra. The interiors are bright and brash and buck the current trend of avant-garde, choosing a khichdi cosmopolitanism that robs it of any distinctive style.
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| But we’re in the gleaming steel kitchen where Sikka’s pottering about amidst bowls of chopped onions and garlic paste, coconut milk and cayenne pepper, tamarind pulp and whipped yoghurt.
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| Unusually for Lunch with BS, we haven’t taken Sikka to a restaurant of his choice, we’ve got him to cook for us at his favourite place. He’s chosen Patra because it’s the latest restaurant for which he’s consulted, and he’s happy with its eclectic menu.
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| At work in the kitchen, he’s sure of what he’s doing. He’s chosen the easy way out, I tell him, pointing to the spices and herbs all chopped and ready for use by the kitchen hands. “Even when I cook at home,” he retorts, “the maid does the chopping and cutting.” That is probably true for every Indian who enjoys cooking.
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| But for all that, Sikka isn’t a hobby chef, he makes his money from the Rs 7,000-crore food business (and that doesn’t include processed foods).
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| Having started off with Jiggs Kalra as a food consultant, he finally cast away from his mentor last December and has since been making a go of it on his own with a training school, food consultancies, festivals and restaurant make-overs. He’s booked all the way through October, and business has never looked better.
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| On the menu is an Awadhi biryani, a Saraswat Goan fish curry, a Punjabi khara masala gravy intended for paneer but which he switches to chicken when he realises I’m not too hot on cottage cheese, and a few other things beside that will come off the restaurant menu.
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| He dips one finger into the tamarind sauce and checks it for tartness, mixes masalas separately into yoghurt and tastes that, also with his finger, and does a similar test with the coconut milk and the browned gravies.
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| There’s none of the fastidiousness you would associate with a Kalra protégé. Kalra, not himself a cook but given to academic research, would probably cut marks for the slightly slap-dash way Sikka is going about his preparations.
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| He’d certainly not approve of the lackadaisical way Sikka is putting together his ingredients with not a care for the minutest quantities Kalra would have calibrated for the perfect meal.
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| He laughs at my assumption. “If food and taste are evolving all the time,” he questions, “where is the purity of food? There is a palate demand that dictates food trends in this country. If I go to the homes of 20 people from even the same community, each dish they will cook will be slightly different from the other. Jiggs,” he explains, “has a soft palate and, like westerners, prefers textures where most Indians like strong flavours.”
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| Clearly, Sikka isn’t stinting on the flavours for our lunch and to onions are added ginger, garlic, slit green chillies, juliennes of capsicum and fresh ground mustard.
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| A decade-and-a-half in the business; having consulted with restaurants in India and internationally; worked closely with many five-star hotel chains; hosted food fests; worked with processed food companies like Frito Lays, MTR, Markfed and Bector Foods; created inflight menus for Jet Airways; hosted banquets for former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and international dignitaries; researched and written about forgotten cuisines — isn’t Sikka ready to settle down with a signature restaurant of his own?
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| “Yes,” he admits, “I’d like that.” What’s holding him back then? “A restaurant isn’t just about food,” explains Sikka, stirring the pot while thinking his dream, “it’s about location, the right parking, about ambience,” and then for good measure, he adds, “it requires finance, you need to source capital.” So? “I’m scouting for a location,” he’ll admit.
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| “I asked Camellia Panjabi who to me is the greatest Indian restaurateur there is, if I was being too finicky about location, and she said ‘no, you can never be too fussy about that.” Panjabi should know, having revolutionised the Indian restaurant business in London with Chutney Mary, and followed up its success with Banaras.
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| Sikka’s restaurant would not have over 25 items on its menu, and that includes the starters and the main course. “I want to redefine the concept of a kitchen in a restaurant,” he shares, “because the variables in an Indian restaurant are fairly high, and because the attitude of the kitchen staff still tends to be casual.”
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| As he says this, the rank and file of Patra are busy watching what he’s doing, or going about their business so that even though the restaurant has hardly any diners, they look like they’re preparing to serve a banquet.
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| “I’m working on procedures to minimise the redundancy between the chef and kitchen staff, and developing a prototype kitchen that will be radically different from kitchens around the world.”
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| He’s done the mutton for the biryani and handed it to his assistant from his company, Gourmet Guru (the restaurant consultancy is called Shahi Dastarkhwaan), Bade Mian, to layer with rice and steam cook.
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| “There are only two restaurants that I think are superlative in India, Bukhara for its consistency and Indigo, to which I take my hat off because it’s what every restaurant wants to become. Olive is great in terms of ambience and service but not, I think food.”
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| We’re almost done in the kitchen. He hands over the pots to the charge of Bade Mian, and Patra’s executive chef is requested to organise the service at a table in the restaurant where Sikka takes a few calls on his cell, checks a recipe on his laptop to read out to an instructor for a training class for a team from a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, and then we’re eating.
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| The chicken, he admits, has been overdone a minute or two and is hard; to me it’s perfect, but the fish curry is so sour my mouth puckers with the astringency.
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| “The variables...” he mutters, but we’re not wasting any more breath about the cook-out. I’m still interested in his dream restaurant. “I’m at the crossroads searching for direction,” he admits.
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| “A restaurant will give me the freedom to put together everything that I’ve learned. What I’m doing now is bits and pieces and bound by limitations; it isn’t fulfilling.”
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| Food processing may mean the big bucks “but it isn’t creatively satisfying”. Yet, he’ll have you know, “the business of food and the business of wellness have a tremendous future in the country”.
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| To ensure he’s part of it, Sikka is on to two book projects that he hopes to finish soon. The first is the cuisine all along the Grand Trunk Road for which he’s done most of his research. “Only the segment in Pakistan remains,” he says.
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| The biryani has proved mild, almost gentle, the perfect antidote to the fish curry, and we’re on the benign high that good food brings with it. “The other book is on Indian flavours.” The chicken, swamped by the heavy masalas, is a good example that he knows what he’s talking about.
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| He insists on dessert though neither of us wants any, so a shared platter goes almost waste. The conversation has drifted away like the afternoon. To what does he credit the explosion of interest in food in India, I ask him.
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| “The media,” he replies, “live cookery shows on television, nuclear families, working couples, and Indians travelling abroad.” Where does he look for inspiration? “International food,” he explains, “different produce, different methods of cooking, different themes.”
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| We’re both running late. He has to head for a meeting, they’re expecting him at the training workshop, there are the plans for an ayurveda restaurant to complete, so, even though it would be welcome, coffee will have to wait till our next meeting. |
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