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| The hand that feeds | |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi November 29, 2008, 0:56 IST | |
 The Taj group’s Hemant Oberoi, probably India’s most influential chef, shared a meal and a conversation with Kishore Singh a few days before terrorists struck at the flagship Mumbai hotel. This piece was written before the attack.
Some people like to talk but Hemant Oberoi is clearly not among them. For a little over two decades now, he has been helping to build the fortunes of the Taj group of hotels around something that Welcomgroup has taken the credit for: food. It is true that before ITC took upon itself the onus of researching, then popularising, regional Indian cuisines, restaurant food in five-star hotels used to be particularly bad (even what passed as Continental, and was largely starch-laden, wasn’t all that great).
But if you look back around the time that ITC was creating a buzz with its Indian cuisines, the Taj group too was pioneering restaurants — only, it wasn’t making a song and dance about it. In New Delhi, the Machan was the hippest place to be on a budget. In Mumbai, the Zodiac Grill proved that modern French cuisine could sell in a country of foodie philistines. And over the last dozen-odd years, the Taj has introduced so many restaurants and cuisines to the Indian palate, it — and not Welcomgroup — ought to be identified as the chain that plays the closer attention to cuisine.
Even after Camelia Panjabi left the group, its forays and experimentations continued (her foodie-promoter contemporary in ITC, the legendary Habib Rehman, on the other hand, confined his repertoire to just Indian, and particularly Indo-Islamic, cuisine; the Oberoi group, of course, did not even make it to the high table). Chances are, when you think of different cuisines, the associations will be with the Taj group, whether Chinese (okay, Indian-Chinese, at least to begin with), Thai, Mediterranean, Lebanese, Vietnamese or Japanese.
And the face behind these innovations in its restaurants is that of Hemant Oberoi (Anand Solomon too, but let’s confine this piece to just Oberoi). In 2008, he’s probably had his most successful year yet opening, in Delhi’s Taj Mansingh alone, two of the chain’s most stylish restaurants, the contemporary Japanese signature restaurant Wasabi, and the cutting-edge Indian Varq.
“Opening new restaurants,” I’m being flip in an effort to get a rise out of him, “I’m sure you can do it with a snap of your fingers.”
“Every restaurant takes time,” Oberoi is admonitory, “Varq took four-five years.”
It’s the problem with chains, board decisions, the whole management thing, I commiserate.
“The management,” he corrects me, “is very passionate about food.”
Then what takes the whole process of creating new dining experiences so long?
I’ve lucked in with his “talk” button. I suspect he is also partly riled by my flippancy. “There are no easy answers,” his tone is still reasonable, “but there are so many questions to be answered. What is to be done? What is the location? How will people react to it? What will be the vegetarian components? How will you ensure the quality of ingredients, the USPs, the consistency — how will it be different from others? Then you select the crockery — how modern can you go? What is the complete meal experience?”
I suspect the pause is only to allow him to catch his breath. “India,” he continues, “is a different challenge from any other country. What works elsewhere doesn’t work here. Thirty-35 per cent of the restaurant diners here are vegetarian, our tastes are different…”
Hemant Oberoi had his most famous outings with former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, responsible for his overseas banquets, at hand with his favourite prawns, but his famous reticence and the last few years when experimentation at the Taj has touched new heights, have kept him away from the media glare. His chef’s table, arguably the most you will pay for a meal for two in India, is something he enjoys: the experience of cooking something special, of serving it at his table, of talking about it, about food, about palates — it’s almost as much a high for him as for his guests.
Fortunately, Delhi has been at the receiving end of some of that favoured attention even without the chef’s table. At Wasabi — “it is our brand”, he corrects my perception that Japanese chef Morimoto has any proprietary interest in the Wasabi restaurants in Mumbai and Delhi — he says the challenge lay in creating an inventory of vegetarian dishes. Vegetarian Japanese? The concept might have been laughable if it hadn’t worked, that and the fact that there are also curry options available. Japanese curry? But even Morimoto gave the additions to the menu his approval. “Most work in Wasabi is being done by our young chefs,” Oberoi gloats. “The Zodiac Grill has run without Michelin chefs, without even a French chef.”
“We’ve never tried to ape others,” he says, “when you do that, success automatically follows.” The swipe at his closest competitor is evident. For a sense of what the Taj group has accomplished, one needs to see their range of restaurants that have either already been replicated in different locations, or are in the process of being so recreated. There’s Souk in which Hemant Oberoi’s team “refined the cuisine of Beirut, of Morocco, into a fine dining restaurant”, and which will soon come to both Kolkata and Delhi; the Masala brand with its variants — Masala Art, Masala Kraft, Masala Bay and Masala Club — “strong in their own way” and now en route to Dubai, Cape Town, perhaps even Phuket, the domestic restaurants contributing Rs 32 crore to the Taj kitty annually (the restaurants in just the luxury Taj hotels make Rs 700 crore from 115 outlets); Blue Ginger, the speciality Vietnamese diner which could soon also be in Delhi; Prego, the fine-dining French restaurant in Chennai; Konkan Café, the Thai Pavilion and Karavali which are “all of them different from any others”; Wasabi; and now, of course, the wildly successful Varq which has redefined the way traditional Indian dining can be turned into a formal but enjoyable, even experimental, experience.
Oberoi says it is the awareness of restaurants abroad that has helped widen the horizons of Indian diners, and that he understands his task to be very simple. “I create restaurants and cuisines for them before they ask for it,” he says.
In the period that he has been a chef, how has the quality of those who work in his concept kitchens changed, I ask.
He pauses a bit, then replies, “The Internet has had a major influence in our industry.”
How?
“You can get any recipe,” he points out, “check out their presentation. You can,” he continues, “combine the science and the art of food.” His hair impossibly slicked back, his imposing silhouette leaning forward as he tells you how the star Varqi crab — the restaurant’s bestseller — was created, Oberoi says, “Today’s youngsters are very good, they’re better chefs than we were in our time.”
Not that it’s time for him to lay down his chef’s hat any time soon. “Culinary art,” he lays some emphasis — probably he is thinking of Vajpayee; the current dispensation doesn’t seem too interested in catering to the experimental palate — “should be recognised by the government. After all, every chef is an artist.”
Recognised how?
“They should have Padmashris for us too,” says Taj’s man who seems to have everyone but the government eating out of his hands.
But there’s something in what he says.
And an award would look nice after his name.
Several of Chef Hemant Oberoi’s team and colleagues from the Taj group have lost their lives in the terrorist attack on the hotel. We commiserate with him, as also his peers at The Oberoi and The Trident hotels in Mumbai, most of whom acted with grace under pressure.
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