Page Three chef

Nikhil Chib, known for his high-profile dalliances, is out with a more mass offering. The celeb culture has changed, he tells Anoothi Vishal.

If you were to look for a Gordon Ramsay type in India, you would possibly zero in on Nikhil Chib, Mumbai’s hottest celeb chef who has Ramsay-esque flair and good looks (but, thankfully, not his foul manners, which we suspect may not be an advantage in India at all), TV presence and should we say skill too?

Chib, of course, is more modest than UK’s kitchen-god. He looks up to Ramsay, he says, or to Nigella Lawson, wants to be like them, but claims to be “nowhere even close”. However, one bite of his amazing Burmese khawsee or of the sizzling fish on his menu and you may be ready to contradict him…

It is not for nothing, after all, that Chib has enjoyed such popularity, cooking in the homes of most of Mumbai’s A-listers: from the Birlas and the Singhanias, to the Godrejs, Goenkas, and top corporates like Merill Lynch, JP Morgan et al. Almost a decade ago, his momos and khawsee parties — “I didn’t know very much then”, says the self-taught chef of his limited menu then —were a hit.

Ever since, Chib has kept busy with his restaurant Busaba, situated next to Rahul Akerkar’s Indigo, quite a daunting prospect for any eatery. But Busaba has been more than up to it and has now been running for six solid years, retaining its band of faithfuls — once again, a singular achievement for any chef-restaurateur in a fickle market. Besides, lately, Chib has also had a food show that has brought him right into our living rooms — with his “better half” (The Chef and His Better Half on NDTV Good Times). And now, he is on to other things.

In a tie-up with Amit “Dabur” Burman’s Lite Bite, a restaurant retail company investing some serious money in the space, Chib has come out with Asia 7, a casual dining space serving food from seven Asian countries, at a mall in Gurgaon. With Chib playing consultant, this is a format destined to be replicated countless times throughout the country. But in the midst of all the big numbers floating around, there’s another that we’re talking about just yet.

“Asia 7”, he grins, “Seven also happens to be my lucky number.” He points out that not only was he born in the seventh month (July) but also rattles off a long list of birthdays — “My mother’s and my sister’s” — all with significant sevens to justify that belief. “I could go on,” he lets me know before we move on to other things.

In the 1990s when Chib turned chef, it was an enigmatic decision. With a businessman father (Ranjit Chib who started his own market analysis company) — who wanted to know whether he was thinking of turning bawarchi — and an LSE-educated, activist mother, Chib came from a privileged background, well-travelled, well-educated. A degree in the US later (he also worked as a banker there, albeit for a very short time), he decided to strangely turn to studying psychoanalysis!

That decision came in Vienna, the land of Freud, but Chib insisted on completing a degree and even assisted a well-known analyst in Mumbai post that. “But I soon realised that the money was such that you couldn’t make a career out of it,” he says candidly. So, instead of going back to banking or business or whatever else was deemed more successful, Chib strayed, almost straightaway, into catering.

Having travelled all over Europe as a child with his mother, Chib seems to have been always a bit of a foodie entrepreneur. As I bite into some perfect momos that he has sent my way with a flavourful green-chilli sauce also done in-house, Chib tells me how, while in college, he used to make chocolate crepes with Nutella and a crepe-making machine bought from France, and sell them to dorm mates for a dollar each.

In Mumbai, out of a career, he happened to cater his khawsee (one of the few recipes he knew thanks to his Bengali grandmother who had stayed in Burma) at a friend’s party. That was attended by A D Singh, now famous as the Olive man, but then a food writer and arranger of boat parties, and that became the turning point. With both Singh and another influential foodie, Rashmi Uday Singh, writing about “the banker-turned-momo man”, Chib became hot property.

Celebrity and Chib have never been too far. If Busaba has its band of faithful — “I never did any publicity, people just came. I am just very bad with marketing,” he says — still entranced by its air of bohemian-chic, Busabong, a restaurant that Chib had run in north Goa in the early days is still remembered for its “model bartenders”.

With much of the fashion fraternity in attendance, supermodels like Ujwala Raut or Nina Manuel or Madhu Sapre would be seen serving drinks there. This was, of course, before Jessica Lal, when many in corporate India were still young and when Goa itself was unspoilt.

“Things were just very cool then. People did that (the bartending) because they were hanging out and they thought it would be fun. But after that things began to change. The Wadia boys (Jeh and Ness) who used to run a place in Goa organised a 240 hour rave and got into trouble. Today, the whole culture of celebrity has completely changed and I can’t imagine paying someone Rs 5 lakh to play bartender,” he says.

For someone who says he is strictly a purist when it comes to his food philosophy —he would rather not stray into the world of fusion, confusion and would be happy to own just two gourmet restaurants in his lifetime (despite his association with the chain biz now) — Chib, ironically, is India’s most widely-travelled chef. In his early days, he possibly spent more money than he made on frequent trips to Thailand and Vietnam to pick up correct recipes (like steamed fish that he learned to perfect in Thailand).

In 2005, he enrolled in Gregoire Ferrandi’s L’ecole Superior de Cuisine Francaise, an exclusive one-year course with just a handful of students, to learn the basics of French cuisine as well as presentation techniques. He uses these now at his own restaurants but there are a myriad other ideas at work too, you realise as he flits from talking about Aquavit in New York run by Ethiopian-origin-Swedish chef Marcus Samuelson (who specialises in original cuisines with French influences), to working as a lowly commie chef in Paris (taking a break from his restaurant) “where they fire the hell out of you”, to molecular gastronomy, the latest “it” cuisine. This is a conversation that really takes you places.