Meet chef Garima Arora, the first Indian woman to win Michelin star rating

Her restaurant is testament to her love for Thailand and its inextricable links with India, be it in terms of mythology, flavour profiles or cultures

For as long as she can remember, Garima Arora has enjoyed nothing more than cooking. Her earliest memories of food are of her father returning home after a long spell of travel and heading to the kitchen to whip up a dish. “My mum cooked as well, but for her it was more of a chore. With Dad, there was an element of fun. That left a huge impression on me,” says the 32-year-old who counts her father as her best friend.

Though she studied to be journalist — and worked as one for six months — Arora hoped that someday she would get to open her own restaurant. She told her father as much one day, Arora says on phone from Bangkok. And thus began her journey as a chef. She left Mumbai for Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu and in 2011 headed to Dubai to work at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant Verre (it closed in October 2011). Stints at Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen and Gaggan Anand’s eponymous restaurant in Bangkok followed — until finally, 18 months ago, her dream came true and she got to helm her own restaurant, Gaa, within a bright yellow converted shop house on Lang Suan Road, Bangkok.

Making a mark for its “modern eclectic cuisine”, Gaa has just been awarded its first-ever Michelin star by the Michelin Guide Thailand. With this, Arora joins a select set of Indian chefs such as Vikas Khanna, Vineet Bhatia, Sriram Aylur and Anand whose restaurants have been awarded the Michelin star in the past.  

As she looks back at her journey, Arora recalls that first day at Le Cordon Bleu when she had landed in hospital with a cut finger. In a candid chat on the podcast, NoSugarCoat, with Pooja Dhingra of Le15 Patisserie she talks about being a vegetarian by choice and an animals’ rights activist before leaving for Le Cordon Bleu. “The first time I heard of rareness of meat was in Paris,” she tells Dhingra. 

Her internship at Noma, she says, changed her as a person and as a chef. She became the first Indian chef to rise up the ranks at Noma. “I don’t think people understand being in that place. It’s a state of mind, it’s an ideology, a philosophy, the way you think. That’s what you take away from a place like that, not recipes,” she says in the podcast.

Her quick grasp of concepts and techniques earned her Redzepi’s admiration who told food critic and journalist Vir Sanghvi, during the latter’s visit to Noma in 2016, to watch out for Arora. “He thought she was a great chef because she had worked as a journalist and not gone to catering college straight after school. Which is why she hadn’t been brought up on preconceived notions of cooking,” says Sanghvi. “Noma is perhaps one of a kind in the western hemisphere that makes no distinction if you understand French cooking or not. There, you have to start from scratch.”

Arora’s food is about a philosophy she has constructed over time. Unlike some chefs, she does not use her experience at Noma as her calling card. Her vocabulary at Gaa, which she started after working at Gaggan, is her own, independent of the star restaurants where she has trained or worked. 

“What makes Garima stand apart is her talent of creating her own story and style. That is the only way forward for young chefs,” says Manish Mehrotra, corporate chef, Indian Accent restaurants. Mehrotra has known Arora since before she started Gaa, when her father and she would dine at Indian Accent, Delhi. 

For Arora, cooking is about asking questions such as: why are we using this ingredient? To what end are we working? What is it that we want the guest to experience? 

Her restaurant is also a testament to her love for Thailand and its inextricable links with India, be it in terms of mythology, flavour profiles or cultures. The menu at Gaa focuses on local and seasonal, with Arora scouring the jungle and tribal markets for produce. The idea is to create dishes that are sustainable and culturally relevant. Within a room dedicated to fermentation, the team transforms the local ingredients to experiment with new and complex flavour combinations. 

In the kitchen, which always resounds with music, Arora and her set of 10 to 12 chefs work on 10- and 14-course menus. These currently include dishes such as chilled soup of guava, duck doughnut, chicken liver and corn, and also unusual combinations of blue swimmer crab, long peppercorn and macadamia milk. One of Gaa’s most popular dishes is unripe jackfruit cooked on the grill, served with roti and pickles — a revelation for locals in Thailand who don’t usually eat unripe jackfruit.

For Sanghvi, who dined at Gaa when it opened, a favourite was stalks of young corn served with a corn emulsion. “A freshwater Thai crayfish came perched on a khakra. Local gobhi was paired with delicious fresh crab and served with a potato mocha, a Japanese phulka, which is neither truly Japanese nor Indian. A spare rib came with pomegranate seeds and the best dish was a loaf of freshly-baked golden bread stuffed with lightly-spiced keema,” he wrote in a column in 2017. 

Over the past year or so, the menu has evolved steadily, with the meal served on the first day of the restaurant’s opening being distinct from the current menu. “There is an urge to create something 

new and different. It gives a certain creative satisfaction. That transfers to the guest, who leaves with a meal he or she won’t get outside of Gaa,” says Arora. There are certain core beliefs that help her achieve that — for instance, sourcing locally is not a USP for the restaurant; rather it’s standard procedure. “When you use whatever is available indigenously, sustainability comes automatically,” she says. 

Arora is being hailed as the first Indian woman chef to helm a Michelin-starred restaurant. Many, however, find these gender labels distasteful. The focus, they feel, ought to be on her talent, not on the fact that she is a “female chef”. “Chefs around the world are getting increasingly irritated about this,” says Sanghvi. 

In fact, when the winners of the recent edition of World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards were announced in Spain, Irish chef Clare Smyth remarked when she walked to the stage to accept the World’s Best Female Chef award, “For the last 10 years of my career, I’ve been asked, ‘What is it like being a female chef?’ To which I reply, ‘I’m not sure what you mean because I’ve never been a male chef.’” In her chat with Dhingra, Arora cites this example while stating that running a business has its own set of unique challenges. “You’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do. Men face their part of the problems as well. As women who run their own businesses, you can set the tone for what you want the future to be like,” she told Dhingra. 

When I prod Arora on this, she says, “I don’t agree with gender labels. But these are two very different things — being called a female chef and being called the first woman to achieve something. The former is sexist, but the latter is a form of recognition.”