What is ‘Indian food’? There is no such thing,” says Varun Rana emphatically. The former fashion features director of a leading fashion magazine is disgruntled at how most cuisines from the sub-continent often taste the same at restaurants. So he hosts a monthly pop-up brunch at his Delhi home, attended by lawyers to app-makers. “We have such a variety in our country, and the menu reflects this,” he says. This weekend, he is hosting 30 at a dinner at Olive Restaurant, and the dishes include matar chiwda from Sindh, nimbu ka boti from Rampur and chor chawal from Benaras.
Rana is one of a growing number of professionals who are channelling their passion into food. This is not a new phenomenon, of course — we have had IT professionals swapping codes for farms, bloggers hosting secret suppers, and a MasterChef -inspired generation of Instagram chefs. As the food landscape evolves, newer examples are cropping up. Like ex-Google employee Munaf Kapadia who turned his mother’s cooking into The Bohri Kitchen, a nationwide series of weekend pop-ups that is bringing a renaissance of sorts to the obscure cuisine. Or 33-year-old engineers, Rohan Rehani and Nitin V, who opened Moonshine Meadery in Pune last year. And The Smoke Co. in Bengaluru, which, despite raised voices against beef, is finding fans with its smoking techniques and hardcore meat menu.
Chef Prateek Sadhu of Masque, the Mumbai restaurant that crafts menus from local and foraged ingredients, attributes this trend to the times we live in. “We’re moving from imported to ingredients that are wildly grown in India. Diners want to know where their food is coming from,” he says.
However, food is not an easy industry to be in. Mumbai-based food writer Vikram Doctor cautions, “To build something sustainable takes patience. Take Sandeep Sreedharan, who is from a corporate background. He wanted to bring home-style South Indian food to Mumbai. He started off with a catering service in 2012, building it, gaining customers and trust, till he recently opened his restaurant, Curry Tales.”
We talk to a few new foodpreneurs who have switched career paths and are addressing the needs of this evolved, more conscious market.
If there is anyone you think we have missed out, write to us at weekend@thehindu.co.in.
Sujit Sumitran, 56
The Bread Whisperer
“My roots are in Kerala — my parents are from Kannur — but I grew up in Mumbai. I started my career selling office equipment, then computers. In 2003, I felt the need to do something more meaningful, so for about 17 months, I worked with Dale Carnegie Training,” lists Sumitran, when asked about his extensive career. Being a “restless” sort, he then joined a consulting firm in Bengaluru, where he worked for seven years, before “a certain amount of mental fatigue” set in. “So I began a boutique consulting firm and dropped anchor in Goa.”
However, consulting — he still works in the space of leadership development — left him with a lot of time on his hands. His tryst with breads began in 2013 when his wife, Sudha, suggested they buy a breadmaker, having seen one in action at her friend’s house. Within a year, he was baking every other day, but “since it was a machine, every loaf turned out the same. So I decided to cross the final frontier — sourdough”.
He sounds almost poetic when he talks of the bread he is now known for. “It is simple, but not easy. The magic is in the ingredients; we are merely facilitators. For me, it is a spiritual and therapeutic experience.” It took some convincing from one of Sumitran’s friends, but he eventually started fortnightly workshops from his home. “A lot of people flew in from Bengaluru, Mumbai and even places like Patiala and Jalandhar. Chefs would take the red-eye flight in, attend the workshop and leave the same night. But I realised that my model of operating was excluding people who could not do the same, like home bakers.”
Earlier this month, he conducted sold-out workshops in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and, due to the demand, has announced a second round in April. As for the future, he says, “We are in the process of building a micro-farm based on permaculture principles, with four guest rooms. It will house an organic food forest, with free-range hens, ducks and geese. Apart from my baking classes, Sudha will also showcase Malayali curries cooked in traditional cast iron ware,” he says.
Anandita Kamani, 34
Danda Food Project
Back in the ’80s, Kamani remembers her mother and grandmother making fresh pasta and soufflés at home. She admits that growing up, watching them whip up fantastic meals, was an inspiration. However, working as a stylist and jewellery designer, the economics graduate from St Xaviers did not pursue her love of food until 2014 — when a friend asked her to design the continental menu for her resort on Havelock Island in the Andamans. When she returned to Mumbai, a mutual friend introduced her to Aditya Raghavan, who was starting out as a cheese consultant in India.
“We started cooking together whenever we were free. Some experiments were funny: we made a dish of baby brinjals stuffed with masala egg custard and called it ‘egg’plant,” Kamani laughs. This led to talk about doing pop-up dinners at her apartment. Their first, the Pandi Degustation, a pork nose-to-tail menu was served in late 2016. The use of every part of an ingredient is her signature, like the recent pod-to-plate, chocolate-themed dinner with Mason & Co at Magazine Street Kitchen. They also hosted a cheese-themed dinner at the launch of Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa earlier this year.
She now runs the Danda Food Project full-time, and hopes to take it across the country. “Our latest collaboration is with The Farm from Chennai this weekend. And we are planning a seafood menu in mid-April, where we will be experimenting with in-house cured fish and fish roe. But the dream is to eventually open a restaurant and deli,” she says.
Abhishek Chinchalkar, 32
Bombay Duck Brewing
This engineer-turned-beer brewer’s journey started in faraway Texas. “I did my mechanical engineering in NIT Surat and finished my masters in the US. I then worked for nearly a decade, mostly in healthcare consulting and data analytics,” he says. In his spare time, he began experimenting with craft beers and joined a home brewers club to learn more.
“A couple of them decided to open their own breweries in Dallas. So I worked with them and got a bit of experience, till I felt I could do it myself,” he says. It was around this time that he had to make a choice: stay in the US and get a green card, or move back to India. “I came back. In the Indian context, there are so many flavours to explore, be it fruits, vegetables, cereals or grains,” says Chinchalkar, who began as a consultant at Woodside Inn, a craft beer-centric restaurant in Mumbai. Here, he infused the brew with herbs like rosemary and basil, and even flowers like jasmine. His personal experiments include a cream ale made from a local variety of rice, ambemohar , which he found at an organic farm on the way to Pune, and a beer with dalle chillies from Sikkim. Most recently, he developed a saison beer with local fruits like rasbhari.
His upcoming venture, Bombay Duck Brewing, will be a production brewery on the outskirts of Mumbai, focussed on making Belgian and English style beers. “It will be a place to drive down to on the weekends, learn about beers, try a few and take a tour of the brewery. Well, that’s the plan, which should happen in a couple of months!”
Jeneva Talwar, 37
The Artful Baker
The head of The Artful Baker chain in New Delhi has donned several caps. A history graduate from St Stephen’s College, she worked with filmmaker Mike Pandey, studied design at NID and worked as a copywriter with ad firm Grey Worldwide. “When I finally quit that job, I told my boss I did not want to spend my life sitting under tubelights. Now the joke’s on me — that’s exactly what I do in the kitchen,” she says with a laugh.
Talwar was also an actor — her filmography includes SlumDog Millionaire , The Guru and Outsourced. “The last was Patiala House in 2011. No matter what I was doing, I could not define the hollow feeling I had,” she says. Then one day, when her cook failed to show up, “instead of making dal chawal, I baked a cake. I realised I enjoyed it, and kept baking over the next few months.” When she decided to pursue it seriously, she went to Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie. Once back in India, she worked with ITC Maurya, then started her own brand of French desserts, called LaDiDa, working with brands like Paul Smith, Jimmy Choo, Makemytrip and Hungry Monkey.
A chance encounter with Rohit Aggarwal of Lite Bite Foods, where he sampled some of her cakes, led to a job offer at The Artful Baker. She is now the brand chef. “I might be overworked and underpaid, as many people who follow their passions are, but I am glad I found my calling,” she says, adding, “I am working towards using our indigenous grains like bajra,ragi and kuttu to create international-quality breads. I want to bring value to our heritage.”
Country Living
Urban farmers are moving beyond organic produce, to provide India’s burgeoning restaurant scene with crops like microgreens and capers that are hard to come by
Hamsa V and Nitin Sagi
Growing Greens
From a 500-square foot terrace garden in Hebbal, to a four-acre farm 45 km from Bengaluru, Growing Greens has travelled a long way. Hamsa says, “I was in IT, and Nithin was a photographer and teacher. But we both knew we wanted to do farming.”
A conversation with chef Manu Chandra set them on their current path. “He suggested we do microgreens, as it was one of the most expensive things hotels imported. We did market research and spoke to chefs across the country to find out what they were looking for,” she says. Their clients include ITC Grand Chola in Chennai and a majority of the fine dining restaurants in Bengaluru.
While they do not claim to be organic — considering the lack of proper certification in India — Hamsa states they “do not use artificial pesticides or fertilisers. We use neem oil and manure from the cows on our farm. It’s all about letting nature do what it is meant to”.
Fiona Arakal and Srikant Suryanarayan
Ishka Farms
Kochi, Kerala, 29/11/2016. Fiona Arakal, Director Ishka Farms and Srikant Suryanarayan, Managing Director Ishka Farms in Kochi. Photo:H.Vibhu.
A chance meeting with an Argentine farmer introduced Suryanarayan to capers. The crop fit in perfectly with what he and his wife, Arakal, wanted to grow on their 365-acre farm in Tuticorin: it produced through the year, and was different from what anyone else was growing in the country. Over three years of testing and hard work followed. “We have now started commercial, retail and online sales through Amazon,” says Arakal. They supply to restaurants like The Bombay Canteen and Masque in Mumbai. Recently, they planted 10 acres of drought-resistant lime. “We plan to introduce bees in the next year, and want to increase the biodiversity in the area,” she says.
