A hush settles over the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency. Nine sets of contestants are lined up MasterChef-style, waiting to be called in front of the judges. Their dishes have been cooked, plated and are ready to be tasted. The regional round of the inaugural Hyatt Culinary Challenge begins. The challenge brings together individuals from various corporates and pairs them up with a child from the SMILE Foundation to execute a recipe of their choice within 75 minutes. Each team also has a chef mentoring them and helping out. Being held in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Raipur, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad, the winners from each city will compete in a finale cook-off in Delhi later this month.
Chungmee Kim, wife of Korean Consul-General Kyungsoo Kim, has all the ingredients for bibimbap, a signature Korean dish, ready to be assembled. She deftly adds the brightly-coloured vegetables to a bowl and starts tossing them. Her team-mate Priya, a student of class IX, looks on and says, “I helped while sautéing and learned how to make this new dish. I hadn’t even heard of it before!” Some of the other kids are not so lucky — they stand at their stations looking bored, watching as the elder member does all the cooking.
The station that draws the most attention is Mikhail Gorbatov’s. The director of the Russian Cultural Centre says that he is making the Russian version of biriyani — plov. “It’s actually a popular dish which originated in the former U.S.S.R, so it has Uzbek and Czech influences. The version I’m making today has less rice and more meat,” he explains. With 20 minutes to go, he’s adding long grain rice to a pot in which gravy with meat and entire pods of garlic are bubbling away, and hoping that it cooks in time.
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On the panel of judges are writer and journalist Geeta Doctor, general manager of Park Hyatt, Christian Wurm and executive chef of Park Hyatt Grzegorz Odolak. They are appreciative of each dish, commenting on the plating, taste and the technique that has gone into it. They declare Mikhail’s dish the winner. Vani Raja of Yazaki Wiring Technologies is the runner-up with a pumpkin seed curry served with rice. Other contestants included Capt. Gur Prasad, managing director of Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics; Tammy Sandhu from the British Deputy High Commission; Lanka Lingam, managing director of Lanson Toyota; Rashmi Rai of Marundheshwara Enterprises; Gautam Bulchandani, CEO of Royal Stitches and Sophia Tallent, general manager of Global Air Transport. Their dishes covered everything from a traditional Anglo-Indian roast dinner to the Indian version of shepherd’s pie and a chocolate dessert.