Have you noticed how kitchens are slowly inching their way close to your table? Once upon a time, they were hidden somewhere behind a restaurant. Then they came up with the concept of open kitchens and you saw your chefs wield their mean spatulas while doing wonders in an area right at the centre of the dining area. But now we have chefs standing by your table, explaining what you are eating, and conjuring up a bit of magic right on your plate.
And I must say that I was under the spell of Vikramjit Roy, who is the chef of a new restaurant called Tian at the ITC Maurya. The restaurant, which opened about three months ago, celebrates Asian food with the most delicious combinations of the old and the new. Tian’s philosophy is simple: “It’s a modern insight into the unknown flavours that are globally Asian.”
I was invited to try the food there one evening, and I had the most amazing experience. The tone was set by the amuse-bouche – a platter of vegetables and seafood with truffle-flavoured cream and goat cheese mousse. I dipped a bit of my tuna into a small bed of olive sand and put it in my mouth – and it burst into a mélange of flavours with a cold shock. “Aah,” was all that I could say.
The chef is clearly a magician. One delightful course followed another. I think what I enjoyed the most was a duck confit, which the chef calls duck carpaccio because it’s cut into thin strips like carpaccio. The almost translucent pieces of duck came with mitsuba (a Japanese herb) and a citric ponzu jelly topped with a dollop of fresh orange ice. I broke the ice over the duck, mixed a piece of the meat with the flavours of herbs and popped it into the mouth. It was heavenly.
If you are a pork lover, you must have the pork belly yakitori with tamari soy (a lighter and more flavourful version of soy) and shichimi (Japanese pepper). I loved it, and enjoyed both the lamb loin cooked and presented like an Indonesian satay and the spring chicken that came in a Thai green curry with jasmine rice.
But the highlight of the evening was the dessert. Tian's speciality dessert has 23 ingredients, including various kinds of chocolates, pineapple, vanilla compote, red cherry compote, sour cherries, figs, mango passion fruit coulis and soy milk and vanilla reduction. The chef assembles all this together in front of you — and then deconstructs them.
Some may describe these moves as culinary gimmicks, but I disagree. I think what’s important in the final analysis is the taste of food – and the experience. The topmost restaurants serve you the best that there is – thanks to the freshest and tastiest of ingredients cooked by the most talented people in the industry, who have, in turn, been trained in some of the best rated restaurants by some of the master chefs of the world. How do you go beyond that? Chef Roy raises the bar by encouraging you to experience your food, and not just eat it.
Rahul Verma is a seasoned street food connoisseur
