When Andrew Wong was invited to The Oberoi, New Delhi as mentor chef, he literally transported his Michelin-starred A. Wong from London to India’s capital. Four months into 2018 he realised, “You can never pick up a restaurant from London and drop it into another international city and not have cultural sensitivity.”
Keeping the audience engaged
It wasn’t just about avoiding beef, but also about the smaller things: the way the menu is formatted, for instance. “In London, we do 18 courses, so it takes about four hours to go through. In Delhi, people don’t really want to eat for four hours, so we have to design or structure the menu accordingly.” Then there’s the level of spice. “In London, the flavour profile can be authentic, but sometimes the chilli levels, or the level of umami, needs to be tweaked a little bit, according to the local palate,” says Wong.
This doesn’t mean Delhi is further off from the Chinese mainland. In fact, the Sichuanese Aubergine is probably closer to what it is in Sichuan, “because in London we increase the sugar and slightly reduce the spice level. Indian sugar is sweeter than sugar that we get in London. So when we came over and made these recipes, a lot of them ended up being incredibly sweet. We toned down the quantity, and slightly upped the acidity.” The idea is to expand people’s repertoire of what they eat when they go to a Chinese restaurant — something that can be done only if they trust the menu.
Wong is open to these tweaks because he’s not a purist, following recipes exactly how they ‘should be’, because food, he says, is meant to travel, imbibe what it encounters, and evolve. “I don’t dislike Indian Chinese. I think it’s magical that our culture comes to India and evolves in a small amount of time and it is embraced by the local culture,” he says. It’s as authentic as authentic can be.
Interdisciplinary alliances
Working with an anthropologist for two years now has made all the difference, because food is then seen in a cultural context, rather than from a position of them versus us. It’s probably the reason he acknowledges vegetarianism in India, not treating them as second-class diners, instead, digging into Chinese cuisine to find recipes — monk food, for instance, that’s vegetarian. In fact, the Baoshuan menu is far more diverse in terms of vegetarian dishes when compared to what he has in London.
It’s not a one-way street though. Wong has taken elements of India to his London restaurant. “ Papads were designed to be dimsums! Those belong in China. In London, we fill them up with a very traditional Sichuanese dish, coated with a peanut essence. It’s a one-mouthful biteful and it’s massively popular.”
Texts from the archives serve as inspiration and are for information. “We take that and translate it,” he says. “My own personal style is to make it (food) a little bit lighter, a little more fun.” So the Emperor’s Soup, is made from traditional Chinese chicken stock. There are up to 40 spices and aromatics (fennel seeds, star anise, liquorice, cassia bark, angelica roots, bay leaf, cinnamon, black pepper, Szechuan pepper, dried herbs, dates) added to about four litres of water, and a whole chicken is dunked in. The water is boiled down to as little as half a litre. Dried morels, goji berries, shimeji, Chinese pak choi, and mushrooms, are added to the rich broth, that’s just right for the winter.
Traditional Chinese cuisine used cornflour, but as people look at eating lighter, Wong finds that if he must avoid it, he needs to invest more in flavours to give the food body. “I don’t want our guests to feel tired after a meal. You should be able to continue the day feeling invigorated,” he says.
The brief though, is simple: “The menu, whether at A. Wong or Baoshuan, is about celebrating China as a very large country.” As people begin to see it as a receptive culture — they took in Buddhism, chillies, tempura — that has international borders with 14 countries, menus will only evolve and go deeper.
(Dim sum lunches are priced at ₹2,500 and ₹2,900 (including a house beverage), excluding taxes)
