Eat with your eyes. As our chefs warm up to an idea the French and the Japanese have long lived by, Indian food gets a contemporary makeover
And it has happened—the curry has left the kadai and become haute. Somewhere along the way, masala maachh has gone for a makeover to look as French as foie gras. Samosa has deconstructed itself, with exposed stacks of brown minced meat, mashed potatoes and cheese between pastries and tamarind chutney drizzled around it like red wine reduction. Pallid sandesh comes baked and set off with a sprinkling of Demerara sugar. And you don’t sip chardonnay between the courses, you ask for chai.

Indian restaurants—the chefs of which fantasise about ornate French cuisine, which never quite picked up in India, and find their patrons eating pretty sushis off the hands of the chefs in the neighbouring Japanese eateries—have finally decided to do the same to the melange we call Indian cuisine, contemporise it. The innovation hasn’t reached Kochi or Kota yet and hasn’t touched everything from aviyal to aam panna, but it has begun in earnest.

If you step into Varq, the swish restaurant at The Taj Mahal Hotel in Delhi, its signature crab dish is not dunked in a bowl of gravy, or unceremoniously sautéed and laid out. There is a sprinkle of turmeric and the meat is spiked with pepper, but it is laid out between layers of ever-so-thin filo pastries with a spicy tandoori prawn curled up on top. “It took us five years to transform the traditional Indian food of our earlier restaurant Haveli into a gastronomic fare at Varq,” says Amit Choudhary, executive chef of The Taj. “We eat with our eyes first. While the French and the Japanese made it a thumb rule in their kitchens long ago, now Indian chefs are now warming up to idea.” But if you ask for rice or roti to go with this elegant-looking crab, Choudhary might just add it to his improved list of blasphemy.

... contd.