Travelling For Foodgasms

We ask five chefs to share their travel tales and the reflection of their experiences in their menus, including the most bizarre fusions

- Samreen Tungekar

Every time a restaurant recreates their menu, the first thing that excites people is the addition of a new ingredient, or a new technique, or a twist to a traditional dish (don’t tell me you’ve not secretly enjoyed the combination of an ice cream with an Indian sweet or the berrying up of your barfis). Chefs these days are travelling especially for food, looking to enhance their current palates even more by discovering new ingredients or products in different countries, and finding a way to incorporate them in dishes. They savour various cuisines on their trips, that believe it or not, sometimes even surprises them.

Bringing it home

When Prateek Bakhtiani, head chef at Ether Atelier Chocolate, was travelling to Tuscany, he discovered a new tea blend. He met two sisters who had turned their love for tea into a tiny boutique. called Oro Nero. “These sisters take frequent trips around Italy to find local ingredients to flavour the superior tea that they fly in from across the globe. Their ortigia tea blend is amazing. Ortigia is a small island in Sicily littered with groves of several native citrus fruit. It has quickly become one of my most prized teas, in what is an almost dangerously large collection,” he says.

Thomas Zacharias, chef partner at The Bombay Canteen, discovered Ambula when he was travelling through Odisha. “I was on my #ChefOnTheRoad trip through the state when I came across Ambula, a form of dried raw mango from Odisha, and I brought it back for my kitchen,” he adds.

It gets even more unusual when Chef Benoit Vidal, the corporate chef of Foodhall, reveals one ingredient he’s recently used. “Corossol is a fruit I’ve discovered in Africa and I used it in a recipe that added great texture and flavour,” he says.