Celebrating India's Culinary Heritage

With decades of experience in running kitchens across the globe, Chef Sriram Aylur is a great champion of Indian regional cooking, as Roopa Gulati discovered

Director of Operations and Head Chef at London’s Michelin-starred, Quilon restaurant, Sriram Aylur celebrates fine dining Indian cooking from the west coast of India with sunshine ingredients, tropical spice blends and outstanding British produce.

I visited Quilon on a stormy, spring day, and although black clouds glowered outside the restaurant, lunch with Sriram Aylur brought warming tropical spice to my plate. The menu is notable for its subtle spicing. Favourite dishes from my latest meal included a simple, yoghurty mango curry speckled with popped mustard seeds and spiked with green chillies, followed by creamy, tart-with-tamarind fish curry, and sweetly spiced pistachio nut cake scented with cardamom.

Owned by the Taj Group of Hotels, Quilon opened its doors for business in 1999 and won its first Michelin star in 2008, which it still retains. It seems hard to imagine now, but at that time, there wasn’t much awareness of the diverse Indian dishes from western and south-western India. Even now, keen home cooks in the UK hoping to create Aylur’s signature dishes will find it hard to source key ingredients such as curry leaves and mustard seeds from many British supermarkets. Luckily, most of us have access to online shops or if we live in larger cities, can visit South Asian grocery stores and buy everything from fresh coconut flesh to bushy bunches of curry leaves. Suddenly, the world seems a much smaller place when you can make a Keralan seafood moilee from the comfort of a kitchen in Aberdeen.