The Stirring Pot

With the rise—and fall—of gimmickry and imitation in modern Indian cuisine, chefs are digging deeper into India’s hinterland to innovate and survive diner fatigue.

- Kathakali Chanda & Pankti Mehta Kadakia

At Indian Accent, the modern Indian restaurant he helms in Delhi, New York and London, chef Manish Mehrotra gives the humble Indian flatbread a nifty makeover. By stuffing pillowy quarter-sized naans with molten blue cheese and pairing kulchas with oddball ingredients— smoked bacon, wild mushroom, among others—the 45-year-old reinvents stuffed parathas that are a staple of North Indian kitchens.

As open as he is to experimenting, Mehrotra was left bristling at a Delhi restaurant that served him bacon and blue cheese kulcha—a cross between two signature bread varieties at his own restaurant. “The chef doesn’t realise that blue cheese and bacon don’t get along well; both have strong flavours that clash when put together. It’s experiments like these that give modern twists a bad name,” says the chef, whose restaurant is the highest-ranked (60) Indian eatery in Best Restaurants list of 2019.

Mehrotra—widely recognised as the torchbearer of the progressive Indian movement—is not alone in his anguish over copycats and wannabes. Saransh Goila, founder of Goila Butter Chicken, recalls that before he launched his venture three years ago, he was approached by a number of restaurateurs looking to do modern Indian—“whatever Gaggan Anand does”. “They understood only the theatrics of Gaggan, but not his food philosophy,” says Goila. That the Bangkok-based Anand’s ‘yogurt explosion’ is in essence a flavour-packed dahi chaat was lost in fancy claptraps over his molecular techniques. Instead, F&B entrepreneurs became busy putting together dishes that were hashtag-worthy not in their flavours but in form—foams, spheres, smoke, what have you.