Taste For Waste

Slowly but surely, Indian chefs are getting creative with kitchen scraps. But consuming zero-waste food is expensive and niche

- Sneha Bhura

In 2017, Dhruv Oberoi, head chef at Olive Qutub, Mehrauli, was looking for ways to re-purpose food waste and leftovers. As part of a collaborative project on sustainable cooking, Oberoi was tasked with coming up with a culinary pièce de résistance from garbage. He first fashioned his chef’s coat out of leftover fabric. Later, while walking around in the back area of his tony restaurant, Oberoi was mesmerised at the sight of broken, chipped and discarded plates scattered everywhere. They looked beautiful. The littered landscape of unwanted plates conjured up images of broken-tile mosaics à la Antoni Gaudí. And also the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are rejoined with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Oberoi had mined his diamond from the dumpster and thus was born All Things Broken—a zero-waste dessert made of short crust, lime cheesecake, meringue and sorrel spice, served on two shards of broken plates. All Things Broken sat primly on last year’s summer menu of Olive Mehrauli. The tangy-sweet confection is Oberoi’s way of injecting a bit of revolutionary zing. “You see, in a fine-dining restaurant, you are not allowed to serve even on a chipped plate,” says the 33-year-old Oberoi, who has been a chef with the Olive group for 12 years.