From Streets to Tables: India's Iconic Street Food Goes Global

India's beloved street food staple is moving beyond borders, inspiring international chefs to experiment with the dish in unique, unexpected ways, finds Smitha Menon

- Smitha Menon

At the international food congress, Gastronomikawhich brings the greatest culinary minds from around the world to Spain's San Sebastián chef Lucía Freitas demonstrates a dish from A Tafona, her restaurant in Santiago. The creation is a tribute to the fisherwomen of Galicia, who harvest fresh barnacles from icy cold waters every morning. I watch as caramelised onion paste, liquid corn foam and barnacles are neatly piled into a crisply fried-gasp-puri. The puri she explains, "provides the right amount of crispiness to the dish while merging a traditional Galician preparation with vanguard fusion cuisine". Tasters are passed around the audience, who savour the dish as Freitas bows to thunderous applause.

So how did the beloved street food staple from India-the origins of which are mostly lost to history-reach the mecca of gastronomy in Spain? Slowly but surely, Indian cuisine is being demystified across the globe. As desi chefs like Chai Pani's Meherwan Irani in Asheville and Naved Nasir at London's Dishoom run award-winning outfits and Indian cookbooks like Cooking To Save Your Life (Juggernaut Books) by Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee grow in popularity, the soft power of the country's cuisine is growing. No longer are international chefs looking to India and thinking butter chicken. They're studying flavour profiles and age-old processes of the Indian kitchen. And this is where the pani puri comes in.