Indian cuisine has always evolved by embracing new influences while staying true to its roots, and that is what makes it so timeless. As chefs and restaurateurs, our responsibility is to preserve its authenticity, celebrate regional diversity and continue telling the stories behind every dish.
A thali is the truest picture of what we celebrate on the fifteenth of August. Look at it: a Kashmiri rogan josh beside a Goan sorpotel, a Bengali fish next to a Rajasthani dal, roti and rice, and a dozen dialects of spice, all sharing one plate in peace. That is India. In my kitchen we cook the food of the old frontier, Peshawar, Lahore, Amritsar, Awadh, recipes from a land that was once undivided, and every time we light the tandoor we are keeping a shared memory alive. Freedom, for a cook, is the freedom to preserve what our elders gave us and the freedom to reinvent it without asking anyone’s permission. And nothing is more secular, more democratic, than Indians of every faith sitting around one dastarkhwan, breaking the same bread.
Today the Indian guest change completely. He is younger, he has travelled, he reads, and he asks me questions at the table — what oil, which region, is this a millet? Twenty years ago nobody asked. So the cooking is becoming lighter and more honest: cold-pressed oils, less cream, millets and ancient grains our grandmothers ate and we foolishly forgot, produce that is seasonal and local. Presentation has become an art too; a kebab today must taste of 1947 but look like tomorrow. Technology has changed us — cloud kitchens, delivery, the phone that eats first. But I tell my young cooks: evolve the surface, never the soul. Dum takes the time it takes. Masala must still be ground by hand and roasted with patience. The day we let a shortcut cook our food, we will have lost the very thing the guest came searching for.
For years the world thought India meant butter chicken and naan, and slowly even we began to believe it. Now the guest is bored of that single story. He wants Chettinad, Naga smoked pork, Kumaoni bhatt, Bohri thaal, Sindhi kadhi — the food of a particular village and a particular grandmother. Young chefs are going back home with a notebook, sitting in their mother’s kitchen, writing down what was never written. A forgotten kokum or a gondhoraj lemon becomes famous overnight on a phone screen. Our own restaurant survived because we guarded the frontier recipes when they were unfashionable. What drives this revival is pride, and a little bit of fear — the fear that if we do not record these dishes now, the last person who knows them will take them with her. That fear is a good cook’s best teacher.
Read the full story that first appeared in Seema Magazine here:
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