Atul Kochhar to be First Indian to Open British Restaurant in U.K.

IN A CLASSIC case of the empire 'cooking back', Michelin-starred chef, restaurateur, TV presenter and cookbook writer Atul Kochhar is all set to open a 'British' restaurant at The Crown, a contemporary coaching inn in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, not far from London, which is otherwise famous as the address where Andie McDowell and Hugh Grant make out in the 'Elizabeth' suite in Four Wedding and A Funeral.

The restaurant will be called Hawkyns, the name being a play on Sir William Hawkins (whose surname sometimes appears as Hawkyns in contemporary records), the English sailor and adventurer who befriended Emperor Jehangir, plying him with alcohol and exotic gifts, and wangled for the East India Company, against fierce Portuguese opposition, the right to set up its first trading post ('factory') in Surat.

Hawkins therefore was the man who laid the foundation of British rule in India, so the delicious irony of an Indian opening a 'British' restaurant inspired by him cannot be missed.

"My entire team is British," Kochhar, who has opened two restaurants (NRI and Lima) in Mumbai, said during a visit to Delhi, where his 80-year-old mother lives. What is British food, I asked, and he replied with an interesting observation: "Britain is such a secular country today that if I serve monkfish curry or Peking duck at the restaurant, it would be considered British."

In a freewheeling conversation, which started with how he had managed to get some money out of the ATM at the JW Marriott, New Delhi Aerocity (thankfully, there was no queue out there!) and was surviving on it, Kochhar talked about his struggle to get the right ingredients for his restaurants and the mismatch between the largely unorganised agricultural sector and the restaurants that depend on it.

All is not lost, though. In this challenging market, Kochhar has discovered the Trikaya farms, 35 km away from Pune near Talegaon, started by the advertising industry pioneer Ravi Gupta in 1991 and now run full-time by his son Samar. Trikaya is Kochhar's source for different types of chillies and the many varieties of salad leaves he needs for the diasporic Indian cuisine of NRI (Not Really Indian).

Looking back at his experience over the past year in India, which he left 23 years ago to become an international celebrity, Kocchar said he was still "a student of the Indian market", but what he was seeing around him was encouraging. "The entire country has reformed in a big way," he said. "The standalones have reinvented the wheel, both in fine dining and in fun dining."

India, Kochhar said, "love their coriander, ginger and chillies", which he kept in mind while tweaking dishes such as the South African Bunny Chow and Curry Puff (a favourite of the Indian community in South-East Asia). "If the Indian market wants more chillies in the curry puff, who am I to argue with it?" Kochhar said, giving an insight into his open-ended cooking philosophy. Similarly, Lima, which started out as a Peruvian restaurant, has taken a pan-Latin American turn with a menu featuring tacos, burritos and empanadas. "You have to give a restaurant 1,000 days before writing it off," he said.

At NRI, people love the Bunny Chow ("it suits the Indian palate and style of eating, because it is a sharing dish") and Curry Puffs, in addition to the Fijian Maman Kebabs and the Caribbean Goat Meat Curry, where the constituents of the garam masala include allspice berries, parsley and thyme. Clearly, Kochhar is catering to the palate of the globalised well-heeled and well-travelled Indians, who are also the patrons of his Michelin-starred Benaras in London and Rang Mahal at the JW Marquis in Dubai, a restaurant he consults with, which has won "each and every award that a restaurant can possibly win in Dubai".

I asked him to described his cooking style and he said it was contemporary cuisine in the tradition of the celebrated French chef, Pierre Gagnaire. "Like him, I must be able to use the same ingredients and techniques wherever I am in the world," Kochhar said. Good food, he added, is all about the interplay of tradition and technology -- you can't have more of one than the other. For Indian food, it's the balance of spices, the marination and the tandoor that matter the most.

Where does that leave 'molecular gastronomy', a term that Indian chefs and restaurateurs love to drop? Kochhar, who believes that his compatriots in India warm up to a global trend when it is becoming passe, is emphatic in his rejection of it. "Why do you want me to add more chemicals to your food than it already carries?" he asked and then pointed out that the mishandling of techniques such as sous vide (water bath) and material such as liquid nitrogen can lead to serious consequences.

Kochhar mentioned Ferran Adria, the world's foremost practitioner of molecular gastronomy. "He decided molecular gastronomy wasn't going anywhere and shut down his restaurant," Kochhar said. "It is not a business model you can make money out of." Heston Blumenthal, the other chef synonymous with molecular gastronomy, has had to shut down his restaurant for months on two occasions because of cases of food poisoning. "The Fat Duck is a 32-seater restaurant and it has 64 chefs working in its kitchen. It is just not a sustainable model. Heston makes his money from the three or four pubs that he owns in the neighbourhood," Kochhar informed me.

Talking to Kochhar is like dipping into an encyclopedia. Even a one-hour interview is not enough. Questions that you want to ask swirl in your mind, but he had to go to meet a friend. Must catch him the next time he's here. There's so much more to learn.