Pursuits: Asian cuisines do not allow for individual expression

I remember reading in a British paper in the 1980s that the French had a strange attitude to chefs.

They treated them like heroes. Some were even household names. And many of them appeared on TV all the time. The article summed up the British attitude to chefs:

they were an integral part of the kitchen and they should stay there. There was no reason for them to emerge from the kitchen and make themselves known to customers.

 

   I’ve picked a British reference. But I could just as well have quoted similar articles from any other country except France. In the early 1980s, there were few celebrity chefs in America. The cookery figures who were well-known (Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, perhaps) were either cookbook writers or taught cookery on TV. In Italy, there were few celebrity chefs. (A problem that persists to this day: how many celebrity chefs from restaurants in Italy can you name?) There were no celebrity chefs in Spain. (No Santi Santamaria and no Ferran Adria certainly). Australia was regarded as a gastronomic backwater. (Nobody thought very much of Pacific Rim cooking and nobody outside of Australia had heard of Tetsuya or Neil Perry.)

 

   The situation was worse in the East. There were terrific Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. But nobody cared who the chefs were. The Thais have one of the world’s greatest cuisines. But even today I can’t think of more than a handful Thai celebrity chefs (as distinct from TV cookery presented). Perhaps Ian Kittichai is the only one with a global reputation.

 

   But by the end of the 1980s, all that had changed --- at least in England and America. Inevitably, it was the French who led the charge. The first celebrity chefs in England were Michel and Albert Roux, both Frenchmen who cooked French food. In the US, the celebrity chefs who emerged in the Nineties were overwhelmingly French: Daniel Boulud, David Bouley and Jean-Georges.

 

   But slowly but surely, the locals got in on the act. By the Nineties, such British chefs as Marco Pierre White and Antony Worrall-Thompson were ubiquitous. In America, the likes of Thomas Keller and Jeremiah Tower soon emerged. And these days, a new celebrity chef is born every minute.

 

   However, the trend has yet to spread to the East. The Japanese worship great sushi masters but they are not yet household names or TV stars in their own country. The Chinese don’t have five local celebrity chefs between Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland. The best known chefs in Singapore are all white boys. And we are only just getting used to the idea of a celebrity chef in India.

 

"Asian cuisines do not allow for individual expression. So we will have very good cooks, some great interpreters of a tradition. But the likes of Manish Mehrotra will remain rarities."

   What accounts for the difference?

 

   I have a view on this.  Some cuisines (French or modern American or modern English) are less a collection of recipes and dishes than a collection of techniques. So, a French chef will look at say, a piece of beef and say to himself: “What can I do with this? Can I perhaps lightly sear it and then pair it with say, raspberries and a little rocket?” If he says: “I will make Tournedos Rossini by adding a little foie gras and a Madeira-truffle sauce to the beef”, he may be regarded as a great cook (if he gets it right) but he’ll not be regarded as a great chef. French cuisine respects and rewards innovation and creativity.

 

   On the other hand, Asian cuisines are about dishes. An Indian chef who is presented with say, a hunk of mutton will say to himself: “Should I make a rogan josh? How about a do- piaza? Or perhaps I can mince the meat for keema-mutton”. He will rarely say: “What dish can invent with this ingredient?”

 

   When cuisines are rigid, we respect good cooks but have no time for great chefs. (To a large extent, the Indian experience is repeated throughout Asia.) When chefs try and innovate we can dismiss them as trying “fusion” cooking and frown on their creations.

 

   Perhaps it is because of this that the great Indian celebrity chefs tend to be those who cook at restaurants abroad where innovation is welcomed. The best-known Indian celebrity chef in the world is Vineet Bhatia who has Michelin stars for his restaurants in London and Geneva and who innovates all the time while taking care to preserve Indian flavours. The best-known Indian chef in New York is Vikas Khanna (of the Michelin-starred Junoon) who is a great innovator though I suspect his fame also has something to do with his charisma and his looks. (He was recently voted the Hottest Chef in America.)

 

   Indian celebrity chefs tend to be executive chefs of hotels who have huge corporate PR departments to promote them. For all that, there are some great restaurateurs on the list: the Taj has Hemant Oberoi who has opened more successful and diverse restaurants than any other Indian chef. (Do not judge him by the dire food at the Dubai Taj of which he is nominally in charge.) And there’s Ananda Solomon who frowns on innovation but runs restaurants of high quality across cuisines.

 

   The single most innovative chef in India however – and for my money, the greatest Indian chef alive --- is Manish Mehrotra who is only now getting the recognition that is his due because of the TV show Foodistan where he takes on all comers and grinds them to dust. But because Manish’s restaurant, Delhi’s Indian Accent, is off the beaten track, he has not become a household name as yet.

 

   But will we ever have a situation in India similar to the one that prevails in England, France or America, where chefs are treated like film stars?

 

   My guess is: no. Asian cuisines do not allow for individual expression. So we will have very good cooks, some great interpreters of a tradition (like Imtiaz Qureshi). But the likes of Manish Mehrotra will remain rarities.