Vikas Khanna is much more than a TV chef or a performer

It is a funny thing to say about India’s most famous chef but till this week, he had still to cross the final frontier: win critical acclaim for his cooking.

And now with the New York Times giving Bungalow, the restaurant Vikas Khanna runs in New York, three stars, making it the first Indian restaurant in this century to gain that accolade, Khanna has climbed that final mountain.

 

Rating chefs is a complicated and multi-layered business. Most of the chefs we have heard of get very little respect from their peers.  They are TV chefs, famous mostly for being good on television.  Hardly anyone has ever eaten their food. For instance, Nigella Lawson, a goddess on the screen, is not a chef. She doesn’t run restaurants and lacks some of the technical skills chefs prize. To be fair to her she is upfront about her role.

 

   When chefs who have made their reputation on TV try and run restaurants, the results can be disappointing.  Jamie Oliver was a young chef at London’s River Café when a TV producer spotted him and turned him into a star. But Oliver’s eventual foray into restaurants has been less than successful. His restaurants have closed, gone bust or flopped.

 

   Vikas Khanna’s case is slightly different. When Star brought him back to India to host the second season of Masterchef India, he was already chef at the Michelin starred Junoon in New York. So his chef credentials were not in doubt. But over the years, as TV gave him a film star-like popularity and a devoted fan-base to match, he cooked less and less at restaurants.

 

   Of course he had once helmed a Michelin-starred restaurant, people said, but what was his food like now? Had anyone actually tried his cooking? It had been 14 years of only celebrityhood.

 

   I have known Khanna ever since he came to India to host Masterchef and have never paid attention to suggestions that he has stopped cooking and started performing. When he is not in front of the cameras he is still exploring the world of food. The cookbooks keep coming. So does his research. He is forever travelling. He has gone to nearly every part of India and explored the local cuisine. He has brought back unusual ingredients from his travels: at one stage he was obsessed with bamboo rice, which is not a true rice but grows on withering bamboo.

 

   He has, contrary to what people may think, also run an excellent restaurant: Kinara in Dubai, and created recipes that take Indian cuisine forward.

 

   But none of this has attracted as much attention as his stardom. When he has been written about in serious publications, it is less for his cooking and more for his humanitarian work. During the Pandemic he put his life and career on hold and focussed only on sending food (and food grains) to people who needed it all over India.

 

   And then, there has been his personal tragedy. As all his fans know, Khanna is the ultimate family guy.  He started cooking as a very young man in Amritsar with the blessing of his parents and his grandparents.  Even now, he relates dishes to his childhood, to his family kitchen and at every public event that is important to him, he brings his family along.

 

"Integral to Bungalow’s appeal (and I have still to eat there) is that Vikas makes Indian food that Indians enjoy but with creative tweaks."

   For most of his life, his closest friend and soul mate was his sister Radhika who had always looked after him (“she was the bright one, I was the dud” he recalls) and even moved to New York to be with him.

 

   But, in 2008 Radhika was diagnosed with lupus, a potentially fatal condition, Brother and sister agreed never to talk about it in public and for over a decade, they kept her condition secret.

 

   Over the last few years, as her health worsened, their roles were reversed: now he was the one who looked after her. As her condition deteriorated Vikas found there was less and less he could do for her. He tried every kind of medical treatment but, two years ago, just before she was due for a kidney transplant, Radhika passed, leaving her brother bereft, lonely and shattered.

 

   It was after he lost Radhika that Vikas took on the challenge of opening Bungalow, a 125-cover restaurant in New York. With a hole in his life to fill, he threw himself into the project. Though nobody will admit it now, many of his peers were sceptical that he could pull it off: it is not easy to open a large restaurant in the most competitive market in the world, in a city that has never rated Indian food very highly.

 

   Vikas was conscious of the challenge and says he was grateful that Unapologetic Foods, the group run by Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya, which owns Dhamaka, Semma and other Indian restaurants had led the way in earning a new respect for Indian food. They, in turn, are hugely complimentary about his skills and talents. The chef, Rene Redzepi of Noma, who loves Indian food, told me that when he met Vikas with Mazumdar and Pandya in New York he was astonished by how friendly they were. “There was no sense of competition”, Redzepi said admiringly. Redzepi has since been back to Bungalow and rates it very highly.

 

   Redzepi also noted the high proportion of Indian guests who loved the food: as the New York Times noted in its review, Bungalow “is a restaurant by South Asians, for South Asians, and if others want to join in, they are welcome too."

 

   I don't think anyone expected Bungalow to do as well as it has done. As Priya Krishna, who reviewed the restaurant for the Times, wrote “checking forward last Friday, I could have landed a dinner reservation for four at coveted places like Lilia, Carbone or Torrisi in the next few weeks. But there wasn’t a single opening at Bungalow.”

 

   Integral to Bungalow’s appeal (and I have still to eat there) is that Vikas makes Indian food that Indians enjoy but with creative tweaks. His galoutis are fried lotus roast filled with mashed rajma. The shrimp balchao comes in puff pastry (like that Indian standard; a cream cone): and Vikas cooks jackfruit, pineapple and guava in ways that no one has treated them before.

 

   All in all, it has been a good week for Vikas Khanna. A total rave from the New York Times with three stars and a restaurant that is full for weeks ahead. Here finally is proof that he is much more than a TV chef or a performer; he is a skilled and imaginative chef who can triumph in an incredibly competitive market.

 

   And the success gives him something to put into the hole in his heart that opened up when he lost Radhika.