The best of the year in food

What a year in food it’s been! It’s been a year of triumphs. A year of recovery.

It’s almost as though the pandemic never happened. Indian restaurants have shone abroad. And within the country, our restaurants have bounced back, demonstrating creativity and flair.

 

Here’s my recap of the best of the year in food and of the people who made it happen.

 

Star of the year: Vikas Khanna

 

I don’t think this one needs any explanation. Vikas was already India’s best-known chef, but he was plagued by suggestions that while he was a superstar in India and drew bigger crowds than many movie idols, nobody had actually eaten his food.

 

   Could he really cook that well, the sceptics kept asking.

 

   This was the year he decisively answered all those questions. The opening of Bungalow in New York City was an enormous risk. Vikas chose to prove that he could be successful and respected in the world’s most competitive restaurant city. But he also wanted to give his millions of Indian fans a place they could treat as their own.

 

   Fortunately, he found the ideal middle ground. Bungalow has been full since the day it opened. It is almost impossible to get a table for months ahead.

 

   It has also got rave reviews. The New York Times gave it three stars, something it has not done for any Indian restaurant in this century. World-famous chefs like René Redzepi and Eric Ripert have raved about the food. When Jeff Bezos went for dinner, he described it as a pilgrimage.

 

   But Vikas has not ignored his Indian fan base either. On any given night, the majority of guests at Bungalow are Indians.

 

   As we know, Indians are the biggest critics of Indian restaurants abroad: They always say that the food is not really authentic or that special. Not in this case. They love it and keep trying to come back.

 

   It helps that Vikas believes in personally looking after his guests. Most nights, he is at Bungalow, going from table to table, happily posing for pictures with his fans.

 

   We sometimes forget that before he became famous with MasterChef India, Vikas was chef at Junoon in New York and had won Michelin stars year after year. He is back on form in the kitchen.

 

   I reckon he will get a star at Bungalow next year. And his life will have come full circle.

 

Phenomenon of the Year: Bastian

 

Bastian is a Mumbai restaurant that opened some years ago, with Kelvin Cheung as the chef. It was an instant success, but it was still regarded as a suburban phenomenon, a smallish restaurant that attracted movie stars and suburban elites.

 

  It has since also opened in midtown locations, grown vastly in size, moved away from focusing on a single chef, and has become the most successful restaurant ever in Mumbai. Its sales figures are the envy of the industry and nobody can figure out how it manages to pull in so many customers night after night.

 

   Bastian is expanding to Bengaluru, Pune and other cities. I imagine it will become an all-India phenomenon, something like Carbone in America. The group will also open an Asian restaurant soon.

 

   Originally, it helped that Shilpa Shetty was one of the investors. But it has now reached the stage where nobody even cares who owns it. They just want a table. Even the legal troubles of some of its investors have made no dent in its popularity. No Indian restaurant has seen such phenomenal growth and success in history

 

Chef of the year: Hussain Shahzad

 

This one is a no-brainer. Ever since Hussain opened O Pedro for the Bombay Canteen group, he was marked as the Chef to Watch. He then took over all of the group’s operations, launched Veronica’s sandwich shop and astonished people with the range of his skills.

 

"High-quality Japanese food has never been hotter with such restaurants as Mizu Izakaya and firm favourite, Izumi."

   But this has been his best year yet, with the success of Papa’s Bombay, a small counter-seating restaurant above Veronica’s, which is the hardest booking in Mumbai and may also have the best, most inspired food in India.

 

Restaurant of the year: Avartana

 

When the first Avartana was launched in Chennai some years ago, I was an enthusiastic fan. But, I wondered, would a modern south-Indian restaurant, no matter how good, really have much success around the country?

 

   I needn’t have worried. ITC has finally rolled Avartanas out at many of its hotels. Calcutta came first and the Avartana there took the city by storm. The Mumbai Avartana, where I ate recently, was, I thought, even better than the Chennai original. The newly opened Delhi Avartana will take a little time to find its feet. There’s even an Avartana in Colombo and more are on their way.

 

   ITC’s reputation for Indian food rests mainly on north Indian cuisine, with such restaurants as Dum Pukht and Bukhara/Peshawari. Avartana will change all that. It wins every award you can think of and is very much the restaurant of the moment.

 

Restaurateur of the year: Samyukta Nair

 

Samyukta is the granddaughter of the late Captain Nair who founded the Leela group. But rather than take the easy way out and focus on India, she made the more difficult decision to open restaurants in the most exclusive part of London.

 

   To everyone’s surprise, she has been super-successful. Jamawar, one of her two Indian restaurants, has a Michelin star. Mei Mei Mayfair, a Chinese restaurant on a location that was widely regarded as jinxed, is a huge success. Koyn, a Japanese restaurant with a Thai sibling, also in London’s most expensive area, has got the city talking. A new Italian restaurant has just opened.

 

   Two of her restaurants have now opened in Dubai and nobody even knew that she had a restaurant in Doha until it won a Michelin star last month; one of only two stars to be awarded in that city. (Alain Ducasse got the other one.)

 

   As if all this was not enough, she has just appeared on the Daily Telegraph list of London’s best-dressed celebrities. No Indian has ever made such an impact on the London restaurant scene so quickly.

 

Food trend of the year: South-east Asian

 

We have always had restaurants that claim to serve the food of East Asia, but most of them have either served Punjabified versions of the real thing or have not been very good.

 

   That is now changing. Garima Arora, whose Bangkok restaurant has two Michelin stars, has just opened a Thai restaurant in Gurgaon, in partnership with Riyaaz Amlani. Vinesh Johny, the celebrated pastry chef, has found enormous success with Kopitiam in Bengaluru, a restaurant where the chefs have been trained at Dewakan, the only two-Michelin-star restaurant in Malaysia. Also in Bengaluru is Kavan Kutappa’s sensational Naru Noodle Bar.

 

   In Mumbai, Seefah, run by the eponymous Thai chef is a cult favourite. And high-quality Japanese food has never been hotter with such restaurants as Mizu Izakaya and firm favourite, Izumi.

 

   This is the real thing, with no compromises on authenticity, and to the surprise of many restaurateurs, Indians brought up on Ludhiana-style Chinese food are loving it.

 

Comeback of the Year: Gresham Fernandes

 

Ask any chef and he will tell you that Gresham is one of India’s best chefs. But for several years, he took a break from full-time cooking, hanging out in Goa. He is back now with Mumbai’s Bandra Born, a restaurant that pays homage to his roots. That simple description can be a little misleading because this is astonishingly complex food made to look easy. You don’t get such deep flavours unless you know all the secrets of the kitchen and have years of experience.

 

The rise of the individual chef: Ranveer Brar

 

For years, we judged chefs only by the restaurants they worked at. That’s still largely true, but it changed when Sanjeev Kapoor became India’s most famous chef on the basis of his television appearances.

 

   It has changed even more after the rise of the internet.

 

   Ranveer Brar is now a superstar chef, but his reputation is not based on any one restaurant or one TV show (though he is a judge on MasterChef India). His following is too vast for his stardom to be confined to one medium. People watch his internet shows for the recipes and sometimes, they watch just to look at Ranveer. He is the first chef to have gone beyond cooking and become a success in Hindi movies as well.

 

   Given that his stardom owes so much to his charisma, it is just as well that he is also an outstanding chef, thoughtful and knowledgeable.

 

RIP hotel restaurants; the standalones have won

 

There was a time when hotels were at the forefront of all culinary innovation. This was always bound to change. All over the world it is standalones that are more highly rated.

 

   Well, that change is finally here. There are still some outstanding hotel restaurants, but the trend is clear. With the explosion of standalone restaurants, many of which are of higher quality than the hotel places, guests have less and less reason to pay hotel prices.

 

   The few advantages hotels had – more expertise with foreign cuisines, access to better ingredients, more opportunities for chefs etc. – have now vanished.

 

   There will always be the odd Avartana or Loya, but the focus has shifted to the standalone sector because chefs prefer working outside of a hotel hierarchy, because the same suppliers who provide say, Japanese ingredients to hotel restaurants, will now sell them to anyone else and because, let’s face it, hotels have stopped innovating.