If you have any interest in food, you have probably heard of Auguste Escoffier, the famous French chef who found fame in London at the Savoy hotel.
I don’t think there is anyone alive who has eaten Escoffier’s food so we don’t know how tasty it was. But we remember him anyway; because he was influential and that is much more important than making tasty food.
Not only did Escoffier create dishes that we still eat today --- Peach Melba and Melba Toast were both invented in honour of the singer Nellie Melba --- but he also codified French cooking, giving us the mother sauces that are still used in kitchens today.
It’s much the same with Fernand Point, the French chef who mentored the chefs who would popularise nouvelle cuisine. Or take Paul Bocuse. By the end the food at Bocuse’s restaurant was pretty terrible but he remains the most influential French chef of his generation because of the way in which he transformed gastronomy.
Alain Ducasse is a great chef though he doesn’t do much cooking himself these days. He is revered by chefs everywhere in the world because he changed the way they think and the way in which European food is cooked. I can’t think of a single chef who does not admire Ducasse’s greatness.
I always make distinctions between famous chefs, successful chefs, trendy chefs, chefs who run hard-to-get-into-restaurants and chefs who are influential. Long after people have forgotten individual dishes and have moved on, it is the influential chefs, the ones who changed the way we eat and how we regard chefs who will be remembered.
Molecular gastronomy is now out of fashion. But even chefs who laugh at spheres and foams will use techniques that were either invented or popularised by Albert and Ferran Adria at El Bulli. All restaurant cuisine is influenced, in some way, by the innovations of Rene Redzepi at Noma. Fine Italian cuisine stopped being Frenchified only after Massimo Bottura gave Italians back their pride in their own food. Indian food became worthy of interest to chefs in the West only after Gaggan Anand changed all the rules.
America has many great chefs but how many of them are truly influential? Alice Waters perhaps because Chez Panisse changed American attitudes to ingredients. (Or Jeremiah Tower, depending on where you stand on that feud). Wolfgang Puck, perhaps, for creating the fat cat version of every single dish from steak to pizza and showing chefs how easy it was to take the simplest dish upmarket. Daniel Humm for proving to chefs that you can go plant based and still get three Michelin stars for your restaurant.
For my money, the most influential American chef of the last 20 years is Nobu Matsuhisa who re-invented Japanese cuisine for global audiences. But nobody would put him in the top ten of any list of the best American chefs. He will never run a three Michelin star restaurant. But nearly everyone you know will have eaten dishes that originated in Nobu’s imagination.
So influence belongs in a category of its own; quite different from Michelin stars and top chef lists.
Let’s take England as an example. The best known British chef in the world is Gordon Ramsay. But that’s because of his TV shows, not his food. His food can actually be very good; his flagship restaurant has retained three Michelin stars for decades. But influential? Well, in a TV sense, perhaps. But I doubt if any punter can name a single dish Ramsay has created. And I don’t think he has changed food in the UK.
Marco Pierre White (who Ramsay once worked for) is more chicken stock-salesman than chef these days. And even in his heyday, a lot of his food was derivative of the great French chefs rather than truly original. But he was the first of the famous bad boys in the kitchen, the first British chef to have the courage to treat his guests like a dirt when they offended him. So he has a certain historical importance even if his food does not.
"When Manish came back to India, he opened Indian Accent, cooking a kind of modern Indian food nobody had ever seen before." |
Heston Blumenthal is easily the most influential British chef of the last 50 years. All four of his restaurants have Michelin stars (and his flagship The Fat Duck has three) even though he hardly ever cooks at his own restaurants these days. But the dishes he created, the techniques he pioneered, the perspectives he introduced (no chef has ever looked at ice-cream the same way after Heston re-invented the very concept) have changed food forever.
Which brings us, inevitably, to India. Who are the most influential Indian chefs in recent memory?
Some, I think, are obvious. Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipes are cooked at Indian homes across the world and if you google any Indian dish, the chances are that one of Sanjeev’s recipes will pop up first. He is also the first Indian celebrity chef: instantly recognisable and with an image that is so powerful that advertisers run after him for endorsements.
Imtiaz Qureshi is a legend in his own lunchtime. Until he became the face of ITC’s Hotels’ Indian food, featuring in ads for Dum Pukht, no traditional Indian chef had ever been so heavily promoted to the general public. It helped that Imitiaz is also a brilliant chef and the dishes he created (and the traditional ones he tweaked) are still being served around the world. Imitaz’s success gave Awadhi cuisine the push it needed to overthrow bogus Punjabi food as India’s leading North Indian restaurant cuisine.
Vikas Khanna made chefs seem glamorous and sexy. He was not the first chef to appear on TV but he had such star quality that even people who had no interest in food turned on their TVs to watch him. When he started on TV, Junoon, the New York restaurant where he cooked, already had a Michelin star but Vikas was never snobby or cheffy in his manner; he was very much a man of the people. Small wonder then that so many young chefs I speak to all dream of growing up to be like Vikas Khanna.
I think Satish Arora never gets the credit he deserves for organising modern hotel kitchens so that they could turn out high quality Indian food or for creating such standards as chilli cheese toast or the chicken tikka sandwich. He became Executive Chef of the Mumbai Taj in his mid-20s and, because the Taj was at the forefront of innovations in cuisine, his influence changed the way a generation of chefs operated.
There are many others too. Vineet Bhatia created dishes that Indian chefs had never thought of and changed the way many dishes were cooked: he popularised the Lamb shank rogan josh, led the revival of khichdi, invented the chocolate samosa and so much more. Along with Atul Kochhar, Vineet made Indian food reach the big time in Britain when both his and Atul’s restaurants got Michelin stars in the same year. (Till then no Indian restaurant had been deemed worthy of a star).
Then, there are those who popularised new ways of serving traditional South Indian cuisine. Sriram Aylur set the trend at Karavalli in Bangalore and then opened the Michelin-starred Quilon in London. Though neither are household names, both ‘Nat’ Natarajan and Praveen Anand created the template for refined South Indian restaurants at rival establishments in Chennai. More recently, Ajit Bangera has created India’s most innovative modern South Indian restaurant in Avartana, which now has a Kolkata outpost and will open in Mumbai next.
None of these people is a celebrity chef but their influence is phenomenal. Every upmarket South Indian restaurant owes something to them.
Then there is Ananda Solomon who cooks the best coastal food of anyone I know .But his real influence is as the man who showed Indians that our chefs could tackle Thai cuisine with ease. His food at Mumbai’s Thai Pavilion was Bangkok-quality and it introduced Thai food to Indians in a way that was comforting rather than intimidating. Nobody now thinks that it is odd to open a Far Eastern restaurant with Indian rather than expatriate chefs.
That leaves Manish Mehrotra – who trained at Ananda’s Thai Pavilion --- and became a successful Oriental chef in Delhi and then London. When Manish came back to India, he opened Indian Accent, cooking a kind of modern Indian food nobody had ever seen before. The rest as they say is history: every modern Indian chef has learned something from Manish.
Manish is famous. The others are not. But all of them will continue to influence and inspire future generations.
And in the end they will be more remembered than today’s celebrity chefs.
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