Finally, food that thrives on local produce

At last, we are getting real food, sourced from our own environment

It is funny how food trends change every decade or so. In the ’70s, the nouvelle cuisine movement was at its height in Europe and chefs were throwing out their flour-thickened sauces and focusing on fresh flavours. In those days, the chef was supposed to go to the market every day, buy whatever was fresh and seasonal and then come back to the kitchen to find interesting ways of cooking the produce.

AnnaMaya, the restaurant at Delhi’s new Andaz hotel, is a European-style food hall with retail and dining

At AnnaMaya, local ingredients are used to create dishes with mass appeal, such as duck keema samosas

For us in the Third World, globalisation came as a boom and a curse. I remember Indian chefs, in the ’80s, struggling to adapt local ingredients for Western dishes. At the Mumbai Taj, they had trouble importing mozzarella. So they found an expat at the Rajneesh ashram in Pune who made his own. Because there were no fish imports, enterprising chefs would trek to the nearby Sassoon Docks to see what the fishermen had caught.

Masque, a hip new restaurant in Worli in Mumbai is the dream project of chef Prateek Sadhu who focuses on local produce

Others have had the same idea (one of the joys of the Bombay Canteen is that it celebrates local ingredients), but Prateek’s menu is stark, severe and takes no prisoners. There are virtually no spices and the ingredients speak for themselves.

Soft-shell crab comes from an Indian fishing operation at Manu Chandra’s Toast & Tonic in Bengaluru

Why would a chef, at the top of his game, want to do everything the hard way? Why would he open a restaurant where everything is made on the premises from scratch?