Indian and Western vegetarians look for entirely different things in meals

Indian and Western vegetarians look for entirely different things in meals. Can we still take a leaf out of their books, wonders Vir Sanghvi.

Allain Passard is one of the world’s greatest chefs. His Paris restaurant, L’Arpège, has held three Michelin stars for ages. Some years ago, Passard announced that he was removing meat from the menu of L’Arpège. There would be a little fish but the menu would be based on vegetables.

At L’Arpège, chef Alain Passard (above) serves vegetarian meals, in which farm produce is the star. (Photo: Getty images)(AFP)

Spice is nice: Indian vegetarian food is not very focused on ingredients. Do you care what kind of peas go into your mattar-paneer?

In France, this approach is heresy. Passard told me that he values young peas more than caviar. This is a view echoed by many Western chefs. They simply cannot understand that the interplay of spices is the point of Indian cuisine. Passard complained about our spices. “Why can’t you just sprinkle a little at the end?” he asked me. To which, of course, there is no answer; either you get it or you don’t.

At Grace in Chicago, dishes like banana cashew (above) and chocolate matcha (below) form the vegetarian menu.

An article in the October issue of US Vogue talked about the American craze for vegetables and as I read it, my heart sank with every para. The writer raved about a yellow bean stew with a poached egg and drizzled olive oil. She praised a chef who served a fava bean mayonnaise made “entirely of dinosaurish outer fava bean husks and the even less usable internal fava bean skins, containing no actual fava bean.”

Chocolate matcha at Grace in Chicago.

And here’s the other thing. Because these chefs are not actually vegetarian, they use ingredients that Indian vegetarians will not eat. One chef serves his vegetables with a side dish of “a whole black cod head, pressed flat and roasted under a box.” Another chef (the great Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park) serves a “whisper-light alabaster celery root braised with truffle” which sounds great till you realise that he has cooked it inside a pig’s bladder.

At Eleven Madison Park (above) a vegetable dish may be cooked inside a pig’s bladder (Photo by Chris Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

None of this is to run down chefs like Passard and Humm who are legends, but only to explain why their approach to vegetarianism and vegetables is so different from ours.