Art, food, foraging: Inside India’s chef residencies
A chef walks into an art gallery. Five move to a farm... At residencies across India, chefs are rooting for rare tubers, swapping recipes, discovering new hacks
There’s a food trail of a different kind taking shape across India.
In Uttara Kannada, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kolkata, small towns, sprawling farms and the edges of major cities are seeing starched white coats and gleaming knife sets descend for chef residencies. They study rare tubers, swap kitchen hacks and help recipes evolve .
Such residencies typically span two days to a week, featuring chefs from various regions who are selected through an open call process or by invitation.
The idea is to work with people who shape food trends and make informed decisions about ingredients and techniques that deserve wider recognition, says Sumeet Kaur, the owner of Spudnik Farms which hosts free residencies in Karnataka. These help explore lesser-known cultures of indigenous people and create economic opportunities by promoting local ingredients.
The shift offers a liberating change of pace from the pressures of professional kitchen environments, including intense service schedules and the relentless pursuit of perfection. Across the globe, chefs and artists come together to create theme-based pop-up dinners, group exhibitions and performances as the culmination of their residency programs.
Route vegetables
One must expect to dig deep, at the residencies hosted in the lush agricultural town of Joida, along the river Kali, in Karnataka.
Situated about 500 km from Bengaluru, on the edge of the Western Ghats, this land is awash in tubers: greater and lesser yams known as kona, big taro called mudli, tannia or kasar alu and sweet potatoes. Each variety offers unique qualities, with textures ranging from chalky to chewy, and flavours that include the mudli’s subtle sweetness, earthy undertones in the kona and kasar alu and the distinct nutty flavour of Chinese potato, locally known as zaadkaanaga.
The Kunbi tribals live on tubers in this part of north Karnataka. These are climate-resilient, indigenous crops that have been grown within the community for centuries. Since 2023, Spudnik Farms, a farm-to-home retail subscription service in Bengaluru, has hosted three chefs’ residencies, all aimed at promoting the region’s unusual tubers.
Five chefs at a time are invited to visit the farms, chat with local farmers about their practices and produce, and, of course, experiment on-site.
At the last residency, in November, they expanded their program to not only welcome chefs like Rahul Sharma from Araku and Harshala Chagamreddy who has worked with restaurants such as Rosells and Bar Miller in New York City, but also food researchers and writers.
They experimented with a mudli rava fry; kona and river prawns; and crispy rice and taro fryums called sandige.
“Even the humble snack of boiled kona tuber dipped in liquid jaggery left a lasting impression,” says Rahul Sharma, 36, group head chef at Araku, which began as a café in Bengaluru and now has outlets in Mumbai and Paris.
Since his return from Joida, he adds, he has experimented with a fudgy cake made with mudli at the Bengaluru Araku.
The thing that really stayed with him though, he adds, is the reverence with which the community treats these ingredients. The tubers are everything to them; often the only thing that will grow in arid parts. “They consume it with a deep sense of respect,” Sharma says. “The leaves are first offered to local deities. And nothing is wasted.”
Kaur says she plans to host at least one such event a year. The residencies help her engage more widely with the community, and help participants make new connections too. “I often wondered, where do chefs go to learn?” she says. “I figured, why not here?”
In the foothills of Bengal
In September, 14 chefs and food experts from across Singapore, Malaysia and India gathered in Darjeeling to forage, cook, learn from each other, and immerse themselves in the food cultures and cuisines of the hills of West Bengal.
The four-day retreat was a paid event curated by Gormei. The Hong Kong and India-based culinary consultancy organises chef residencies in India that are inspired by Civitella Ranieri, an international residency program in Italy that brings together visual artists and writers to work independently and communally. At these retreats, traditional recipes and cooking methods are shared and there is also room for experiments with the same ingredients. Usually on the last day, the chefs present form teams and put together inventive and collaborative menus as part of a cook-off.
For her team’s effort, Chennai-based Italian food curator Fiammetta Maggio, 57, marinated trout in Italian spices, which chef Ishita Rai Dewan of Kalimpong wrapped in bacon and then smoked and grilled it in pandan leaves -- as suggested by home chef Patricia Chen of Singapore’s Sekel Kitchen.
It was here that Maggio first savoured the umami-rich flavour of kinema or fermented soybeans and the spicy chicken floss pickle, a local speciality made by Dewan. “Adding just a hint of this intense pickle to my Italian pork roast gives the dish a lovely kick,” she says.
Both Darjeeling and Kalimpong offer a unique culinary landscape inspired by Nepali, Tibetan, Bhutanese, Sikkimese, Chinese, Bengali and Colonial cuisines, making it an ideal location for the retreat, says Argha Sen, the founder of Gormei. Additionally, the area boasts of produce such as stinging nettle, fiddlehead fern, bamboo shoots, and gourds such as chayote which are largely unknown outside the region.
“Several local specialties left a lasting impression on the participants, with favourites including gundruk or fermented mustard greens, churpi cheese and the regional millet beer called thongba,” says Sen.
Two states collide
In Kolkata, Gormei collaborated with the art gallery Experimenter for a unique chef’s residency.
In 2022, Experimenter invited Cuttack-based chef Rachit Kirteeman, 35, to attend an unusual “solo” residency.
They offered him a penthouse and let him build his own schedule and itinerary.
“We invited Kirteeman because he has been documenting Odia food, its culinary heritage and local produce through pop-ups across the country,” says Sen of Gormei, the company that organised the event.
In his seven days in Kolkata, Kirteeman took long bus rides to the outskirts of the city to meet local farmers and spice traders, had lengthy discussions with potters in Kolkata’s Barabazar wholesale market to learn about traditional clay and ceramic cookware, and discussed evolving recipes with Bengali chefs.
By the end of his residency, he had put together a new menu that was served at an open house at the Experimenter penthouse. It featured elements of tribal, coastal and temple cuisine informed by the state’s history, its ancient sea trade, and its stories of migration.
There was a Koraput mutton curry from the tribal Odia region of that name, made with just the GI-tagged Kandhamal turmeric, onions and the star ingredient, gongura leaves (sorrel) for sourness. A very different mutton curry, inspired by Mayurbhanj’s fiery cuisine, was served not with red rice but with Kolkata’s beloved muri or puffed rice (made, in this case, with red rice).
“The crunch of the muri added a whole new texture to the dish even as it soaked up the gravy,” Kirteeman says.
It was during his interactions with head chefs of traditional Bengali catering companies that he discovered the term “ude thakur”, a nod to the Odia temple cooks who migrated to Bengal to work under zamindars.
A simple one-pot dish made of pumpkin, including its stalk and leaves, marinated in mustard and garlic paste and cooked in hot mustard oil is a good example of the exchange of food culture that followed between the two states. When chachadi (named after the sound of the paste spluttering in oil) came to Bengal via these ude thakurs, it was adapted to incorporate poppy seeds and grated coconut, to leverage the abundance of ingredients available under the zamindars, says Kirteeman.
An ingredient he often incorporates in his dishes after the residency is the elephant apple or chalta in Bengali. The souring agent is notoriously hard to process because of its thick, leathery rind. “We’ve always used it traditionally in chutneys or dals in Odisha, but after learning how easy and versatile it is to use, I’ve been adding it to pulled pork or prawn dishes to elevate their flavours,” he adds.
