If we can eat together, we can live together. And I’ve had more meals with Mohammed Imtiaz Qureshi, the legendary chef who passed away this month at 93, than I can count. Our daily luncheons at Dum Pukht at Delhi’s ITC Maurya ( the restaurant was closed for lunch) weren’t just about an F&B manager and a master chef talking business. They were lessons in gastronomy and life.
Imtiaz started out as a raqabdaar, or royal chef, in Lucknow. But his talent and ambitions were global in scale. This is the man who transformed north Indian cuisine, who gave regional recipes an international platform, and who built the vocabulary by which we understand so many cooking traditions today.
I remember him reminiscing about his earliest days as a chef, learning from his mentor, Haji Ishtiyaque, and later working at Krishna Caterers, where the owner, a Mr Tandon, would send Imtiaz to cook at the palaces of erstwhile Maharajas under pseudonyms like Krishan Prasad.
By the time I joined the Maurya in the 1980s, jumping into management training straight after an honours degree in History, Imtiaz was already a force in the kitchens. He was obsessed with ingredients: The freshness of vegetables, fruits and dairy, the quality of the in-house butchery. He had no intention of being polite or politically correct. He barked out orders, sought complete submission, but was prudent enough to value measured execution.
Our friendship didn’t start on a great note. One monsoon morning, the trainees were tasked to make breakfast for the chefs. My scrambled eggs (what he called Rumble Tumble) were a watery, limp mess. I could hear him hollering for “blekfast”, letting loose some fiery expletives. Fortunately, a kind chef took over and saved the day.
{{/usCountry}}Our friendship didn’t start on a great note. One monsoon morning, the trainees were tasked to make breakfast for the chefs. My scrambled eggs (what he called Rumble Tumble) were a watery, limp mess. I could hear him hollering for “blekfast”, letting loose some fiery expletives. Fortunately, a kind chef took over and saved the day.
{{/usCountry}}I befriended this giant of a man slowly. In my early days as banquet manager, he made sure the food on offer was always more than enough. When I opened my first hotel as General Manager in Hyderabad in 1995, he dazzled the Deccan with his biryani, qaliya, salan, nihari and aloo batasha quorma. When he moved on, he left behind his son, Irfan, a gesture that I shall always cherish.
The man was a genius. He picked up European techniques early – blanching, making sauces, thickening a gravy with roux and straining it to achieve smooth textures that had never been tried with Indian food. His Mayur Rogan Josh (later called the Koh e Avadh) was most certainly inspired by the Lombardy Osso Buco. His piece de resistance, for me at least, is the Biryani For One. To take a dish designed to feed a crowd, and recreate it in a little handi, is no easy task. Imtiaz did it, masterfully combining his stock with a browning process.
He knew how to take charge. When ITC’s Habib Rehman sent us to San Fransisco for the Golden Fork Awards in 1988, he had to serve dinner to 500 food and wine writers with just a team of four. Imtiaz dazzled them with a potli kebab: Pickled chicken tikka barbecued in an envelope of chicken-neck skin. Except, he used American turkey. When guests wanted kulfi, he sent me scurrying to the Ghirardelli store next door for gallons of pistachio ice-cream. The team hand-churned it all, adding saffron strands and crushed pistachios, and filling them into hundreds of moulds. Dum Pukht won Asia’s first Golden Fork that year.
Imtiaz was open about his likes and dislikes, I was far more reticent about mine. I think he appreciated my ideas on how food can be packaged and differentiated. Together we worked on some grand marquees and luxurious banquets before our careers progressed, our ambitions diverged, and those luncheons became less frequent.
Guests delighted in his presence and he delighted in theirs. He remembered names, and had the air of an Instagram celebrity, genial, well-dressed, gracious, using copious amounts of soorma and ittar.
But Imtiaz’s greatest contribution is that he made complex traditional cuisines easier for modern India (and the world) to love. Guided by ITC’s Gev Desai (and later overseen by executive director, Nakul Anand), he standardised the recipes and techniques for the Indian food that the hotels are known for today. His work is now an inseparable part of modern cooking. The next time you order an Awadhi-biryani, a kakori kebab or a silky salan, offer up a silent prayer in his memory.
Gautam Anand is the founding trustee of the Cuisine India Foundation and president of the IIHM College of Distinguished Fellows