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Food has to satisfy the soul and body, says chef Sabyasachi Gorai
Chef Sabyasachi Gorai tells us that during his second year of training, he developed an interest in the kitchen because “one could eat a lot of food”.
It took quite some time for Delhi-based chef Sabyasachi Gorai to realise that there’s no love sincerer than the love for food. Popularly known as chef Saby in the culinary circuit, he had a humble beginning with a degree in hotel management, but wasn’t keen on being in the kitchen. Instead, he had always imagined himself as a manager, dressed in a crisp suit at the lobby of a glamorous 5-star hotel. But life had a different plan for him.
Saby tells us that during his second year of training, he developed an interest in the kitchen because “one could eat a lot of food”.
“They (chefs) let you have a freehand, and asked us to enjoy ourselves and, most importantly, to eat well”, he says, adding, “This kind of message coming to a person from a lower middle-class Bengali family... getting to eat whatever you want in a 5-star kitchen was like Alice in a Wonderland situation. That’s when I felt the calling.”
Having grown up in farms, the tough life in the kitchen never seemed to be a problem for him. And now he has been in the food industry for more than three decades. He says, “The restaurant boom came in late ’90s or early 2000s and I have been part of it since day one.”
Talking about the changes he has noticed over the years in the food industry, he says, “There’s a new food trend every 3-4 years, but in my mind, food is a basic necessity. And one thing that has kept me grounded is that food has to satisfy the soul and body. So you have to be very conscious and need to know what you are consuming. It can’t change just because the trend has changed.”
While the chef enjoys cooking European food and Japanese-influenced delicacies, what fascinates him the most is discovering and bringing local, indigenous regional food from different parts of India to the public. And this is exactly what his latest venture, Poppins Hotal at Cross Point Mall in Gurugram intends to do.
He says, “It’s about my journey through the highways of India on a plate. It’s called a ‘hotal’ because often old restaurants in small towns and villages have wrongly-spelt hotel in their name... that’s where the inspiration came from. So, it’s about multi-cultural food from India, purely because how colourful the country is.
