Delhi's Masala Library serves Indian delight on a plate
Hours before I went to Masala Library, which has brought about a fairytale transformation to an old luxury car showroom on Janpath, I was with executive chef Arun Sundararaj of the Taj Mahal Hotel and he was speaking in his usual entertaining style about a grand khichdi from the kitchens of the Nizams - apart from mutton, chicken, quail and partridge, and three varieties of lentils, it packed in just about every masala and paste you can imagine, topped up with generous dollops of ghee.
That was the pinnacle of Indian cuisine in an age when grandeur was synonymous with excess. Delhi's Masala Library, the second restaurant of the brand that has swept just about every food award in its city of origin, Mumbai, has turned this paradigm on the head and concurrently upped the ante for the established masters of modern Indian cuisine - Bangkok's Gaggan and our own Indian Accent.
It is the home lab of post-modern Indian cuisine (its founder, Zorawar Kalra, prefers the expression "post-molecular gastronomy". And if it doesn't make the cut for the World 50 Best Restaurants, then there's something terribly wrong with the list.
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| A view of Janpath restaurant's signature Jalebi Caviar with Pistachio Rabri and Saffron Glaze. |
It may not be entirely coincidental that Masala Library, which formally opens on July 18, is the brainchild of 35-year-old Zorawar, whose father, journalist-turned-food impresario Jiggs Kalra, discovered the gems of Indian cuisine (rescuing them from the shadow of their bastardised cousins then popular in the west) and put them on the world map.
(Camellia Punjabi was the other person who championed the same cause around the same time, besides writing 50 Great Curries of India, the must-have wedding gift for generations of Indian women till the internet took over.)
And like his father, who was the Matt Preston of his time, presenting cookery shows when television was just coming of age in India, Zorawar is all set to make his small screen debut in the new season of MasterChef India with Vikas Khanna and Maneet Chauhan.
Masala Libary's founding chef, Saurabh Udinia, who's barely 28-years-old, started his life as an acolyte of Indian Accent's celebrity chef Manish Mehrotra, but after teaming up with Zorawar, he has become a ceaseless innovator.
For Masala Library's Delhi edition, he has travelled across the country, 15 states in all, to discover the way people cook at home and then giving everyday dishes delicate twists that are distinctively his own.
You must have his minimally cooked flavour bomb, Mizo chicken stew served with Manipur black rice, to understand how the simplest foods get elevated in the hands of a gifted chef and impart the greatest pleasures.
By adding roughly mashed onion as filling in a bajra roti and serving it with a dollop unforgettable white butter, Saurabh lends new life to a forgotten, poor man's food.
Even the Kashmiri nadir choorma (a gently spiced air-fried sliver of lotus stem) served with the traditional radish-walnut (mooli-akhrot) chutney retains its authenticity, even as it comes to the table like a little work of installation art on a stone that Saurabh hand-picked from the Ramganga bed after spending 14 hours driving up to the river.
The Nizam's chefs would have turned their collective nose up at this blasphemous simplicity.
Saurabh addresses the worst fear of his generation - that an Indian meal is a tad too heavy for one's comfort and our health, so it's best avoided - and makes Masala Library food light and airy, without being any less flavourful. Indian food doesn't necessarily taste better if it is amped up with diverse forms of fat.
I am sure it is a debate that Saurabh has daily with his father. He says his parents would never appreciate the food he cooks. His father, who was in the business of fresh fruits in Karol Bagh before retiring from the trade, swears by Karim's, and his mother loves the Rajasthani flavours she has grown up with.
There's predictably a generational difference between their taste buds and their son's cooking style. Saurabh brings together in the keema karela - his mother's recipe - that he serve with semicircles bitter gourd pickled for six days in apple cider, vinegar, salt and sugar.
Touches like these are what sets Saurabh apart and makes Masala Library the restaurant that promises to be in the news.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)