After the welcome lunch, press interviews and introduction to the kitchens, it was time for a party. Delhi’s top brass received invitations to drinks, a buffet style dinner and the chance to talk to us about the festival. The gardens in the front of the hotel were dressed for a special occasion, a huge stage with British high commission banners celebrating Great Britain and our relationship with India. A bar and individual kitchens were set up, ready for us to display and offer a selection of our menus. My kitchen offered Coronation chicken, Fish and Chips and Apple Crumble. Fish and chips proving to be a revelation and hugely popular with expats and locals alike.
“Where are the mushy peas” was one question, “the best chips ever” another comment, “wonderful fish n chips!” Great comments all round and actually really fun to cook such a British favourite in India.
The following day we began to cook for the hotel guests, these were a mix of locals and tourists, guests from, America, Australia, Iran, Japan and the UK, businessmen and women, local bloggers, food journalists, and the Sri Lankan and South African 20/20 Crickets teams.
The kitchen team at the ITC Maurya were all incredibly helpful, the West View was on the eighteenth floor, right at the very top of the hotel, Chef Suresh Kumar ran the kitchen, he has worked for the ITC for 35 years, hard working, knowledgeable and a great sense of humour. Brilliant chef and I very much enjoyed working with him.
The pastry section was on the ground floor. It’s very interesting, and also very different from my world.
In a 5-star hotel, each department has their own role and it is important that each department delivers their role. The pastry department was to deliver my desserts and any pastry work required for my dishes. The pastry team were a highly efficient department that operated 24hrs a day.
All croissants, pastries and a huge selection of bread were baked daily, a chocolate room produced delicate chocolates of all flavours, cakes for the hotel shop and colourful Easter eggs. (The festival was on during Easter) The desserts were all beautiful, intricate, colourful and delicious.
I’d email my recipes to the pastry chef on a daily basis and with a little direction on presentation, my desserts would appear.
Classic British puddings, like Rhubarb Crumble, Strawberry Trifle, Steamed Puddings and Apple Tarts. Puff pastry, shortcrust pastry and finished pithiviers. This was all considered the role of the pastry department, and as I was instructed, the pastry would be more than capable of producing these recipes.
Word soon spread and the festival began to bring some interesting guests to the hotel: Neha Sudan a local food writer whose blog is called Digitizing Food; Rocky Mohan, ambassador for Old Monk rum and the man behind Rocky’s Chicken Korma, a recipe in Rick Steins cookbook and famous search for the perfect curry. Rocky was a lovely man, knowledgeable about food and had visited my restaurants in the UK, he was genuinely interested in our visit to Delhi. We talked easily about recipes and food, he’s a passionate man that knows our industry very well.
Sourish Bhattacharya, one of India’s oldest and most respected journalists also visited the West View. His booking brought fear to the chefs at the ITC Maurya. Executive chef Manisha Bhasin even arrived in the West View kitchen to announce Sourishs arrival. We were on red alert for his visit, menus ready, top team on the stoves and all looking forward to the excitement of cooking for this respected food critic.
Sourish arrived alone, notepad in one hand, camera and a book by Pat Chapman, Taste of the Raj in the other.
He quickly discovered that I was no relation to Pat Chapman and that the cooking of the raj was now well out of date in the UK. The Curry Life chefs were producing authentic curries, curries that you would find in the subcontinent, particularly Bangladesh or the Bengal region of India.
Sourish tasted everything, starting with a selection of dishes from my menu at the West View, and then dishes from the Pavilion restaurant downstairs, specifically brought up to the West View for him to taste.
Sourish was very happy, Shepherds Pie and a Lamb burger with minted yogurt were particularly well received, and the authenticity of our British curries went down extremely well.
Sourish wrote a lovely article about his visit to the festival, it appeared in various papers and magazines in India and even made it into the UK’S Daily Mail.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3517902/FORTUNE-COOKIE-Understated-British-chef-help-curry-win-Michelin-recognition.html
The festivals are becoming more and more popular in India, I have visited 3 different cities and three different 5 star hotels, the Curry Life team have many different opportunities in the pipeline, one of those opportunities is to work with a hospitality college.
One morning at 5am, Syed Belal Ahmed, editor of Curry Life and I, flew to Chandigarh in the Punjab and visited the Chitkara School of Hospitality.
This was an incredible experience, the welcome we received from Dr Madhu Chitkara, Vice Chancellor and her team was amazing. We were presented with two beautiful Indian silk scarfs, breakfast and an introduction to the college. We met many of the professors, they were all hugely enthusiastic about the possibilities of working together. Our aim was to inspire the students to drive standards within the hospitality industry.
After meeting the professors, we headed for a large meeting and function room. Unknown to me, we were to be introduced to 150 students, future restaurateurs, hotel managers, chefs and hospitality graduates.
It was a brilliant experience. Once again we were welcomed and introduced to the students, they even played a short clip from my appearance on Great British Menu. I was then invited to give a talk on my experience of being a chef and running restaurants. It was actually a huge honour to have been asked to visit the university. The students were massively interested, enthusiastic and extremely respectful.
After my talk we were taken to the campus kitchens with all the student chefs where I was to demo three dishes. India is a diverse country. Education is the most important topic to any parent and the Chitkara university is passionate about the education of its students.
I had previously sent full instructions of ingredients required for my demo, on arrival at the kitchens my ingredients were ready for me to cook.
Ingredients are sometimes challenging in India and this was going to be a challenging demonstration, the Punjab is famous for its farms and the crops that are produced here. However, the ingredients for my demonstration were a little tired and my equipment limited.
The demonstration went well, I had a great lad helping me clear pots away and make sure everything I required was on hand, we produced three dishes, stuffed artichokes, Piedmontese peppers and coronation chicken. The students asked lots of questions, after the questions, a stream of selfies were requested, I knew selfies were a worldwide craze, but this rubber stamped it as a worldwide obsession. The students were brilliant and in a similar way to cooking with the Academy of Culinary Arts, Adopt a school programme. It was an inspired day.
The festivals are inspiring in so many ways, my one goal on this trip to India was to visit the Taj Mahal. This was another early start, we decided to take a taxi and visit the iconic building. Three hours south of Delhi is Agra, a tourist hotspot, and home to the Taj Mahal and another Red Fort. On arrival at the Taj Mahal, you are immediately bombarded with touts selling postcards, daggers, t-shirts and lots of other souvenirs.
A guide approached us advising us not to take food or drink anywhere near the Taj, he also offered us a good price on a guided tour. This bombardment can by totally overwhelming, however the guides are registered and actually very helpful, we agreed a good price for a guide and headed for the Taj Mahal.
Petrol cars are not allowed to venture to the entrance of the Taj Mahal, tourists need an electric tuk tuk, camel or horse driven cart. We decided on a tuk tuk, a quick journey up the hill and we were soon outside the famous mausoleum, its more than a building, its majestic and like nothing I have ever seen before.
We paid our entrance fee and entered the grounds of the Taj Mahal. The intense surroundings of the exterior of these grounds and the experience of our arrival had gone. We were now entering a peaceful paradise of Mughal architecture, immaculate grounds, manicured lawns, fountains and tombs, a short walk through these grounds and we were faced with the entrance to the most famous structure itself.
The marble gleams in the sunlight, the bluest of skies behind this shinning structure, it is quite simply majestic and without doubt the finest man made structure I have ever seen. It took 20000 people and 20 years to complete the Taj Mahal. There were plans for an identical black structure to be built on the opposite riverbank.
