FARMING SPECIAL ........A Farm in your Fork

A Farm in your Fork





Restaurants ride the farm-to-fork wave, picking vegetables and micro greens from chosen artisanal patches, if not their own gardens

The muddled cucumber, mint and lime cooler that we are sipping on a hot April afternoon is not a mundane drink. It is unusual not just because the bartender steers clear of the syrupy sweetness that cocktails in India come with. But because every ingredient has come from a patch of green right outside the restaurant. The 5,000 sq ft house-farm bang in the centre of the new Pullman hotel in Delhi's Aeroc ity is bursting with squashes and gourds still on their vines. Occasionally, a chef or a bar chef (that's just a fashionable term for bartenders), or guest may pluck these or some herbs for plates and drinks that are being made inside.

The cucumber cooler is not the only thing with pedigree on the menu at Pluck, the restaurant. All the vegetables, from the baby spinach in the salad to the pumpkin in the mash (spiked with truffle oil, though), have been sourced from the patch.

When the greens were being first plant ed, the soil of the garden had to be changed. A more fertile top layer was brought from Mandi in Himachal Pradesh.

The surprising fecundity in the midst of Aerocity's concrete and glass jungle is perhaps a result of that. At any given time, about 10 vegetables and an equal number of herbs are grown here. And chefs keep an eye, changing their menu frequently to reflect the seasonal produce.

Farm-to-fork dining is hardly a new concept. From California to Mumbai, the idea of sourcing ingredients in a way that the provenance of almost each bite can be traced to small, local producers has had many champions. By using ingredi ents that are plucked fresh from an in house farm, Pluck, a modern European diner, has now upped this experience in India. Other restaurants are riding this wave too.

A little outside Pune, Vistara, a new restaurant at the wellness resort Atmantan, has something similar. While all the food is organic and sourced from small farms, some of the edible flowers and vegetables are grown in-house. “The idea is to let guests pick their own veggies like melons, beets, baby radishes, different types of saag and choose a method of cooking for these. The chef could sous vide or grill, steam or roast vegetables, according to the guests' preference,“ says chef Sandeep Biswas.

Farm Fresh

In Mumbai, one of the most anticipated restaurant openings next month is of Masque at the Laxmi Woollen Mills compound in Lower Parel. The brainchild of chef Prateek Sadhu, former head chef of Le Cirque, Bengaluru, this is an ambitious farm-to-fork restaurant, where ingredients sourced from 14 different artisanal farms all over the country take centrestage.

Sadhu, who studied at the Culinary Institute of America, spent eight months travelling around India to study regional produce and tying up with small farmers for ingredients, which include Mexican amarillo chillies (being grown at a farm near Bengaluru especially for the restaurant), Italian-style cheese from Puttaparthi (the pilgrim town has a substantial Italian community, some of whom turned to cheese-making), and even sea buckthorn, the nutrient-rich berry from Ladakh, which ordinarily does not find their way into the domestic market.

The menu will change every week at Masque. And Sadhu says he will not stick to any one style of cooking. Food trials currently underway see him playing around with flavours such as sea buckthorn, pine and almond ice cream or eggplant, turnips and soy rice. It is pitched as an avant-garde restaurant. How diners take to it will be keenly watched. For now, it seems set to breach many boundaries.

Good, Fad & Ugly

For all its possibilities and the pushing of gourmet boundaries, farm-to-fork is also a much abused term. The genesis and political underpinnings of the movement was in the 1960s-70s California, when the hippie community championed local, artisanal producers. However, the term started gaining new, chicer currency only by the 1990s with top chefs moving away from traditional supply chains.

In Europe, food movements around slow food or foraging, made utterly fashionable by the likes of Noma, are similar ideas. With all these becoming hip, it was inevitable that chefs use them as marketing pegs. Today, while some restaurants genuinely go to great lengths to stick to their larger philosophy, others are merely me-too entities riding a wave.

So abused has the term become that top chefs like Thomas Keller, often seen as a bedrock of haute farm-to-fork, have now questioned the term, pointing out that all food (in the universe of fancy dining) is farm to fork and that chefs can only be responsible for cooking, not promoting the politics of sustainable farming. In India, restaurants, particularly in hotels, have been paying lip service to the idea for some years now, dabbling in showpiece herb gardens and micro greens from the owners' farms to embellish salads. But it was only when The Table opened in Mumbai and credibly pushed the envelope with its upper-crust, niche consumers that this kind of eating out started becoming fashionable. Even so, the idea has gained momentum only in the last year or two. Mumbai has been the epicentre, with restaurants incorporating elements along with those from organic or local gastronomy.Places like The Pantry, The Yoga House, The Village Shop, Birdsong Organic Café and Farmer and Sons work around the theme in varying degrees.

While the consumer's desire to be part of a global food fad may be a reason for the proliferation of farm-to-fork, the trend is equally fuelled by a new tribe of hobby-turned-professional farmers, silently pottering away on their terraces, balconies and farms, redefining the chic ways in which we perceive and eat food.

Millennial Farmers

Twenty-two-year-old Achintya Anand started farming just for a lark. The Delhi boy with a degree from culinary school in Adelaide had just begun working at Tres, a modern European diner in Lodhi Colony, Delhi, when he started growing micro greens. When these grew well, he carried boxes to the restaurant.

Soon Anand hit the road, going from restaurant to restaurant with his greens, asking chefs if they were interested. All the while, he kept working the kitchens, shifting to the Olive in Mehrauli, where chef Sujan Sarkar was researching on indigenous ingredients for The Tasting Lab -weekly dinners revolving around the farm-to-fork concept. As Anand visited other farms as part of that research, he started experimenting more. And he started talking to other chefs too about their wishlists, growing microgreens and vegetables according to that demand.

A little more than a year down the line, he is a full-fledged farmer and has rented a farm in Chhatarpur. He caters to some of Delhi's top restaurants, working closely with chefs. “Both Sarkar and Manish Mehrotra (of Indian Accent) really encouraged me and I also know the kind of demand in different restaurants,“ he says. His company Kishi Cress produces 2,500 boxes of microgreens monthly.

Farming is still a hobby for Delhi restaurateur Saurabh Khanijo. But, inadvertently, it has also led to his restaurants embracing the elements of farm-to-fork. “I am the son of a poultry farmer. Though we shut that family business, I still have my father's farm in Dera Gaon, Delhi, where I grow vegetables and herbs without pesticides, even aloo, pyaaz , tomatoes. I keep two cows for milk and 200 chickens because I do not like the eggs sold in the market. I use old practices of farming. The birds, for instance, are free to roam around. They are fed properly. The resulting egg yolks are a brilliant orange colour,“ he says.Khanijo, who owns the restaurant brand Kylin and is a partner with Jamie's Italian, uses the eggs in his bakery and vegetables at Kylin.

Khanijo and Anand are just two examples of scores of city-bred Indians who have taken to farming and even cheesemaking, coffee-growing and so on out of a sense of passion. These small-scale farms paying close attention to good pro duction practices are perfect for chefs to liaise with, helping farm-to-fork in India.

If chefs are able to pull off offbeat sourcing, thanks to these ventures, on the consumer side, farming becoming more fashionable also means there is now more attention to the quality of food we eat. At least in metropolitan, affluent In dia, exposed to international trends around artisanal and healthy ingredients, there is a huge discourse around these. Hobby farm ing thus is both a fallout of and a fuel for this sort of farm-to-fork lifestyle.

If cities like Bengaluru have been at the forefront of hobby gardening or farming, in their post-retirement communities, it has now gone beyond those frontiers.Many younger, wannabe gardeners and farmers are sprouting everywhere.

Rai Mahimapat Ray, posted as deputy collector of Bokaro, says it was a stint at Oxford that turned him to organic farming. “My wife and I would buy organic fruit and veggies from the hypermarkets there but they were so expensive that we decided to grow them at home. It is a habit that persisted even when we returned to India,“ he says.

For Vineet Bansal, who works with a tech company in Gurgaon, it was the simple realisation -“there is so much difference in taste between the torai we grow at home and what we get from the market“ -that led to his growing fruits and vegetables on his terrace. “I even have a chikoo tree,“ he adds, proudly.

For an agricultural nation, it is somewhat ironical that this rediscovery of green thumbs should be part of a buzzing city trend. But it has been spurred by the social media. “Terrace farming groups and swapping circles on Facebook, where people exchange seeds and cuttings, are pretty common,“ says Urvashi Malik, marketing executive. The online socialising involves sending each other cuttings through courier: “I got Malabar spinach from someone in Bengaluru, and stevia from someone in Assam,“ says Malik. Or, sharing heartbreaks about things not growing well. Or, sharing knowledge on pests.

“I am always ready to help anyone on Facebook. People have my phone number and can call me up any time,“ says Umed Singh, a businessman in the quarrying industry and hobby farmer in Bhiwani. Singh, who is part of about 100 Facebook groups on gardening and amateur farming in India, is quite dedicated, putting to use his 55 acres of ancestral agricultural land: “I do it in my spare time, and it is only for family and friends.“ He seeks out seeds when he travels abroad. “I have 15 varieties of tomatoes, including chocolate and purple ones, and one that weighs 327 g. I got the seeds from London. I also have curled corn from Canada and pink broccoli (a sedum plant that is not broccoli),“ he goes on.

Though Singh hasn't turned professional yet, he is exploring the idea. If he does, it will just be more on the table.

ETM24APR16