It’s A W rAp
A
round-up of the most interesting food trends of 2016
I
USUALLY END each year or begin the following one by listing all the food trends
I have observed over the last 12 months. This year, for reasons too tedious to recount,
I neglected to do such a piece.
But
here – either many months after I should have written it or a few months before
– is the annual trends round-up!
The
End of Courses: In the West they like dividing food into three or four courses
– starter, main, pudding and possibly one other (soup? cheese?). That idea
first came under attack with the Tasting Menu which was supposed to be a
line-up of the chef ’s greatest hits spread over many (sometimes, too many)
courses. Then came the whole Small Plates and Big Plates thing.
Now,
the idea that meals have to be served in courses is under such attack that I
think it will be dead (in trendy restaurants, at least) by the end of this
decade.
More
and more restaurants encourage diners to order a variety of dishes in any order
and suggest that rather than individual portions, everyone should share
everything.
It is
easier for us in India to understand this concept because there is no order to
our food anyway and everyone does share everything. In the West, however, it’s
pretty revolutionary.
What
we will get eventually, I think, is the sort of menu that offers Big Plates,
Small Plates, Sharing Platters etc. There will be no individual portions and no
specified order of courses.
Some
Indian chefs are already doing it: Manish Mehrotra, Manu Chandra, all of
Zorawar Kalra’s chefs at his casual places, etc. Young Chefs/Outliers: There
will always be the big-name chefs. But all over the world, a new generation of
chefs has appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and caught the public
imagination. In the UK, for example, the big boys still keep their stars but
the attention is on people like Isaac McHale (whose Clove Kitchen has some of
the best food in London) or James Lowe of Lyle’s.
It’s
the same in India. The era of the hotel chefs is passing. Manish Mehrotra was
the first to break the hierarchy but all the hot chefs now are non-hotel chefs:
Gresham Fernandes, Julia Desa, Jatin Malick, Prateek Sadhu, Manu Chandra,
Sourabh Udinia, Jaydeep Mukherjee and Anahita Dhondy. Usually they are people
who don’t have PR departments to promote them, but their talent shines through
anyway. Cloning: It is now an article of faith that any restaurant, no matter
how off-beat and individualistic it may seem, will be cloned. Zuma started as a
single-restaurant operation in London; it now has branches all over the world.
It followed the lead of Nobu which was just one New York restaurant owned by
Robert DeNiro, Drew Nieporent and the eponymous Nobu before it became a global
empire. For years and years, Le Petit Maison was a Riviera restaurant, popular
only with people who could afford to pay high prices for simple food. Now the
London and Dubai versions are so successful that few of the patrons even
realise that there is a Nice original. When outliers take a city by storm as
David Chang did many years ago with Momofuku in New York, nobody realises that
the Momofuku empire will eventually straddle many countries or that the chef
will become a TV star. But nothing breeds excess as much as success.
India
has followed the cloning trend. AD Singh, India’s original restaurant pioneer,
has many kinds of Olives in many cities. Manu Chandra, who is part of AD’s
group, has Monkey Bars and Fatty Baos all over India. And AD’s Soda Bottle
Openerwalla (helmed by Mohit Balachandran with Anahita Dhody in the kitchen)
has taken India by storm..
Interestingly, the
foreign chains have done less well in India. Ping Pong may pack them in at its
London outlets but it flopped here. I’ll be polite and not name the other
foreign restaurant chains that have failed to meet the expected response in
India but with the exception of Yauatcha in Bombay, there are no stunning
successes.
Contrast this with
homegrown talent. Mamagoto is a great Indian success story. The Cafe Delhi
Heights people are on a roll. Partners Navneet Kalra and the Bajajs have
rewritten many of the old rules at their Delhi restaurants and Riyaz Amlani
continues to reign over his Smokehouse empire. Outside Financing: In the US and
the UK, the process of raising money for a restaurant is not unlike the process
of financing a movie. In both cases you go to people outside the industry and
entice them into investing by offering them a slice of glamour. Even people
with a ten per cent share in a dining venture will pretend to outsiders that
they are the owners of a glamorous restaurant or the producers of a new movie.
So great is the return in terms of glamour and showing off that even if the
financial returns are not as high as promised, the investors don’t mind. They
got what they came for.
Something like that is
finally happening in India. People are willing to put money into restaurants
only because it seems glamorous. This comes as a relief to restaurateurs, some
of whom have fallen out of love with the private equity boys, who can be hard
taskmasters. Now, a new source of funds has opened up. Food Trends: Contrary to
the general view that a global food revolution is coming, I don’t see much
change, just gradual evolution. Molecular cuisine continues its downward slide.
Foraging is all very well for Noma but most Western chefs have not really taken
to it. Forest mushrooms and wild leaves are as far as they are prepared to go.
In India, foraging for food is probably a health hazard anyway.
There are some trends
that we should adopt here however. In the West, seasonal eating is bigger than
ever, which should come as no surprise to Indian home cooks who have always
been constrained by the seasonal vegetables our farmers can grow anyway.
But Indian chefs have
ignored the wisdom of their mothers. For instance, thanks to cultivation in
Peru, asparagus is available all year around. But Peruvian asparagus can be
tasteless and good Western chefs are picky about using it. Not so in India
where it routinely turns up on menus. The same is true of so many ‘imported’
vegetables.
Our chefs have not yet
learnt to distinguish between quality vegetables and rubbish. For instance, an
Asian cep/porcini imported fresh from Bangkok may well be a member of the
Boletus family and can be cultivated in those months when there are no ceps in
Europe. But Asian ceps are horrible and taste nothing like the real thing. But
our chefs use them anyway because they sound fancy.
In the West, the cleverer
chefs are the ones who understand seasonality and then turn it on its head. At
dinner at The Clove Club in London this summer, I was surprised to discover
that the chef was using high-quality black truffles. I knew for a fact that
they were out of season and that the summer truffles served elsewhere in London
were bereft of flavour.
So how did they do it?
Finally I went and asked. The truffles, it turned out, were from Australia,
where they cultivate them (in Tasmania, apparently).
But this is June? I asked
the chef. So how did the Australians grow such flavourful summer truffles?
He smiled. “No they are
winter truffles. It is winter in Australia, now. They are in the Southern
Hemisphere.”
Oh yes, silly me! So What
Should You Expect?: Well, basically, an aggregation of the trends of the last
few years: the winding down of formal restaurants; the growth of casual,
multi-cuisine standalones; a flood of new entrants into the business who have
raised money from private individuals and a greater uniformity in restaurants
all over India.
There will no longer be
“a famous Delhi restaurant”. If it’s that famous, it will open clones/branches
in Bombay and Bangalore too.
Will this lead to the
development of better restaurants? Or an end to gastronomic diversity and the
growth of boring identikit restaurants?
VIR SANGHAVI
HTBR16OCT16
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