By Sourish Bhattacharyya
WHAT’S with celebrity chefs and their
love for Delhi? Even before we could stop talking about the galaxy of Michelin-starred
chefs who spent a week in the national capital, thanks to Anand Kapoor and his non-profit Creative Services Support Group,
the city is abuzz with the news that London’s celebrity chef and television
presenter Aldo Zilli is opening a
restaurant at The Ashok, the
state-run hotel infamous for its evil-smelling corridors, in partnership with Kashif Farooq of Urban Pind.
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| Television celebrity and cookbook writer Aldo Zilli's Fresh and Green was on the Daily Telegraph's Top Ten Books of 2012. He has teamed up with Kashif Farooq to bring the much-acclaimed Cicchetti restaurant (TripAdvisor rating: 4.5/5) to the state-run hotel, The Ashok, in New Delhi. |
Zilli has just made headlines by creating
a pair of edible stilettos from fresh pasta stuffed with spinach, ricotta and
truffles (price: 7.90 pounds) for the multiple award-winning Manchester
restaurant, Cicchetti, which is said to be the favourite of Coleen Rooney, wife of the England and Manchester
United superstar Wayne Rooney.
Farooq’s Urban Pind, the N-Block Market, Greater Kailash-I nightclub, has
seen better days, when the queues outside it and its discriminatory “foreigners
first” entry policy kept the watering hole in the news.
Those were the days
when Farooq could get away by making his infamous statement — “Foreigners know
how to talk to or approach women. Indian men get drunk and start to misbehave.”
He said this to author Omair Ahmed in
Outlook magazine, but now, after
being for years the must-go-to party spot in South Delhi, Urban Pind seems to be
no longer top of mind for Delhi’s night birds.
Born in the Italian seaside town of
Alba Adriatica in Abruzzo, Zilli ran a number of restaurants in London (the
most famous of them being Zilli Fish,
a Soho institution, which he sold along with the rest of his chain after he hung
up his chef’s whites in 2012). And of course, he’s a television favourite — as
we learn from his website www.aldozilli.com,
he has co-hosted with Enzo Olivieri
a top-rated cookery show shot in Sicily (it has gone into its second season); he
has travelled around Britain with fellow chef Silvena Rowe to compete in local cook-offs; his wife Nikki and he
have mentored on television a homeless boy on television; he has lost 15 kilos
on a reality show named Celebrity Fit
Club; and he has even charmed the audience with his Italian songs in the
ITV1 show, Celebrity X Factor.
He is also an acclaimed author of ten
cookbooks and two autobiographies — his book over 100 vegetarian recipes, Fresh and Green, was on the Daily Telegraph’s Top 10 for 2012. He
writes a weekly column for the Daily
Express Saturday Magazine; he has consulted with Kraft Foods and Morrisons
Supermarkets, where his Pizza Calabrese with Nduja (Calabria’s signature soft
salami) was a national best-seller; and he has opened his own public relations
and marketing company, Zilli Media (www.zillimedia.com).
Who brought Kashif Farooq and Aldo
Zilli together? The buzz is that the match was sealed by Michelin-starred chef Atul Kochhar of London’s Benaras
restaurant. And the restaurant brand that they are bringing in, Cicchetti (named
after the Venetian term for ‘small plates’, pronounced ‘chi-KET-tee’), is run
by Carlo Distefano’s San Carlo Group,
which has become famous riding on the success of the restaurant, which opened
last year at the Piccadilly with a TripAdvisor rating of 4.5/5 after a hugely
successful start in Manchester, and the Waterloo Street cocktail
bar-cum-restaurant, Fumo. After he
sold off his business, Zilli joined the San Carlo Group as Chef Consiliere, a
consultancy position that makes him responsible for designing the menus of
Cicchetti (www.sancarlocicchetti.co.uk).
Having made its debut in Birmingham in 1996, the Group has spread its wings to
12 locations, including Kuwait, Beirut and Bangkok.
The entry of Cicchetti into The Ashok
follows closely on the heels of the rather unimpressive opening of Michael van Cleef Ault’s nightclub for
the fatcats, Pangaea, in partnership
with the colourful owner of Spice Global, B.K.
Modi. The industrialist’s other venture at The Ashok — Nom Nom, the Pan Asian restaurant in association with Dharmesh Karmokar — is yet to acquire the
buzz of its Mumbai counterparts, which have got rave reviews from critics and
guests alike. Will Cicchetti do what the combined star power of Michael van
Cleef Ault and B.K. Modi has not been able to achieve in the jinxed state-run
behemoth?
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