Sitting in Delhi, Eating in Madurai and Talking Khushboo Idlis with Dakshin's Custodian, Praveen Anand

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

FEW INDIANS have worked as hard as Praveen Anand, Brand Custodian of ITC's Dakshin restaurants (six, and counting!) and Executive Chef, Sheraton Park Hotel & Towers, Chennai, to document our country's rich culinary heritage and gastronomical traditions.

I've avoided so far the temptation of carrying my
picture with the celebrities I interview, but on this
occasion, my admiration for Chef Praveen Anand
got the better of me. We had breakfast together
at Baywatch, Sheraton New Delhi, Saket.

In the last 25 years that he has spent giving birth to and mothering Dakshin restaurants across the country, Anand has collected an encyclopedia of recipes and cooking secrets of communities as different as the Shivali Brahmins of Udupi, the Rajus of Andhra Pradesh, the Chettiars and the Ravuthar Muslims of Tamil Nadu, and the Mappilas of Kerala. This intellectual diligence driven by a  hunger for greater knowledge has made Dakshin a constantly evolving brand, so there's always an excitement about it, as I have learnt through the many food festivals that the one at Sheraton New Delhi, Saket, keeps organising from time to time.

In my view, Dakshin is India's most vibrant restaurant brand, which is why whenever I get a chance to dip into Chef Anand's knowledge bank, I leave everything at hand to be able to do so. That is exactly what I did when I got a call from Chef Anand, saying he was in the city for an inspection of the local Dakshin and a recce of the competition, which, I was shocked to learn, included Swagath, which is without doubt the most faux 'Madrasi' restaurant in the city.

Over a breakfast consisting of the most heart-warming podi dosai I have had in a long time, Chef Anand revealed the most interesting fact of his life. Immediately after school, he had got admission into a 'Triple Maths' honours course (Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Operations Research), but it was his desire to grow up outside the comfort zone of his home that made him opt study hotel management at IHM-Chennai. He chose it over an aeronautical engineering course (also in Chennai) just because it got over in three years, compared with the five of the competing option! It may not have been the most rational career choice, but we should be thankful for such irrationality, for we wouldn't have had a Chef Anand had he opted for aeronautical engineering!

Our conversation started with the irony of the temple town of Madurai having a robust tradition of liquor shops opening at 6 a.m., which was celebrated event by the ancient Pathupattu epic poem, Mathuraikkanci (composed sometime between 100 BCE and 100 CE), and the hearty non-vegetarian dishes developed at the city's famous messes, shacks and homes of the local Chettiar families. "It's a town that never sleeps," Anand said, "and you get awesome food 24 hours a day."

He mentioned a popular shack outside Madurai University, run entirely by women, "which serves dishes made with every part of a goat, including goat's blood." It is also in Madurai that Anand saw a karandi omelette being made by breaking eggs on a large wooden or aluminum ladle and then exposing the contents directly to a wooden fire. "The omelette comes out like a poori!" he said, going on thereafter to describe the kari dosai of the Konar Mess (originally for the cowherd community), which is actually an uttapam with a layer of curried mutton and diced onions. Another of Anand's Madurai discoveries was the Khushboo Idli (named after the unconventional Tamil cinema star), which is spongy because of the use of castor seeds. "Nothing has changed about Madurai since the time of Mathuraikkanci, which describes its 'world-famous fried foods' and 'wine shops with colourful buntings'," Anand said.

The conversation moved on to the kebabs of Thanjavur, whose recipes were meticulously recorded by the last ruler of what was then a Maratha principality, the enlightened Serfoji II (Sarbhoji Raja), in a cookbook titled Sarbendra Pakashastra. The recipes, according to Anand, had been translated from the original Marathi into Tamil and "putrid English", so he had to get a Maharashtrian chef to read the manuscript and ensure nothing got lost in translation. An interesting facet of the king's life, Anand said, was revealed not long ago by the founder of Sankara Nethralaya, Dr S.S. Badrinath. Serfoji II, apparently, was a qualified eye surgeon and would conduct cataract operations around his principality, paying his patients a small sum to help them during the time it took them to recover.

Anand's life is studded with such delicious discoveries, like when he stumbled upon recipes for unusual payasams made with garlic and Cape gooseberries (amla) in Ramachandra Naidu's Paka Shastra, a cookbook written in the 1890s and re-published on the occasion of King George V's visit to Madras in 1911-12. Anand mentioned how Naidu wrote about women increasingly having less time to devote to house work because of their changing role in society, which must have been a revolutionary statement to make in his time.

If Ramachandra Naidu led Anand to dishes whose existence he could never have imagined, a recipe book by a Marie Kolandaisamy and her mother, published in 1927, which he secured with a lot of effort, introduced him to Pondicherry's Tamil-French cuisine, with showpiece dishes such as the peppery manthakali (night shadow spinach) soup and prawns cooked with ice apple (or sugar palm) being added to his already crowded repertoire of culinary secrets. Pondicherry is the only place in India where seafood is cooked with fruits (and more than one type of fish or seafood are used together in curries). It is also the only enclave in the south where curry leaves aren't used, nor is cardamom, at least not in quantities acceptable to the Indian palate, obviously in deference to the French aversion to the spice.

You can never have enough of Chef Anand, for it takes just one conversation for you to go on a magic carpet tour across little known kitchens of the country. He said it was his dream to travel down the course of the Tamarabharani river, which flows across Tamil Nadu, to see what people ate on either of its banks. That one journey would reveal facets of the state in a way that no one has ever done before.

As Dakshin Turns 25, Its Creator Praveen Anand Recalls His Long Journey of Discovering New Cuisines

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Executive Chef Praveen Anand (with spectacles)
at the kitchen of Dakshin at the Sheraton New
Delhi. At the extreme right is Velumurugan
Paul Raj, lead chef of the Dakshin in Delhi.

DAKSHIN, I believe, is one restaurant that can claim with justification to have contributed the most to our understanding of our vast national wealth of cuisines in the 25 years it has just completed. Having grown up in Delhi, where the majority used to believe 'South Indians' lived on a diet of idli-dosa-vada-sambhar, I was delighted to see Dakshin open its tastefully embellished doors and introduce us to the inventive regional kitchens of the south. Till Dakshin arrived at the Sheraton New Delhi in Saket, I had no idea about the distinctive kitchens of communities such as the Mudaliars or the Ravuthars, or how the temple food of Udupi tasted, nor was I aware of the depth of Mappila (or Moplah) cuisine.

I took the opportunity of the silver jubilee to call up Praveen Anand, Dakshin's brand custodian,  walking encyclopaedia on southern cuisines and one of the most erudite chefs I have met in my career. A conversation with Chef Anand (actually, he's Executive Chef) is like going on a long drive through the by-lanes of history and contemporary culture. The Hyderabad-born master chef joined Sheraton Park Hotel & Towers, where the first (and foremost) Dakshin opened in 1989, immediately after he graduated out of the Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition, Chennai. That was in 1984, when the establishment on TTK Road was known as the Adyar Gate Hotel Holiday Inn. Its ownership  changed a year later, with the Goyals, who were in the textiles business, acquiring the hotel and inviting ITC to run it for them.

The hotel's board of directors, according to the industry grapevine, was very keen initially to open a vegetarian thali restaurant named Mylapore (a dream that has finally found fruition at the ITC Grand Chola's Royal Vega restaurant, which needs a lot of tweaking, but that's another story!). ITC did not have a good experience with running vegetarian outlets, so Syed Habibur Rehman, who was then briefly the Area Director (South) before eventually becoming the boss of ITC Hotels, floated the idea of a restaurant that would showcase as much the lesser-known non-vegetarian fare of the southern states as the more common vegetarian dishes.

It was a brave (rash?) suggestion. A 'North Indian' hotel chain serving authentic 'South Indian' non-vegetarian dishes in Chennai, a city that is justifiably proud of its gastronomic lineage, was an idea that no one had dared to put to test. It was the era of established players such as Woodlands and Dasaprakash, and the only non-vegetarian restaurants were the Buhari Hotel on Mount Road, where Chicken 65 is said to have been invented, and Velu Military Hotel.

The idea of Dakshin was given final shape by the hotel's then general manager, Pawan Verma, who later rose to the position of Senior Executive Vice President, its executive chef, Uday Girme, who's now settled in New Zealand, and the food and beverage manager, Amit Mitra, who has moved on to Australia. Chef Anand, who was then all of 24 and a Continental chef, was roped in to create a menu from scratch.

It was nightmarish in the days when Chef Anand was doing the initial trials for the restaurant. No two persons would agree on any dish that he and his fledgling team would prepare. It was only when he prepared rasam with garlic one day, and got lambasted by a prominent industrialist's wife, that he figured out what he, being from Andhra, had failed to notice. The classical Aiyar-Iyengar divide was working against Dakshin's menu-in-the-making in those pre-opening days.

The lady who had got so upset over the rasam was an Iyengar and garlic did not agree with her taste buds because her caste rules forbade the use of onion and garlic. Chef Anand started visiting homes, cajoling housewives to part with their recipes, standardised them and put systems in place to ensure consistency in cooking. And, more importantly, instead of getting people to taste them and sit on judgement, he followed his instincts, tweaked the recipes that he had collected and prepared a menu.

By the time Dakshin was launched after four to five months of food trials, Chef Anand had lined up a repertoire of 45-60 recipes. "My background in Continental cooking helped me standardise recipes and processes and establish exacting standards," he said to me. "My challenge was to share this knowledge with my chefs, who were extremely talented, but uneducated and resistant to change." It took a Moplah food festival steered by Ummi Abdulla, the foremost exponent of the cuisine and author of Malabar Muslim Cookery (Orient Longman; 1993), to give Dakshin the direction that it eventually took. It set Chef Anand off on his constant peregrinations in search of regional variations and he  says he couldn't have done it without the support of his hotel's owners.

From Jiggs Kalra, who was then advising ITC, Chef Anand learnt about how different dishes required different cuts of meat. At a wedding uniting two mill-owning families of Chettinad in Sivaganga district, he met the famous 'America' Natesan, who had earned his sobriquet because he was much in demand among the NRIs. Natesan let him into the many secrets of the prosperous Nattukotai Chettiyar community's cuisine, which goes far beyond the Chettinad chicken that we all know about. Likewise, on a visit to a wedding at Pudukkottai district, Chef Anand was introduced to the use of Everest masalas in Chettinad cookery.

Chef Anand owes his passion for research to Chennai's most prolific chronicler, S. Muthiah, whose column Madras Miscellany in The Hindu has a humongous following. The chef once tested his aadi kummayam, a "sweet delicacy" made with rice, moong and urad dals and jaggery, on Muthiah, but the chronicler wasn't impressed. He invited the chef over to his home, served him a perfect aadi kummayam and introduced him to the treasure trove of manuscripts housed in the Roja Muthiah Research Library, one of the world's finest private libraries of Tamil publications with more than 300,000 items listed in its catalogues.

It was at this library, Chef Anand discovered the Sanskrit culinary treatise, Pakadarpanam, attributed to King Nala of the legend of Nala-Damayanti and stumbled upon what he considers to be the oldest recipe for a biryani, where the rice is cooked in stock made with game birds and infused with flowers and herbs, and then prepared meat is added to it. The problem with this recipe book is that it doesn't have weights and measures. Chef Anand, as a result, has had to create recipes out of ingredients mentioned and descriptions given in the book.

Another noted resident of Chennai, K.S. Padmanabhan, founder of East West Books (now known as Westland, after its acquisition by the Tatas), whose wife Chandra is a noted cookbook writer, introduced Chef Anand to the first Tamil cookbook, Hindu Pakasastra, a compilation of vegetarian recipes by T.K. Ramachandra Rau, first published in 1891 and then two more times, once in honour of King George V and Queen Mary, who were visiting India in 1911. Just five of the recipes had onions and one of them -- vengaya payasam, or kheer made with onions, somewhat like Lucknow's garlic kheer -- is a star of the Dakshin repertoire.

Not all of Chef Anand's recipes owe their origin to books. He mastered the art making a fluffy idli, for instance, at a Chettiyar wedding in the hotel, where he learnt that the trick is to use IR20 short grain rice and add mashed boiled rice to the batter. Trainees at his kitchen also have been rich sources of information. Chef Anand makes it a point to quiz them about what they eat at home and how it is cooked, ferreting out recipes and secrets from them.

One such trainee was a young man named Satya, who joined the Dakshin kitchen after a stint with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). By gaining access to information in the possession of the ASI, Satya, who's now in London, helped his boss recreate the recipes of the Vijayanagara Empire. Chef Anand also dug into the descriptions of markets and everyday food left behind by the contemporary travellers Domingo Paes and Fernao Nunes, read up Edgar Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India, and spent long hours in the kitchens of Anand Gajapathi Raju of the Vizianagaram royal family, whose ancestors were the feudatories of the Vijayanagara kings.

Dakshin under Anand's leadership not only serves good, approachable food, but also keeps introducing its regulars to the culinary jewels of the south far beyond the stereotypes. It is as much a culinary museum as a restaurant that no one has been able to recreate.

THE GOOD CHEF: Custodian of Delhi's Dakshin is an Encyclopedia of Southern Gastronomy

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Dakshin's Chef Velumurugan
Paul Raj lets his cooking speak
more eloquently than his words,
but that doesn't stop him from
constantly digging deeper to
 know more about the south's
numerous kitchens

I HAVE been having food cooked by Velumurugan Paul Raj at my favourite Dakshin for many years, so when Anchal Ghosh, the EDM-loving PR of the Sheraton New Delhi, extended me an invitation to sample the Mudaliar spread laid out by the restaurant last week, I jumped at the opportunity because it meant meeting the soft-spoken chef with a childlike smile who lets his cooking speak more eloquently than his words.

In the past, I had written about Mudaliar cuisine -- a culinary tradition developed by an essentially vegetarian community that started out as pioneering agriculturists in the time of the early Cholas -- so I needed another angle to my story to get me interested in it. I chose to use the opportunity to reflect on the man who started out as the understudy of Master Chef C.B. Shankaran and then made Dakshin the go-to restaurant for a pan-South Indian fine-dining experience.

What I love about Dakshin is the consistency of the quality of its offerings -- from the Iyer's Trolley, which is famous for its banana-flavoured mini dosais and the addictive kuzhi paniyarams, to the metre coffee at the end -- and its many festivals, which take us into parts and communities of the south that we never knew existed. For the Mudaliar Samayal Pandiga, for instance, Velu's team produced a divine Chow Chow Curry that I almost licked off the serving bowl. Chow chow, also known as chayote, is a humble vegetable of South American origin that is quite a favourite in Tamil Nadu. The Vazhaipoo Thattai, vadas made of yam, coconut, green chillies and aniseed, also left an indelible impression on my palate. If these preparations made with everyday vegetables and tubers can grab your attention because of the efflorescence of flavours on the palate, then there has to be something right about Dakshin.

Like most Mudaliars, who are now divided into 26 sub-castes spread across Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, Velu comes from a family of farmers. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather and their forefathers have all been farmers, originally from Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, although his family moved to Kerala. Just one member of his extended family, an uncle, has been in the hospitality business for more than 40 years -- he owns one- and two-star hotels in and around Kochi -- and it is his advice that Velu keeps remembering: "In our business, your happiness depends entirely on the happiness of others."

Velu continues to be connected with the soil, helping his father whenever he can to nurture their five-acre farm near Munnar, Kerala, where they grow 'exotic fruits' such as sharifa (custard apple). His umbilical connection with the soil is taking him to the Servarayan Hills, a detached range that straddles nearly 400 sq. km. near the Tamil Nadu town of Salem. Famous for its old coffee estates and the orchidarium run by the Botanical Survey of India, as well as the hill station of Yercaud, Servarayan beckons Velu, despite its difficult terrain and troublesome leeches, because of the prospects it holds out for the discovery of wild mushrooms and root vegetables that can bring a whiff of novelty to the Dakshin menu. This urge for discovery is a trait that Velu has clearly imbibed from Dakshin's brand custodian and brilliant chef, Praveen Swamy, who has not only made the world aware of the many variations of a cuisine that we lump under the umbrella term 'South Indian', but also recovered the lost recipes of the Chola, Chola and Pandya kingdoms.

Velu launched his career 20 years ago at the Southern Spice restaurant in Taj Coromandel, Chennai. He joined Dakshin in 2003 and has 40 food promotions behind him. His work has taken him to various places in the south, but the experience that left a lasting impression on his was his stint at Mangalore, where he got an opportunity to dig deeper into the area's distinctive cuisine and the famous vegetarian fare of Udupi's maths (I first got to know him, in fact, when he organised an Udupi food promotion at Dakshin many years ago). He has even been to Russia, where he mastered the art of cooking horse meat,  a skill he hasn't been able to put to good use after his return to India, but give him fish curry and rice and you'll see break into his infectious smile.

I asked Velu what his forefathers ate and he said their staple, especially during the blazing summer months, was cold fermented rice (it reminded me of the Bengali paanta bhaat) served with sun-dried red chillies and vegetables such as butter beans, black eyed peas (lobia), okra, cluster beans (gawar phali) and brinjal. Why are Mudaliars so partial to sun-dried foodstuff (they even have dried seafood)? Velu said it was purely a response to the harsh weather that made it impossible for fresh vegetables to grow in most months of the year.

Modern storage and transportation methods may have changed the way people eat, but the Mudaliars haven't given up their love for dried vegetables. Incidentally, Mudaliars even cook fish -- surmai (king fish) and snakehead fish or murrel (viral meen in Tamil) are their favourites -- with vegetables, mainly okra and drumsticks. The community's agrarian and vegetarian roots keep showing up in its cuisine, but their marriages feasts are the stuff of legends, for it is at these events that the Mudaliar repertoire of spices -- nutmeg (jaiphal), star anise (chakra phool), mace (javitri), clove (laung), cinnamon (dalchini) and green cardamom (chhoti elaichi) -- find their true expressions.

It takes only a couple of hours with Velu to have a good meal and come back with a large helping of food for thought. He is Delhi's walking encyclopedia on the south's numerous kitchens, each churning out secrets that need a master to decode and share with the world.

CHENNAI CHRONICLES: What It Takes For A Restaurant to Top TripAdvisor Rankings

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

HOW DOES a restaurant, which is barely five months old, reach the top of TripAdvisor.com’s Chennai rankings and stay there? When I asked this question to Vikramjit Roy, who was discovered by Vice President (Operations), ITC Hotels, Gautam Anand, at Wasabi in New Delhi and transplanted to ITC Grand Chola in Chennai as leader of the newbie hotel's Pan Asian team, the young chef launched into a long discussion. Then he said something that has stuck in my mind: “We cook with a mother’s love. We have systems and recipes, but our secret ingredient is love.”

Chef Vikramjit Roy explaining to yours truly and Philippe
Charraudeau, Vice President and General Manager, ITC
Grand Chola, how to unveil the seared foie gras from
its orange peel quilt. That was sheer inventiveness. 

It was this past Friday, around 9 p.m., and Pan Asian was abuzz with people. The early-bird Japanese diners had already come and left, yet the restaurant was packed. A prominent family of Gujarati diamond merchants had occupied one long table to celebrate a birthday in the family. And it was hard to find a vacant table at the 176-seater restaurant.

I wondered why and I got my answer in the course of my meal. It was better than what Vikramjit had ever done at Wasabi — and I have maintained that his ‘swansong dinner’ for the Taj, the one he created for the Delhi Gourmet Club and it was attended by Anand, to be in a league of its own. What he laid out for us at on Friday was deserving of a Michelin-star. His team had transformed even the humble fish cake, a common feature of any Thai menu, by hoisting a stopper full of spicy mango puree on top of each. Before eating, you are meant to squeeze the stopper so that the mango puree oozes out into the fish cake, giving it a dramatically different taste profile. Anyone who can do that gets my instant respect. “It’s a complex affair to make a simple dish,” Vikramjit says, and I believe him entirely.

‘Progressive Asian’ is how Vikramjit describes the menu of his restaurant. Each dish is authentic, but it comes with a twist, or, as Vikramjit puts it, with “layers of elements”. The traditional banana blossom salad gets a young and contemporary twist (apart from another texture) when it is made to sit atop wasabi mash. The Sichuan-style crispy prawns arrive on a bed of avocado puree, with a crispy caramelised pineapple on top and ikura (salmon roe) on the side. Eaten together, they tantalise the palate with a bouquet of flavours and taste sensations.

Vikramjit explaining the intricacies of the
tuna (chu-toro, not less!) tataki spiked with soy
salt and served with wasabi mash. Yours truly
is seen with Atul Bhalla of the ITC Grand Chola.

Likewise, the duck carpaccio with a scoop of yuzu (citrus) sorbet on top was a brilliant reinterpretation of duck with orange sauce, an old-world French recipe. The topping not only added another flavour dimension to the carpaccio, but also made the act of eating raw meat more palatable. We see the same inventiveness in the ‘scallop in onion shell’ (the scallop actually comes in a quilt of onion!) and the baked chicken puff pastry, which looks like a miniature wine barrel and has a film of wasabi wrapping the chicken inside: the competing textures and tastes of the puff pastry, wasabi and chicken make it a treat for the palate and a trigger for the mind’s amphetamines.

In my view, it is dim sum chef Raju’s finest piece of work — he has brought back the best from the three months he spent at The Peninsular Beijing to master the art. He has indeed come a long way since he left his home in Pokhara, Nepal. “My entire team of 14 is from Delhi. We have all left our individual comfort zones with the intention to cook from our heart and connect with our guests,” says Vikramjit. Of course, without the support of ITC, which has a tradition of setting food benchmarks in the country, he may not have gone this far.
The IHM-Kolkata graduate (he talks about Sabyasachi ‘Saby’ Gorai as his super senior, so you can imagine how young he is!) was a part of the pre-opening team at threesixtydegrees at The Oberoi New Delhi, has worked under the brilliant Thomas Wee at Empress of China during its heyday at the hotel formerly known as the Parkroyal at Nehru Place, New Delhi, and been exposed to the best of Japan when he went to the Okura in Tokyo for an exposure to the classical hotel’s two Michelin three-star restaurants — Yamazato, which specialises in sushi, and the teppanyaki place named Sazanka.

Pan Asian is an old ITC restaurant brand. Vikramjit has just reinvented it, but he couldn't have done it so effortlessly had he not been at an ITC hotel inspired by the irrepressibly brilliant Gautam Anand. I hope Anand will now make it a national trend-setter like Dakshin. Fortunately, he has a chef we’ll hear a lot about. We have only seen the tip of his creative iceberg.