DINING OUT: Diya Turns Five with the Menu of a Masterchef

QUICK BYTES

WHAT: Five Years of Diya with Kunal Kapur

WHERE: The Leela Ambience Hotel, NH-8, Gurgaon

WHEN: Till July 27. Open only for dinner (6:30 to 11:30 p.m.).

DIAL: (0124) 4771255

PER PERSON: Four-course meal (vegetarian) Rs 3,350++; (non-vegetarian) Rs 3,850++

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Masterchef India co-host
Kunal Kapur earned his spurs
as chef de cuisine at Diya, the
under-rated Indian restaurant at
The Leela Ambience Gurgaon,
where he's now the executive
sous chef.

FIVE YEARS AGO, after dining at Diya at The Leela Ambience Gurgaon, I'd hailed the restaurant as the next big thing in Indian fine dining, without knowing that the chef who had sweated it out to inspire me to write that glowing review was the now-famous Kunal Kapur, the endearing (and enduring) face of Masterchef India.

Kunal was then an uncelebrated chef de cuisine, but he brought with him the experience of working at some of the finest Indian restaurants of the Taj Group hotels -- the old Handi and Haveli in Delhi; Southern Spice at Taj Coromandel, Chennai; Karavalli at The Gateway Hotel on Residency Road, Bangalore; and at the Holiday Village, Goa, under the greatest exponent of the state's cuisine, the inimitable Urbano Rego. Yet, Diya hardly ever figures in drawing room conversations, or in animated Facebook food group discussions. Neither does Made in India at the Radisson Blu, Noida, where Kunal worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the under-rated master chef, Arun Tyagi.

In the last five years that Diya, and the hotel, has been around, Kunal has become a celebrity TV show host and best-selling cookbook writer (he has moved up the corporate ladder as well), and the restaurant is now headed by Angshuman Adhikari, a former acolyte of the Michelin-starred, UK-based chef-restaurateur, Atul Kochhar. You can imagine my joy therefore when the hotel invited me for a meal cooked by Kunal, who has returned to his old kitchen to showcase the cooking skills that got him the ticket to fame. Giving me company were the hotel's friendly (and hands-on) General Manager, Michel Koopman, and the charming Nidhi Verma, the marcomm manager, who's a fund of stories.
I have had a lunch orchestrated and served by Masterchef Australia co-host Gary Mehigan at the Grand Hyatt, Mumbai, where I shared my table with a media baron who had just made a lot of money selling his popular afternoon newspaper, but who insisted on describing himself as a farmer from Alibaug (of course, he knew more about farming than all of Delhi's farmhouse owners put together, so he could qualify to be a farmer!). Mehigan wasn't cooking; his executive chef was. On July 15, however, it was Kunal who prepared dinner for me and at the end of it, I was happy to see my long-held view -- that TV chefs can't cook, so they are on TV -- lying in ruins around me.

The mutton shank guddu kurma
is one of Kapur's stand-out
dishes, which showcases his
ability to meld the influences
and flavours of India's many
kitchens into an unforgettable
taste experience

Kunal surprises you not in the Gaggan Anand or the Manish Mehrotra way, with modernist drama and molecular gastronomy, but in his orchestration of flavours and influences he has imbibed from across the country. His style of cooking is classical with a contemporary twist, a touch I find missing in my favourite Indian fine-dining restaurant, Dum Pukht at ITC Maurya. The most eloquent representative of his style is the multi-textural haleem kebab, where the solidity of the mutton boti is balanced by the slight mushiness of dal, daliya and jowar -- biting into one is like having a generous helping of the Hyderabadi dish (a Ramzan must-have), whose taste is reinforced by the quenelle of haleem that is served along with the kebab.

The Hyderabadi influence kept showing up, first in the grilled scallops served with the saalan of a baghare baigan, and then in the guddu kurma, where mutton shanks were cooked in a rich bone marrow gravy. If the surprise of the evening was the 'Punjabi bruschetta' -- liver, kidney and diced mutton cooked in the tak-a-tak style, topped up with a kachumbar salad, and served on toasted French bread -- the murgh malai shorba with a vol-au-vent island stuffed with murgh khichda was a treat for the senses: an explosion of flavours that did a tango with the taste buds. But the desserts blew my mind: cinnamon-flavoured shrikhand with juliennes of a Granny Smith apple (its tartness the perfect counterfoil to the shrikhand's sweetness) and the Bailey's chhena payesh must at once be declared the national dish of Greater Bengal! Kunal is not just the co-host of Masterchef India; he's the master of his craft.

This review first appeared in the Mail Today edition dated July 18, 2014. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

On The Day After National Public Relations Day, Spare A Thought for Hospitality PRs

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHENEVER Richa Sharma of ITC Hotels sends me a 'thank you' text early in the morning for a cheeky story I may have written about Bukhara, or some other pet peeve, I can feel the searing heat of her irony. I call her up at once, she makes her point, and then it's business as usual.

Having known Richa from her days as the country's first celebrity television news anchor (when Zee News ruled the ratings) to the present, when she's the national head of PR of a hotel chain that takes media reports about it a bit too seriously, I know, and I know she knows, that if there's a more thankless profession than journalism, it is hospitality industry PR.

Richa Sharma's Facebook profile
picture seemed to me to be a
telling comment on the fuzzy
status of the PR person in
the hospitality business

It was National Public Relations Day yesterday, so it set me thinking about the people who keep calling me, texting me or emailing me every day, feeding my exaggerated sense of self-importance, asking me to review restaurants or attend food promotions, or sometimes, grace hotel and restaurant openings, or better still, go on an outstation junket. The older I get, the less inclined I am to accept invitations to places where I know I won't get a good meal. Earlier, I would just flatly, sometimes rudely, say 'no'; now, I try to come up with inventive excuses.

My latest didn't work. The other day, I met this bright young man named Akshat, well brought-up and polite without being grovelling in the fake PR sort of way. When he was pressing me hard to review a new restaurant, which must have become old by now, I said I had decided to stop eating out. He took one good look at me, laughed out loud, and said, "No sir, that can't be possible." Well, now that the world assumes that I live to eat, and now that I have to keep playing this cat-and-mouse game with PRs because I am left with no other option, let me share my thoughts on the people whom food journos need all the time, no matter how much we may deny the fact.

Hotel PRs can never please anyone, especially their own F&B guys, because the human appetite for the spotlight is limitless. Even if they get the respect of their colleagues, the world doesn't get to know the work they put in to create stars. As I keep telling Mukta Kapoor of Old World Hospitality, Manish Mehrotra owes a substantial part of his fame to her efforts to market his exception talents at a time when he was an unknown chef in a restaurant that used to be empty even on a good day. Yes, I am talking about Indian Accent five years ago.

In hotels where the F&B guys are bright and communicative, as in the instances of Soumya Goswami at The Oberoi New Delhi, Rajesh Namby of The Leela Palace New Delhi and Tanveer Kwatra at Pullman Gurgaon Central Park, the PRs have to work overtime to be taken seriously by their sub-set of contacts. Deepti Uppal of The Leela Palace, though, doesn't have to make that effort. Nor does Deepica Sarma at The Oberoi. But Tanveer definitely deserves a doubling of his salary because of the effort he invests in popularising his hotel!

The PRs also have to contend with another, greater, internal challenge. Their bosses, I know for a fact, are in love with international PR agencies, because they get gora journos on junkets to write glowingly about their host hotels after being wined and dined by the local PR resources. Good publicity in the international media is worth several times more than the money a hotel might spend to get gora journos over -- and the poor local resource who put in 16-hour days to wine and dine the junketeers is forgotten in the afterglow of a splash in the North American and European editions of Conde Nast Traveler.

If the poor local resource manages good local media for free (which is becoming increasingly hard in the time of paid media), the chefs walk away with the credit. If a hotel, however, lands in a mess because of a prostitution ring being busted, or a man deciding to jump to his death from its 17th floor, or an IPL after party going bad, and the name of the place gets mentioned even once, then I would rather be in a deserted island with Osama Bin Laden than be the PR of that hotel.

I have lost count of the number of times PRs have called me to get their hotel's name dropped in a crime story. I have invariably obliged because I believe that if a hotel did not actively aid and abet a murder or a freelance escort, it should be left out of the glare of bad publicity. It should be taken to the cleaners, however, if there's a case of food poisoning or bad service. Of course, in this day and age of the social media and citizen journalism, hotels should give up the fond hope of their fair name not being dragged through the mud in the public domain.

When I first started writing about food, I would be chaperoned by PRs who used to remind me of my Science teachers in school -- of course, I was a young man then and would have surely enjoyed their company now! They oozed sweetness, but they controlled, like mother eagles, access to even the doorman as if he was privy to some state secret.

In those dreary days, I would pray for an invitation to the Taj Mahal Hotel because Vandana Ranganathan (who has since left the hotel industry -- not because of me! -- and even re-married) could at least share stories (never gossip!) about the theatre world, which was her second life. Madhulika Bhattacharya, who would entertain us with her mellifluous voice and her quirky sense of humour, was briefly the light of our lives, first at the ITC Maurya and then at The Park, but then she opted for happy domesticity with my good friend, Aman Dhall, India's foremost wine importer. L. Aruna Dhir was another exception who stood out in the crowd till she opted out, not only because of her exceptional grasp over the English language (she is gifted poet too), but also because of her unfailing sense of humour.

I don't know what has happened, but as the years progress, and the industry grows to unprecedented levels, the PRs are getting younger, sassier and definitely more professional. Some years back, I was particularly impressed by Pallavi Singh, who manages the PR of the two Crowne Plaza addresses in Okhla and Gurgaon, after she passed on information that I had forgotten to add in a restaurant review, and which I had noticed just as the pages were going to bed, at 11 p.m. She was half-asleep, but she called the hotel, got the information and passed it on to me. That, for me, was a wow example of professionalism.

The trio of The Oberoi's PRs -- Silki Sehgal (who I have seen grow in stature, and how!), Deepica Sarma and Mallika Dasgupta -- are textbook examples of professional finesse. Madhur Madaan of the Kempinski Ambience and Nidhi Budhia of Crowne Plaza Rohini get my vote for doing a great job of putting their respective hotels on the mindspace of Delhi-NCR's media-consuming public. Madhur, of course, is lucky to have Vella Ramaswamy as her General Manager -- I always look forward to an invitation to dine with him.

Nidhi Verma of The Leela Ambience Gumrgaon is the other PR whose understated efficiency is complemented by a General Manager (Michel Koopman), an Executive Chef (Ramon Salto Alvarez) and an Executive Sous Chef (Kunal Kapur of MasterChef India fame), who are pros at having the media eat out of their hands. Unfortunately, Reema Chawla, formerly of the Taj Palace and Vivanta by Taj Gurgaon-NCR, has moved on to another line of business. She has always impressed me with her sunny disposition and competence at work. It'll be hard to find a replacement for her.

Before I sign off, and although I have steered clear of PR agencies, I must mention Neeta Raheja and Pareina Thapar's Very Truly Yours, which has a host of F&B accounts. What I like about them is that they create excitement in their communications about the restaurants they handle and their juniors, luckily for us, don't exist in some other universe. Their one-time colleague, Sonali Sokhal, who now has her own agency, Intelliquo, brings to the table that winsome quality. And of course, my last sentence must belong to my favourite upcoming PRs working with impersonal agencies. They are without doubt Muddassar Alvi (Avian Media), Daisy Basumatary (Perfect Relations), Ruchika Gupta (PR Pundit), Zainab Kanthawala (El Sol) and Akshat Kapoor (Goodword). If their tribe grows, journalists won't ever dodge the calls of PRs.

High Priest of Pastry Chefs Takes Delhi on a Guided Tour of His Magical World of Flavours

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Pierre Herme explaining the finer points of a
macaroon at his tete-a-tete with the city's leading
chefs, restaurateurs and bloggers at Le Cirque,
The Leela Palace New Delhi, Chanakyapuri.
Picture: Courtesy of Rupali Dean

WHEN Chumki Bharadwaj, Associate Editor, India Today Spice, informed us that more than 90 invitees had confirmed their attendance for the 'High Tea with Pierre Herme' organised on Monday jointly by her publication and The Leela Palace New Delhi, Chanakyapuri, I expected all hell to break loose. But Rajesh Namby, the hotel's Executive Assistant Manager (F&B), did not bat an eyelid. With clockwork efficiency and dazzling speed, he re-arranged the seating at Le Cirque, the appropriately chosen venue of the event, and inspired the equally even-tempered Executive Chef Christophe Gillino to make food for a gathering of 100-plus leading chefs, restaurateurs and bloggers of the city. It is not for nothing that Namby has been named Delhi's Best F&B Manager not once but on several occasions by top critics, including Vir Sanghvi, and leading publications.

Herme, universally hailed as 'The Picasso of Pastry', was having a quite lunch at Megu, the hotel's Japanese restaurant, when all this action was happening. When he came up to Le Cirque with his charming wife and his company's president, Charles Znaty, after what seemed like a soul-satisfying meal, he looked a little apprehensive. To unwind him, I asked him how his Sunday visit to Agra was and he instantly broke into a sunny smile, and said, "It was beautiful! It was too beautiful!"

France's most celebrated patissier, whose macaroons and chocolates are in a league of their own, dispensed with the services of the interpreter and connected effortlessly with the audience, whose questions were as well-researched as the answers were well thought out. The session was studded with profound one-liners from Herme.

Herme sketches out the macaroons he conceives
and then writes detailed recipes below. Here's his
sketch of his best-known macaroon, Ispahan.
Picture: Courtesy of Rupali Dean

"If there are no flavours to invent, I would be dead," said the man who reinvented macaroons (or macarons, as he insisted on calling them, in the way a true-blue Frenchman would call these confections). "There's no conflict between tradition and creativity," he said when asked about how he viewed the contributions of molecular gastronomy to the pastry chef's craft. "When you're in pastry school, keep asking questions, keep demanding more. Don't just accept what your teachers tell you. I was known as the guy who asks too many questions," said the former student of Lenotre, which Sabyasachi Gorai described as "the Harvard of pastry chefs", in response to a question on how a newbie could aspire to become like him.

He also shared with us his personal gold standard. "A macaron should be slightly crunchy when you bite into it and then it must be soft, not chewy," he said, laying down the definition of perfection, which The Oberoi New Delhi's talented pastry chef, Vikas Vibhuti, hopes to follow to the last letter when he unveils his own line of these delicious little temptations that Herme has made us fall in love with.

At the India Today Conclave, Herme, who draws inspiration from around the world, did not say anything categorical about how India has influenced him, but on Monday, he talked about his love for Alphonso mangoes and his interest in mustard oil. "I have always wanted to taste mustard oil to be able to understand its flavours and I got to do it during my present visit," he said, without divulging more, in response to MasterChef India co-host and The Leela Gurgaon's Executive Sous Chef Kunal Kapur's suggestion that he should not leave the country without having Dal Makhni and Butter Chicken. Well, one of his famous macaroons, inspired by a visit to an olive oil press in Italy, has among its ingredients the green first-press olive oil, vanilla and individual green olives sliced by hand into three pieces.

Herme dazzled us with the array of ingredients that he uses in his macaroons and chocolates. Of course, we didn't get to bite into the ones with foie gras, white and black truffles, which Herme rolls out only during Christmas, but we did get to taste combinations of vanilla from Mexico, Madagascar and Tahiti, hazelnut from Piedmont, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, lemon from Sicily, and single-origin chocolate from, among other places, a Venezuelan village named Chuao, which has no proper road, but whose 122 cocoa farmers produce a magical ingredient for the patissier's repertoire.

"We always have 18 different kinds of chocolates on our menu," Hermes said -- and the point to note is that he never repeats a collection from one season to another. What about the rose-litchi-raspberry combination that has immortalised Ispahan, his most famous macaroon? "We have 42 recipes with this combination," said the man who revels in the fine art of "the management of combinations of flavours".

Herme was only 14 years old when he got interested in macaroons. That was the year 1976 and a macaroon then meant, to quote Herme, "two biscuits with just four different types of fillings". By now, Herme must have left a trail of several hundred flavour combinations, but he's constantly seeking out more. I now wonder when we'll get to savour a hint of mustard oil in his macaroons.

Kunal Kapur Launches His Must-Have Cookbook For 'A Chef in Every Home' At Diya

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHEN Kunal Kapur was a kitchen trainee under the redoubtable Chef Arvind Saraswat at the Taj Palace, New Delhi, he had the most unnerving experience on the day each member of his batch was to present a three-course meal for evaluation by their guru. An eager-beaver, who made a mark on his first day at IHM-Chandigarh by being the only student to be able to identify the spices that are common to every kitchen, Kunal was the first to present his three-course meal, starting with a dahi ka shorba, to Chef Saraswat. He was expecting to earn brownie points for being the first, but he, for reasons that he could not fathom, only managed to send the master chef into paroxysms of anger.

The MasterChef India co-host and Executive Sous
Chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal Kapur, with his
identically dressed son, Ranbir, at the launch of
his book, A Cook in Every Home (Random
House India). Image by Marryam Reshii

Chef Saraswat cried out in rage and flung the bowl of soup at Kunal. "It barely missed my head," Kunal recalled with his characteristic shy smile, and then he revealed why he had incurred the chef's wrath. He had served soup without a spoon! With the industry's expectations from chefs changing over the years, and with chefs no longer expected to be faceless masters of the back-end, it was important for one who aspired for a place in the kitchens of Taj hotels to get his basics right. Chef Saraswat was conveying this message to Kunal -- albeit in a way that unnerved the rookie to the point of making him want to cry.

Now famous as the co-host of MasterChef India and executive sous chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal shared this blast from his past, even as he cooked the most aromatic prawn moilee, at the launch of his truly family cookbook, A Chef in Every Home (Random House India), at Diya, the Progressive Indian restaurant at his hotel. The choice of venue was appropriate, for Kunal earned his spurs at Diya, as the famous restaurant critic and Editor of the Times Food Guide, Marryam Reshii, reminded us. Kunal joined the restaurant after a stint at Made in India, Radisson Blu Hotel Noida, where he met his other mentor -- Arun Tyagi, who was then executive chef. Tyagi brought out the best in Kunal -- unlike Saraswat, he focused on his acolyte's strengths, not his weaknesses.

"He has a way with the imagination," Marryam said in her introductory remarks. She was right on target. Kunal's debut cookbook, which took him more than a year to complete (and which I have reviewed earlier), makes it abundantly clear that he not only has imagination, but also the ability to feel his audience's pulse. Unlike Chef Saraswat, who propagated lighter but difficult fruit-based sauces in The Gourmet Indian Cookbook, without paying the least attention to the lifestyles and needs of his audience, Kunal shares recipes that can easily be replicated by the home cook, especially a working mother, and her weekend 'chef'-husband.

At the launch, Kunal made bruschetta, prawn moilee and baked yoghurt, even as we talked about the state of hospitality education in the country, and Kunal's son Ranbir (his wife's called Ekta, which makes them quite a Bollywood Kapur khandaan!), sitting on an inverted pot like his father on the cover of the cookbook, kept ordering him to not stop stirring the moilee. Kunal's boss, The Leela Gurgaon's General Manager Michel Koopman, said he had been to a dozen hotel management colleges across the country and was shocked to find that their textbooks were at least 20 years behind the times. Reshii, at this point, remarked how the hotel management students were still being taught how to make cona coffee.

Koopman said F&B was becoming a key distinguishing factor in hotels, so culinary education should be in sync with the changing times. "A room is a room, is a room, is a room -- and is a room," he said to emphasise his point. Well, Koopman should know -- The Leela Gurgaon's earnings from F&B have touched Rs 88 crore, with Rs 46 crore coming from banquets. With the hotel notching up a revenue of Rs 220 crore, F&B accounts for a healthy 40 per cent of the pie. Of course, Koopman couldn't help saying how wherever he goes, people ask him whether he's from Kunal Kapur's hotel! Being as F&B proud as he is, Koopman just loves it.

A journalist asked Kunal whether the stardom that chefs seem to enjoy today has made any real difference to the attitude of people towards the hospitality industry. Not much has changed, Kunal admitted, and he was supported by the other panelist, the scriptwriter of the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani, novelist and OCLD graduate, Advaita Kala. Kunal recalled how the doctor parents of a young man, who were fans of MasterChef India, came to him with the request to dissuade their son from joining a hotel management institute. He refused to accede to their wish. "I couldn't be expected to dissuade someone from joining my own profession," Kunal said proudly, but he admitted that popular attitudes are still stacked up against the profession. Star chefs, by becoming role model for the young and ambitious, should be able to change all that. I hope and pray they succeed!

FORTUNE COOKIE: Recipes for a Multitasking Generation

This column first appeared in the Mail Today dated January 30, 2014. If you wish to see the original page, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=3012014 and go to Page 15. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A NEW generation of cookbook writers are rewriting the ground rules of the craft. It may be because of the criticism that their recipes are meant to be admired for the pictures that accompany them because they are impossible to follow. Elaborate recipe requiring numerous ingredients and many stages of cooking may demonstrate the prowess of the person writing them,  but these are impossible to replicate at home, and can be frustrating for both the homemaker and the hobby cook.

It is heart-warming therefore to see the efflorescence of cookbooks that the Regular Ritu or the Neighbourhood Neha can relate to even as she juggles the multiple chores of managing a career, running a home and raising children, who can never be satisfied with the food they get. Cookbooks must address the needs of our multi-tasking, multi-cultural urban middle-class universe, where each family wakes up every morning with one existential question: What shall we eat today that will be different from what we had yesterday?

The debut cookbooks of Kunal

Kapur (above) and Rushina

Munshaw Ghildiyal address

the needs of a time-challenged,

 multi-tasking homemaker

 and hobby cook

We have two of them that have just been published and stand out in the crowd. A Pinch of This, A Handful of That (Westland; Rs 595) is by a popular food blogger (A Perfect Bite), Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, who lives the life of the average working mother making a desperate daily effort to prevent her children from seeking out junk food as deliverance from 'uninteresting' food at home. I first met her at a Godrej Nature's Basket cookery demo and was impressed by the turnout -- there's clearly an audience of young mothers out there among whom Rushina is the new domestic goddess.

The other cookbook (A Chef in Every Home; Random House) is by the sunny-faced Kunal Kapur from MasterChef India, a good-looking Punjabi munda whom every auntieji following the reality show co-hosted by him would want to have as her son-in-law. Away from his popular television persona, Kunal is an inventive chef who works very hard in the kitchens of The Leela Gurgaon and I first discovered him through his paan-flavoured panna cotta at the hotel's under-rated Indian restaurant, Diya, whose kitchen is now headed by an acolyte of the Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar.

In his acknowledgements, Kapur mentions an array of male relatives, unintentionally pointing to a rising constituency for cookbooks -- the urban male hobby cook, whom you'll find all over Facebook and Twitter, exchanging their recipes and holding forth on those of others on Sikandalous Cuisine, the busiest and the largest (at least in South Asia) recipe-sharing social media community. The audience for cookbooks clearly has transformed dramatically since the glory days of Mrs Balbir Singh and two Mrs Dalals -- Tarla and Katy.

The beauty of Rushina's book is that like the average day of a homemaker, it follows no order. Each page, as a result, throws up a little surprise, or an interesting anecdote, and you can start reading the book from anywhere and still find a recipe you'd want to replicate at home. You could find a recipe for something as easy as Keema Pasta or as challenging as the 13 Onion Pasta, or as nostalgia-laden as the chicken curry that is served with roomali roti at Mayo College on Tuesdays, or as exotic as the Root Spinach Soup of Istanbul's Asitane restaurant, or the South African Bunny Chow, or Pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup, or the Channa Bateta of Bhendi Bazar's Bohri Mohalla. There's something for every inclination.

Kunal's book, as you'd expect from a chef, is structured like a traditional cookbook, but its sweep is remarkable -- from Menaskai, the famous spicy pineapple curry from coastal Karnataka, Bhutte ka Shorba with Chilli Butter Popcorn and Potli Masala Creme Brulee, to Mutton Varuval, Fish Amritsari, Prawns Moilee and Char Siu Mutton Chops, the recipes come with a twist to excite your imagination. And perhaps prevent your little ones from ordering in a McDonald's lunch or Domino's dinner.

LOVE YOUR BREAKFAST? INSTAGRAM IT!

WHAT do Instagram, India Art Fair, signature breakfasts and tea-time eclairs have in common? I asked myself this question as I watched Arnaud Champenois of Starwood Hotels and Resorts walk in, his fluorescent green shoelaces grabbing my attention before anything else. We were at Le Meridien, at an exhibition of Instagram pictures of Delhi's sights and people by Dan Rubin, who with 600,000-plus followers on the picture blogging site is a social media hero. The three-city show (San Francisco and Paris are the other two big cities) is a part of the Filters of Discovery initiative of the international hotel chain -- one of nine owned by Starwood -- and the event where I met Champenois was timed to coincide with the India Art Fair.

"Mobile photography is the new language of our social media-obsessed world," Champenois said as he went about explaining the connections. After the Obama selfie kerfuffle, don't we know all about it! Travellers "unlock destinations" with the pictures they shoot with their mobiles and they have turned the social media into a global repository of these millions of "picture story books", as Champenois described them. To engage their guests in a more creative way, Le Meridien hotels (#lmfilters) around the world encourage them to Instagram or tweet their mobile photographs, and get rewarded for their work. And by connecting with the art community through the concluding dinner that Le Meridien New Delhi, where the country's many culinary traditions will be showcased to the accompaniment of music by the Bandish Project, Champenois said, the hotel is reaching out to "creative-minded travellers" who are "more plugged in" than the rest of the world.

The Dan Rubin show coincides with the global launch of Le Meridien's signature breakfast, which after nearly four years of carrying American top chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's stamp, will have a strong local flavour. You can now order a rasam poached egg served with a lentil galette to start your day, or have a baked omelette rolled in a gramflour cheela with tandoori chicken morsels and mint chutney. Craving for an eclair with your coffee? Don't miss the one with ginger and jaggery, or maybe rose and cardamom. Indulge -- and Instagram. That's the new mantra.

GOOD FOOD FOR THE COFFEE TABLE

OK, I did extol the virtues of cookbooks for the new homemaker and hobby cook in the lead piece, but there's still a market for the strikingly illustrated tome that looks good on your coffee table and also has recipes that you can attempt at leisure (and of course, if you're adventurous as well!).

One such cookbook, appropriately titled Taste (Om Books), has been moving fast in the market. You'd  expect it from a cookbook with recipes from four Michelin-starrers (Vineet Bhatia, Vikas Khanna, Frances Aitken and Marcello Tully), Australian celebrity chef Ian Curley, Michelin Rising Star Laurie Gear, and BBC2 cookery show host Anjum Anand. Creative Services Support Group's Anand Kapoor, whose grandfather's Chicken Korma and Coffee Mousse Cake recipes are the ones you must attempt at home, has accomplished the surprising feat of getting the celebrity chefs together to share their best. Having done two annual charity events with these chefs, Kapoor seems to have mastered the art of balancing their egos and managing to get the best out of them, and it shows in the selection of recipes, which are arranged in the form of meals.

Surprisingly, despite the heavyweight presence of Michelin stars, the recipes are not that hard to replicate. Start with Anjum Anand's Fluffy Spinach Koftas in Creamy Tomato Curry, or the New York-based Vikas Khanna's Octopus Chaat and Watermelon Shorba, Ian Curley's Tortellini of Pumpkin and Ricotta, Marcelo Tully's Bread and Butter Pudding, and find out for yourself how these creative powerhouses elevate the simplest pleasures of life.

Three New Pedigreed Chefs Land in Delhi: Angshuman Adhikari at Diya, Sujan Sarkar at Olive Mehrauli and Alex Marks at Orient Express

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

DIYA at The Leela Gurgaon is one of Delhi-NCR's few finer Inventive Indian restaurants that can be counted on your fingertips, but it has never got its due, maybe because the chef who was responsible for its outstanding menu, Kunal Kapur, is more famous as the genial host and judge of Masterchef India, and not for his tawa parantha stuffed with feta cheese, spring onions and onion seeds (kalonji).

Kapur has risen steadily up the hotel's corporate ladder -- he's now the executive sous chef -- so Diya will soon have a new chef and he's Angshuman Adhikari, who has been running Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar's Simply India restaurant at the year-old St Regis in the scenic Le Morne peninsula, an old hideout of runaway slaves on the south-western tip of Mauritius. Angshuman was sous chef at Kochhar's Dubai restaurant, Zafran, before he moved to the Indian Ocean island nation.

The St Regis at Le Morne stands in the shadow of a 556m-high basaltic monolith that looms over the palm-fringed resort thriving in glorious isolation on a beach in pristine condition. It is here that Kochhar, who opened London's Tamarind restaurant and now presides over Benaras, conceptualised Simply India, where the Samundri Do Pyaza, a treat for seafood lovers, competes for your attention with Karara Kekda Aur Salad (soft-shell crab paired with apple and peanut salad and apple chutney); Batak Chettinad served with cabbage and vermicelli foogath (which gets its name because of coconut and curry leaves); Tandoori Machhi teamed with crispy bok choy and Kochhar's signature smoked tomato chutney; and Citrus Rice Pudding with Blood Orange Ice Cream.

I can see Diya becoming the talk of the town, which Angshuman knows very well, having worked at Set'z with the formidable Master Chef Arif Ahmed, but it is not the only restaurant that'll see the infusion of pedigreed talent. The ever-popular Olive Bar & Kitchen at Mehrauli has got itself a prized import -- the young Sujan Sarkar, who's fresh off the boat from London (and all set to get married). I was reading up about Sujan when I stumbled upon a tweet by Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck fame informing his followers about how this talented dynamo was "preparing [a] dazzling display" for TreatFest 2012. It's not often that Blumenthal tweets as enthusiastically about a young chef.

Described as a "gastronomic genius", Sujan was crowned London Chef of the Year and was National Chef of the Year finalist in 2012. The rising star of 'molecular ingenuity' who uses liquid nitrogen like a magician, left Mumbai's JW Marriott, where he launched his career, in 2004 to join the Hilton hotels in the UK. Soon, he found himself working at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, from where he moved under the wings of the Relais & Chateaux grand chef Peter Tempelhoff, and then on to the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows on the 28th floor of the London Hilton at Park Lane, where he got to work with Andre Garrett and Chris Galvin.

Sujan Sarkar, seen at the TreatFest 2012 in the UK,
has joined Olive Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli. His
appointment has been a casting coup for the
restaurant's charismatic owner, AD Singh.

Moving fast, Sujan changed gears and went on to be the opening chef of the Automat American Brasserie on Dover Street, Mayfair, whose popular menu is as famous for its macaroni and cheese with truffle as for its chicken liver and foie gras mousse served with plum chutney. From Automat, Sujan also ran the affairs of the private members' club, Almada, which opened beneath the brasserie and attracted the likes of George Clooney because of its classic decor, good food and discreet setting.

Alex Marks is the other debutant from London who is opening his innings at the Orient Express with a dinner on Tuesday, November 12. He's replacing D.N. Sarma, the Taj veteran who learnt his craft from the legendary Arvind Saraswat and became synonymous with OE. Well, OE needed more than just Sarma's reassuring presence to shore up its jaded reputation and Marks, who earned his spurs at Gordon Ramsay's Maze at the Marriott on Grosvenor Square, may just be the oxygen that the chic restaurant badly needs.

Marks got noticed because he did a pretty competent job of stepping into Ramsay's star protégé Jason Atherton's shoes at Maze -- a gushing review of the restaurant had lauded it for its "attention to infinitesimal details and a commitment to exactingly high standards". He was previously the head chef at the Michelin-starred Foliage, the Modern British restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge that has been replaced by Heston Blumenthal's Dinner.

With such talented chefs with impeccable track records arriving in the city (apart from of course the incredible Rahul Akerkar), we seem to have a great gastronomic season ahead. I can't wait to see how it unfolds.