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| Out of the 17 awards to be given away today at the Top Chef Awards 2014, the only one disclosed so far is the Lifetime Achievement Award to be conferred upon Executive Chef J.P. Singh of the Bukhara. |
By Sourish Bhattacharyya
THE DELHI Gourmet Club's Top Chef
Awards 2014 kicks off in less than ten hours today (July 22) with just one
award, out of the 17 being given away, being disclosed by the founder-members
of the Facebook group (in the interests of transparency, I must say I am proud
to be one of them). It is the Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be given away
by the chief guest, Parvez Dewan,
Secretary, Tourism, Government of India, to J.P. Singh, the man at the helm of ITC Maurya's (and indeed,
India's) top-grossing Bukhara restaurant.
This is one of the three awards that
were decided by the jury, headed by Manjit
Gill, Corporate Chef, ITC Hotels, and Founder-President of the Indian
Federation of Culinary Associations. The idea to honour Singh and Bukhara,
which is celebrating its 35th birthday in the first week of August, came from Varun Tuli, owner of the much-awarded Yum Yum Tree restaurant and now also a
very successful A-List caterer. Being an observer at the jury meeting, I was
surprised by how the decision was wholeheartedly accepted by all the other
members, including Manish Malhotra,
who has pioneered a style of cooking that is taking Indian cuisine in a
direction that is completely different from that of Bukhara.
The other members of the jury were
Chef Bill Marchetti, eminent food
critic Marryam Reshii, Chef Girish Krishnan (JW Marriott, New Delhi
Aerocity), Chef Mickey Bhoite (Le
Cirque, The Leela Palace New Delhi), Neeraj
Tyagi (The Claridges) and Magandeep
Singh (India's first French-certified wine sommelier). Top Chef Awards
Delh-NCR 2014 is being co-presented by Pullman
Gurgaon Central Park, powered by Le
Cordon Bleu-G.D. Goenka University, and supported by Elle & Vire,
Delverde, Torani, Granini and Nestle Professional.
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| Some months back, the Delhi Gourmet Club, represented (above, third and extreme right) by Rocky Mohan and yours truly, honoured Bukhara for serving the best seekh kebabs in Delhi-NCR. Bukhara's No. 2 Purshottam Singh and ITC Maurya's Senior Executive Chef, Manisha Bhasin, received the award. |
A graduate of the famous Dadar
Catering College (Institute of Hotel Management, Dadar), J.P. Singh has spent
all his life in the hotel chain that was created by ITC's first Indian
chairman, Ajit Narain Haksar, primarily
as a vehicle to earn hard-to-get foreign exchange during the high noon of the
licence-permit raj era. A passionate foodie, Haksar was also responsible for
creating Bukhara in the
then-uncelebrated Maurya Sheraton in 1978. It was he who poached Madan Lal Jaiswal (J.P. Singh still
can't get over his colourful language!) from a now-defunct hotel named
President on Asaf Ali Road, at the intersection where New Delhi meets Purani
Dilli, which was famous for its tandoori
preparations.
Jaiswal was given the task of running
Bukhara, which he did with great flourish (he even opened the New York Bukhara),
till he died in a car crash. It was under Jaiswal that Chef JP, which is how
everybody knows Singh, joined Bukhara in 1991, and like everyone and everything
associated with the restaurant, continues to be a part of it -- like the 17 chefs
working with him, including Purshottam
Singh and Balkishen, who has
travelled the world, from New York to Ajman to Hong Kong, with the Bukhara
brand. Prem Rajput, the maitre d' who would charm his guests
into coming back — again and again, and Jaiswal formed quite a formidable team.
Together, they scripted the early success story of the Bukhara.
Interestingly, Jaiswal's 'gurubhai' Todar Mal was the leading light of The Oberoi's Mughal Room, which Haksar
almost disabled by poaching a dozen chefs from what was then Delhi's premier Mughlai-Punjabi
restaurant in a five-star hotel. Haksar wanted to move the centre of gravity from
the contemporary market leader (and not the caricature of the original that it
has become today), the colourful Kundal
Lal Gujral's Moti Mahal, to Bukhara.
In Bite the Bullet, his autobiography, Haksar devotes some pages to
the Bukhara, where he says he got the idea of people eating with their hands and
wearing aprons, instead of spreading a serviette on the lap, after seeing a BBC
TV drama based on the life of Tudor King Henry VIII. If English royalty could
eat with their hands, why couldn't we, he reasoned with himself, and the
practice has been in vogue since the day the Bukhara opened its doors. The
practice has even survived one of the early (and rare at the Maurya) European
manager's attempts to do away with it! Apparently, his argument that
international visitors were being put off by the practice found no takers in
the higher echelons of the ITC.
According to Haksar, the seating
(which I find highly uncomfortable -- conspiracy theorists insist the design is
driven by the idea of making people leave as soon as they finish eating!) and decor
were inspired by a World War II film set partly in the North-West Frontier.
There was a scene in it, Haksar writes, where British officers were seen dining
at a rugged local eatery. The image stayed in Haksar's mind when he was
planning Bukhara with Rajinder Kumar,
the architect who became famous after the Maurya came up. Haksar borrowed the
idea of the glass-fronted kitchen (which was a novelty in its time), or so ITC
insiders whisper, from Rama International, a hotel that ITC managed for Iqbal Ghei and Pishori Lal Lamba in Aurangabad.
Bukhara started as a 60-seater and
its entry, oddly, was through Amrapali, the 'coffee shop' that was subsequently
renamed Pavilion. The strange layout had an adverse effect on the image of
Amrapali, for there would always be a little crowd of Bukhara diners awaiting
their turn hanging about in the 'coffee shop' or ordering starters from their
favourite restaurant. Thanks to the 1982 Asian Games, when the hotel underwent
a major refurbishment, this layout was changed in favour of what we see now.
Chef JP, who was toying with idea of
becoming a doctor before listening to his heart and training to be a chef, joined
ITC Welcomgroup in 1981 from the lowest end of the pecking order -- as
management trainee at Mumbai's Ambassador
Hotel and then, Demi Chef De Partie at the Sea Rock Sheraton, which was bombed in a terrorist attack in 1993.
He was a Chef de Partie (CDP) at the Patna
Maurya before he joined Bukhara, where he's now the hands-on executive chef
-- even as he and his team feed more than 400 people a day, and make more money
than any other restaurant in the country (Rs 8 crore a month, one hears from
the competition!), his constant exposure to the tandoor has no effect on his even temper.
Like his temper, Bukhara thrives on
consistency. The restaurant's mutton supplier has been at it for more than 25 years
and so have the vendors respectively supplying the tomato puree for its celebrated
Dal Bukhara and the brass vessel in which it is cooked on charcoal fire; its sole
fillets unvarying weigh 300gms and its jumbo prawns, sourced from one of the
ITC subsidiaries in Visakhapatnam for as long as anyone can remember, uniformly
weigh between 80-120gms. Similar weight specifications are followed for capsicums
and potatoes, and a mutton leg piece meant for a raan is never used for a burra!
The butter and cream content of the Dal Bukhara, moreover, has never been allowed
to exceed 6 per cent of the total portion size. Consistency of quality and an
even-tempered chef -- you can't get a more winning combination.
