Leading Delhi-NCR Chefs Welcome Grown-Up Meat Products from Indo-Australian Venture

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Le Carne Cuts is wholly owned by Primo Foods,
which is backed by one of the country's leading
meat exporters, Moin Akhtar Qureshi. Its
Master Butcher, Sigi Maletzki, has previously
been associated with Top Cut, Australia's
quality meat producer, and its East Asian
subsidiary, Tender Plus.

IT WAS Tanveer Kwatra, the extremely creative Executive Chef of Pullman Central Park Gurgaon in whose passion I see shades of Bill Marchetti, who first volunteered to take me to the Le Carne Cuts production facility in Manesar, the upcoming industrial suburb of India's 'Millennium City', Gurgaon. He said he knew the Le Carne Cuts Master Butcher Sigi Maletzki from his days in Melbourne, Australia, and showcased sausages from the company on the popular Sunday brunch menu of Sen5es. Maletzki, whose wife Gilly is the Head of Sales at Le Carne Cuts, previously had a long stint with Australia's quality meat producer, Top Cut, and its East Asian subsidiary, Tender Plus.

The conversation came back to me a couple of days back, when I visited Aahar 2014, India's premier food show at Pragati Maidan, and met the gregarious Tarsillo Natalone, the owner of Flavors, who was effusive in his praise for the chicken pepperoni that he had sourced from Le Carne Cuts for his pizzas. It was finally the busy restaurant consultant, Ramindar Bakshi, who put me in touch with Bharat Singh, a former executive at the independent private equity advisory firm, Campbell Lutyens, and now one of the five directors of Primo Foods Private Limited, the holding company of Le Carne Cuts.

Primo Foods is a privately held Indo-Australian joint venture company led by Moin Akhtar Qureshi, one of the country's leading meat exporters and President of the Doon School Old Boys Society. The company's Australian directors are Marvin Fayman, Joshua Fayman and David Joshua Grajzman. It was incorporated on January 18, 2013, and its production facility, an out-of-work garment-manufacturing factory, is studded with state-of-the-art German and Australian machinery.

Bharat and I connected at the busy Hall No. 10 at Pragati Maidan, he took me to the Le Carne Cuts stall, and then started what I can only describe as a meat feast. Tanveer was around and so was Andrew Parsons, Executive Chef at the Official Residence, High Commission of Canada. What struck me instantly was that I was having sausages that actually tasted and felt like meat in the mouth and not like some rubbery, synthetic mock meat.

My favourite was the juicy pork kransky, a sausage that's hugely popular in Australia -- mildly hot and best eaten in a roll with rustic mustard. Giving it competition were the chicken chorizo sausages, which my boys polished off in a matter of minutes; lamb kabana, which are modelled after the Polish sausages made with pork drawn from pigs fed on potatoes; and the pork krakauer, sausages made from cuts of lean pork, seasoned with pepper, allspice, coriander and garlic, and packed into large casings. The winner, though, was the birchwood-smoked whole chicken, which you can simply microwave and add to your Caesar's salad, or just have by itself. I preferred the second option -- the chicken was too wholesome to need any sexing up.

Finally, we have grown-up meat products in our city. Let us fall in love with them -- like I have. You can get them at Modern Bazaar outlets and at the Japanese store, Yamatoya, in Humayanpur, in the neighbourhood of Safdarjung Enclave.

Sulafest Has Shown the Way for Others to Follow and Harvest the Gains

This article first appeared on Indian Wine Academy's website (www.indianwineacademy.com) on Feb. 11. Reprinted with permission. Click on http://www.indianwineacademy.com/item_4_589.aspx to see it in the original format.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Susheela Raman was one of the major world
music stars who performed at Sulafest 2014.
India's premier gourmet music event is a model
for others to follow to give the wine culture
a big thrust forward.

THERE was a time when sponsoring wine dinners was the only option available to wine producers and importers to make inroads into a society wedded to brown spirits. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of people like the late Ghulam Naqshband and our own Subhash Arora, whose Delhi Wine Club events have become launch pads for wines and restaurants that believe in the wine culture, and some five-star hotels as well as passionate restaurateurs such as AD Singh, Rahul Akerkar, Ritu Dalmia, Abhijit Saha and Tarsillo Natalone, wine dinners became an essential part of the social calendar of our big cities.

As they evolve, wine dinners have started attracting the same crowd and most of the regulars are on the wrong side of the age curve -- it's a market with not more than 10 to 20 years of longevity left. Organising a wine dinner is like preaching to the converted. If the wine market has to grow, the country's vast young population -- 70 per cent of India is below the age of 35 -- must be introduced to the heady joys of the wonderful world of wine. But this important market segment seems to regard formal wine occasions to be too stuffy, too 'grey', to merit any place in its crowded life. How does the industry win this vodka-and-white-rum-toting generation over to its side of the circle of pleasure?

Seven years ago, Rajeev Samant of Sula Vineyards, who's always one step ahead of the competition, hit upon a brilliant idea. It was called Sulafest -- a weekend in February dedicated to the pleasures of wine, food and music; "a gourmet wine festival". There couldn't be a headier mix, and soon, all roads were leading to Nashik, the headquarters of the country's top wine producer. And the pilgrims on this road less travelled were precisely from the generation that considered wine to be oh-so yesterday.

The idea wasn't entirely an original Samant brainwave. The inspiration came from the grape-stomping dramas that Chateau Indage would organise every year, with Mumbai's who's who in attendance, till the company went bust. But what Samant has done is give it a spin -- and every year, Sulafest has been growing, not only in the number and quality of music acts it hosts, but also in the turnout and fashion statements that the visitor flaunt. It is India's Woodstock with shades of Ascot.

I bumped into Samant at the VIP Lounge and, after admiring his orange shorts and exchanging notes on the political temperature in Delhi, asked him about the turnout at Sulafest 2014. "I have stopped counting," he said with a broad grin. I could see the sense of triumph in his looks. He deserved his moment in the sun.

For the past two years, Sulafest has tied up with the country's leading purveyor of world music, blueFROG, which is why homegrown artistes such as Susheela Raman, Vasuda Sharma and Avial performed to capacity audiences along with the British psychedelic music group Shpongle, the toast of this year's fest; the ska/reggae band from Croydon, The Dualers; rumba-meets-raga group Gypsy All Stars; dub music and big beat band Dub Pistols; and the Italian from London, Gaudi, who's one of the busiest solo performers in the electronica world. And then there were pleasant surprises such as singer-songwriter-guitarist Gowri, who held her own and kept her audience asking for more, despite the deafening boom-boom-boom emanating from the 'Electro Zone'.

The 'Electro Zone' was rocked by some of the trendiest names in EDM -- the Brazilian export DJ Anna; the multi-cultural exponent of psychedelic trance, Ma Faiza; the Russian DJs who have a cult following in Goa, Mescaluto (Victoria) and Sashanti (Alexander Sukhochev); and the desi boy Ankytrixx (Ankit Kocher). It was an eclectic mix of music, which was being canned by VH1 for future broadcasts, and with Vero Moda, the trendy international women's fashion brand, being the lead sponsor, floral colours and youthful style were in evidence everywhere. The food was just the kind that the young love -- from momos to shawarma, from rajma-chawal to egg/kebab rolls, washed down with Mount Gay mojitos, or Asahi beer, or the sparkling fruit drinks from Pune-based Good Juicery, the baby of former Cape Town resident Michelle Bauer and her food technologist friend Julia Madlener.

There was food and drink everywhere, but no one got drunk or misbehaved, and the hundreds of young women could do exactly what they wanted to do, without any man paying more-than-usual attention to even the shortest skirt. It was clean, unalloyed fun, and people minded their own business. I wonder how many people signed up for camping at the vineyards organised by LetsCampOut.com, which was surely a first for an Indian "gourmet music" event.

Seeing the scores of young people who had signed up for the winery tour and tastings, asking questions, sipping wines and excitedly shooting selfies, Ajoy Shaw, Chief Winemaker and Vice President, Sula Vineyards, said, "This is the market we must reach out to if we have to grow." We were at Sula's Tasting Room, drinking Rasa 2007, a delicately balanced Shiraz with still some years of life left.

Shaw, a Bengali who is proud to call himself a Maharashtrian (his parents brought him to the state when he was five months old), said at least 600 people, mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, show up every weekend at Sula for guided tours, wine tastings and gorging on the food served at two vineyard restaurants (Soma and Little Italy). They go back with bottles of wine and a sense of excitement about the wine culture. They become the ambassadors of wine.

We need more clones of Sulafest -- in Akluj, in Baramati, in Charosa, in Hampi, in the Nandi Hills -- if we wish to create new gourmet tourist destinations and get more people hooked on to the joys of wine. What is the point of producing increasingly better wines if the market moves at what used to be once called the "Hindu rate of growth"?

Olive Bar & Kitchen Tops Delhi Gourmet Club's Best Pizza of Delhi/NCR Ranking

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Olive Bar & Kitchen team posing for a photo-op with
the Best Pizza Trophy being handed over by Rocky Mohan
and other members of the Delhi Gourmet Club jury

AFTER enjoying a long Diwali weekend, I am back with a bucketful of news, starting with the announcement of the Delhi Gourmet Club's Pizza Hunt results. When I look back at the evolution of the pizza in our city, I remember the days when the Nirula's Keema Do Pyaza Pizza used to be my post-examination treat from my father. The pizza crust used to be like toast, with shredded Amul processed cheese filling in for mozzarella, the 'tomato puree' suspiciously seeming to be straight out of a ketchup bottle, and the keema do pyaza was unevenly spread on top, with the serving getting thinner as the pizza got popular. Of course, there was also the pepperoni pizza, which was hugely popular (with good reason!), but I discovered it much later.

I am speaking of the early 1980s, when a pizza was a treat that few middle-class families could afford. That was when Taxila, the city's only respectable Continental restaurant on the Maurya rooftop, was struggling to survive, and so was Valentino at the fledgling Hyatt Regency, which made way for the juggernaut named La Piazza. It was La Piazza, together (a little later) with Italian electrical engineer-turned-restaurateur Tarsillo Natalone's Flavors, which ended Delhi's pizza virginity. In fact, the opening chef of La Piazza, who was an Austrian, was so pernickety about the restaurant's Neapolitan pizzas that he banned the waiters from dousing them with Tabasco sauce or chilli flakes. The waiters, as a result, had to smuggle bottles of both in their jacket pockets to serve their contents on the sly.

Since those early days, we have seen Ritu Dalmia introduce Delhi to the wonders of the wood-fired oven at Diva. We have had Bill Marchetti inaugurate one with great fanfare at Pavilion, the all-day restaurant at the ITC Maurya, but the restaurant never became famous for pizzas. We have watched Olive Bar & Kitchen turn pizza slices, freshly out of the wood-fired oven, into popular party snacks in the days when the trio of Anirban Sarkar, Mohit Balachandran and Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai had made the restaurant a force to reckon with. And Mist at The Park, in the days of Bakshish Dean (the golden age of the Connaught Place hotel's culinary journey), rolled out such novelties of the time as the smoked salmon and quattro formaggi pizzas.

Of course, we had our share of PR gimmicks as well, such as the pizza priced at Rs 9,999 (its toppings included a generous helping of beluga and lobster), with which The Qube opened its doors at The Leela Palace Chanakyapuri. It was the creation of the hotel's then executive chef, the affable American, Glenn Eastman, who formerly presided over the kitchen at the personal yacht of the world's richest man, Mexican telecoms tsar Carlos Slim Helu. Talking about Americans and pizzas, India is well on its way to becoming one of the top five market for Domino's, which straddles across 55 per cent of the country's Rs 1,300-1,400-crore organised pizza market. Pizza Hut is hot in pursuit, followed at a respectable distance by players such as Papa John's and Sbarro, and now, JSM Hospitality, the company behind Shiro and Hard Rock Cafe, is ready to roll out California Pizza Kitchen in Delhi/NCR after a successful run in Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.

With Delhi's pizza offerings getting more diverse than ever, it has become important for food connoisseurs to get a sense of where they can get the best pizzas in the city and its upscale suburbs. True to its record of becoming the final arbiter of taste in the city, the Delhi Gourmet Club, led by 'Mr Old Monk' and author of four well-received cookbooks, Rocky Mohan, went on a whirlwind hunt for the best pizza, covering 15 restaurants a record three weeks.

The jury consisted of a mixed group of well-travelled people united by a passion for food but representing the universe of Delhi restaurants--a couple of home-makers, a social media marketer, a management consultant, a well-known restaurateur, and even a professor of human rights at a reputed law school. Each of them spent Rs 5,000, tasting a basic margherita pizza followed by a gourmet pizza at each of the 15 restaurants, over five nights to arrive at a ranking that is refreshingly honest, though some of the big names in the business may not agree with their relegation to the lower end of the list.

My big complaint against the jury is that it left out Flavors and Cilantro at The Trident, Gurgaon, which, I maintain, has been consistent with the superior quality of its pizzas. I wholeheartedly endorse the No. 1 position going to Olive Bar & Kitchen, but I was left wondering how threesixtydegrees at The Oberoi managed to be No. 2 -- I have never known of anyone going there to ask for a pizza. Fat Lulu, in my opinion, should have been No. 2, not No. 3. But the shocker was Diva ending at the bottom of the heap, at No. 15. The news made me lapse into a state of violent disbelief followed by shock. Has Ritu Dalmia allowed her restaurant to slip to such an extent or was it a bad dough day? Anyway, without more quibbles, let me share the ranking with you:

Olive  Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli, 79.33; threesixtydegrees, The Oberoi New Delhi, 74.50; Fat Lulu, Gurgaon, 70.50; San Gimignano, The Imperial, 68.50; La Piazza, Hyatt Regency, 68.44; Sen5es, Pullman Gurgaon, 66.25; Sartoria, Vasant Vihar, 62.93; Mistral, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 62.20; Prego, The Westin, Gurgaon, 60.57; La Tagliatella, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 58.47; The Qube, The Leela Palace Chanakyapuri, 53.35; Amici, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 50.36; Tonino, Andheria More, Mehrauli, 48.57; Mist, The Park, Parliament Street, 43.22; Diva, M-Block, Greater Kailash-II, 42.88.

So, how do you rate a pizza? Did the jury follow certain guidelines? Rocky shared them with the Delhi Gourmet Club before posting the results. Though Rocky did not mention this fact, you'll find the pointers in the blog 'A Gravy Train with Biscuit Wheels'. Anyway, here they are:

Is the crust worth eating on its own? Or is it simply a load-bearing device to hold up massive quantities of toppings (not necessarily a bad thing, but not usually seen in the best pizzerias)?

Is the bread dense or airy?

Do the individual toppings taste good on their own? Would you eat them if they were served on an appetiser plate alone? Or do they need cheese, bread and tomato sauce to work.

What types of cheeses are being used? Would the cheese(s) also taste okay on its own?

Is there a lot of sauce, a sauce drought, or is it in-between? Is the sauce delicious on its own?

Does it rely on salt or sugar for a strong taste?

Does the pizza remain tasty and interesting from start to finish? Or does the pizza have a great first bite, but then become an uninteresting trudge to finish eating. Over-salted pizzas can definitely fall into this trap. If you wish to check out the original, go to http://cincinnatimalavita.blogspot.in/2012/12/how-to-judge-great-pizza.html. 

Interesting pointers! Keep these in mind the next time when you to have a gourmet pizza experience.