FORTUNE COOKIE: A Bold New Avatar of Indian Cuisine 2,0

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

When it opens on July 20, Farzi Cafe at Cyber
Hub, Gurgaon, promises to give Modern
Indian Cuisine a bold creative thrust with its
new-generation menu and presentation styles

WHEN the Taj veteran, Arvind Saraswat, wrote The Gourmet Indian Cookbook in 2004, I could not stop admiring the beauty of each dish whose recipe was presented in the slim, glossy, hardcover volume.

Saraswat would say that he had been inspired to devote many years working on the recipes because of a barb from the father of French nouvelle cuisine, Paul Bocuse. On a visit to India as a guest of the Taj, Bocuse had said to Saraswat that Indian food tasted great, but it didn't excite the eye and make one want to eat it. Saraswat rose up to the challenge, but his cookbook sank without a trace, just like Michelin-starred Vineet Bhatia's Mushk restaurant, which opened in 2002, where he courted Delhi's palate with novelties such as truffle oil-flavoured naan or his favourite squid ink-infused black chicken tikka.

Both efforts were way ahead of their time. It was five years later that Varq at the Taj Mahal Hotel and the now-famous Indian Accent opened to a tepid response, and another five years had to lapse before Gaggan Anand, Saraswat's former acolyte, dazzled the world from his Bangkok restaurant, ranked 17th in the world, with his brand of Progressive Indian Cuisine.

Himanshu Saini, who's all of 26, has worked hard
to translate Zorawar Kalra's vision on the menu

These thoughts raced through my head as I stepped into Farzi Cafe at Gurgaon's Cyber Hub for a sneak preview a couple of days ago. A project of Zorawar Kalra, who has seen complimentary reviews (the latest in The New York Times) pour on his Masala Library in Mumbai, Farzi Cafe promises to give Delhi-NCR's dining culture a new direction. The young man behind the show is 26-year-old Himanshu Saini, who had his first date with fame when he won Chicago/New York restaurateur Rohini Dey's much-publicised 'chef hunt' last summer by dishing up a sarson da saag quesadilla with butter milk foam.

To a traditionalist, Saini's creations, and the artefacts they arrive in, may seem straight out of Mad Hatter's tea party, but their beauty lies in the way they tantalise the imagination using the tools of molecular gastronomy (notably liquid nitrogen) without deviating from the real flavours of Indian cuisine. That is exactly what Modern Indian Cuisine is all about. Its practitioners don't use, for instance, squid ink because it has no Indian connect.

When at Farzi Cafe you are served a mini raj kachori stuffed with kurkure bhindi surrounded by islands of chutney foam, each element tastes just how it is supposed to. As does the idiappam sushi with prawn pepper fry, or the sarson da saag gilawat kebabs, corn tostadas, chhaas spheres and masala popcorn, which may sound like a gimmicky reinvention of the Punjabi winter staple, sarson da saag-makke di roti, but actually tastes right while looking oomphy. This combination of the right marriage of flavours and the elements of surprise is the leitmotif of the Farzi Cafe menu.

The bhoot jholokia spare ribs not only melt in your mouth, but also make you feel braver after having the world's hottest chilli; the chilli duck samosa with hoisin chutney and the galouti burger with mutton boti will leave you admiring the sheer ingenuity of the medleys of flavours and textures; the pumpkin khao suey, yet another flash of inspiration, will awaken you to the limitless possibilities of the humble kaddu; and you'll smile when the chicken tikka masala with Cornish cruncher cheddar cheese naan arrives in a replica of a public telephone booth you'll see all over London.

The same streak of innovation runs through the desserts (Parle-G cheesecake on a pool of rabri studded with Gems chocolate spheres) and the molecular cocktails (mixologist Aman Dua left me groping for words of praise with his mango spaghetti in gin with a grape infused in a red wine reduction), but the cherry on the icing is the paan gujiya, which is a dehydrated paan inside a candyfloss casing. That, in a sense, defines the Modern Indian experience: quirky but not contradictory.

MISTRAL MENU INTRODUCES DELHI TO THE JOYS DUCK'S EGGS

Renaud Palliere of PVR Cinemas is anything
but your stereotypical finance man

A MEAL with Reynaud Palliere, CEO (International Development), PVR Cinemas, is a lot of fun, for he may be crunching numbers for a living, but he brings a Frenchman's passion for food to the table when he's not running marathons (he has done New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney; Mumbai and Capetown are his next stops).

As Executive Chef, Mayank Tiwari has given
Mistral's menu a new direction -- I recommend
his gazpacho soup and pumpkin risotto 

When we met earlier in the week, at Mistral adjoining PVR Director's Cut at the Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, our conversation started with the amazing weekend Palliere had just spent at Tikli Bottom, the Chhattarpur hideaway run by a British couple, Martin and Annie Howard, at the far end of a village named Tikli (it's a pilgrimage for every expat who lives in Delhi). I then got fixated on the fried duck's eggs, which are a part of  the restaurant's all-day breakfast menu, served with a summery salad, hollandaise, toasted bread with parsley butter, and an orange-pineapple relish.

As I looked at the fried eggs, their perfectly semi-circular yolks appearing like twin images of the setting sun, memories of the summer vacations I had spent in Kolkata as a child flashed in my mind's eye. Duck's eggs are a delicacy among Bengalis -- you get them fresh every morning in Kolkata, brought to the city by women from neighbouring villages who pick up what they find by the side of ponds where ducks, a strain of the Muscovy variety known as Chinae Hans (the name indicates the ancestors of these birds came from China), live in good numbers across rural West Bengal.

Mistral gets its duck's eggs from the French Farm in Manesar, which is run by a temperamental yet much sought-after Frenchman named Roger Langbour (and his Muscovy ducks have nobler strains). The restaurant's executive chef, Mayank Tiwari, a graduate of what I call the AD Singh school of hospitality, took nine minutes to get the perfect fried eggs, their uniformly proportioned whites balancing the bright orbs at the centre. There's more to recommend the restaurant for -- the gazpacho, pumpkin risotto and the Persian koobideh (seekh) kebabs are my personal favourites -- but I can keep going back only for the duck's eggs.

HAVING DUCK EGGS THE BENGALI WAY

DUCK EGGS seem to be in vogue, especially because they have thicker shells, which means they stay fresher longer; more albumen, which makes them best for cakes and pastries; and more Omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the brain and the skin. There's one catch, though. They have double the amount cholesterol in chicken eggs, which is bad news for the heart. They also have very little moisture, which can be a problem if you are trying to whisk a duck's egg, and fried eggs can become rubbery if you aren't a skilled handler of duck's eggs. I just love the way they are cooked in West Bengal -- as a curry (dimer dalna). Duck's eggs, funnily, entered old-fashioned Bengali kitchens much before chicken eggs were allowed!

MANJIT GILL'S QUEST FOR AN INDIAN DATA BANK OF RECIPES

Manjit Gill, Corporate Chef of ITC Hotels and
President, Federation of Indian Culinary
Associations, was inspired by the International
Congress of Culinary Traditions held at
Bucharest, Romania, earlier in the year

WE LIVE in a cornucopia of cuisines, yet the world knows so little about our country's culinary heritage. To bridge this knowledge gap, the Ministry of Tourism has teamed up with the national body of chefs, Federation of Indian Culinary Associations (FICA), to launch a multi-disciplinary effort to create a central databank of recipes (at least ten of them) from each of the country's 640 districts. We owe this idea to FICA President and Corporate Chef, ITC Hotels, Manjit Gill, who was inspired by his visit to Bucharest, Romania, for the International Congress of Culinary Traditions earlier this year. And he found an eager listener, and doer, in Parvez Dewan, Secretary, Tourism.

Gill says his team will have 600 recipes, a tenth of what is intended to be collected, ready for the Modi government's 100 days in power. Imagine the world this exercise will open up. Where else are you going to find the kind of variety we are able to savour even among jalebis! A Gohana jalebi weighing 250 gms apiece (almost like the ones dished up by Chandni Chowk's Old & Famous Jalebiwala) is a story by itself, as is the dark brown Burhanpuri mawa jalebi, which is a Ramzan must-have at J.J. Sweets in Mumbai's Bohri Mohalla. The national databank will make us understand this diversity and treasure it.

This column first appeared in the Mail Today edition dated July 17, 2014.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

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.

India’s First Ritz Carlton Opens with Michelin-Starred Anupam Banerjee as Executive Chef

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

BANGALORE and Bengal are powered by two entirely different mindsets, but our own Silicon Valley’s culinary scene has been dominated for years by a Bengali. Abhijit Saha grew up in Delhi, studied Hotel Management at IHM Pusa and Oenology at the Johnson and Wales University, USA, started out as an industrial trainee at the Taj Palace in his home city, earned his spurs at The Park, where he launched IT.alia in Bangalore with guidance from the famous Antonio Carluccio, and then has had his adopted city eating out of his hand at Caperberry (and subsequently Fava).

Now, there’s another probashi (expat) Bengali chef who’s set to storm Bangalore’s culinary scene as executive chef steering the seven restaurants with which the country’s first Ritz Carlton has opened in the southern city. Anupam Banerjee, who grew up in Ranchi, where his mother is a professor of economics and his father an engineer, was the head chef of Rasoi by Vineet at the Mandarin Oriental Geneva when it became the first and only Indian restaurant in Continental Europe to get a Michelin star and 15 points on the GaultMillau.

Banerjee’s ties with the Michelin-starred chef-restaurateur Vineet Bhatia, the force behind Rasoi, goes back to their days at The Oberoi. When the Mandarin Oriental Geneva chose to open with the Indian restaurant in 2008, Banerjee naturally was the hotel’s first choice for the position of head chef. Banerjee, who turns 40 next years, has spent nine years with the Mandarin Oriental, having worked at the group’s hotel at Hyde Park, a favourite of Indian fat cats, and in Washington, D.C., where he was head chef before he got his Bangalore assignment — or, to use the famous Ritz Carlton expression, was inducted as one of the “Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen”.

An IHM Chennai graduate, Banerjee completed his education at the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development (OCLD) and worked at La Rochelle, where he honed his French culinary skills, before it made way for threesixty degrees at The Oberoi New Delhi. When he was 25, he won a cooking competition for chefs at The Oberoi and was chosen to represent the hotel at a ‘Taste of Asia’ promotion in Singapore.

Ranchi's Anupam Banerjee (do you see a resemblance here
with M.S. Dhoni?) is the Executive Chef of India's first
Ritz Carlton in Bangalore. Image: Courtesy of Destination
MO, online magazine of the Mandarin Oriental group

It was there that he was spotted by a chef from The Raffles and was inducted into the historic hotel, where he also met his Singapore-Chinese wife Fung. In the two years he spent as stand-in chef at The Raffles, he got to work in all of the hotel’s 18 restaurants, which prepared him for bigger roles at the Mandarin Oriental. Banerjee has also worked with Alain Soliveres at his Michelin two-star restaurant in Hotel Vernet, Paris, had a short stint with Pierre Gagnaire at his Michelin three-star restaurant, also in Paris, and worked alongside with Charlie Trotters, Jeun Fleury and Lea Linster.

A world-travelled chef who has lived and worked in three continents, Banerjee comes with an impressive CV and a heavy load of expectations on his shoulders. The Ritz Carlton Bangalore will have three specialty restaurants — The Market, an all-day dining destination where the main highlight will be the chef’s table where Banerjee will showcase his culinary repertoire; The Lantern, a lantern-shaped Chinese restaurant and bar designed by Super Potato; Riwaz, a Bukhara-type North West Frontier restaurant with a whisky and wine room; and Bang, an open-air rooftop bar offering panoramic views of the city from the 15th floor. That’s an impressive inventory to command, but Banerjee has the experience to slip into his role seamlessly.

Six Indian Restaurants Retain One-Star Rating in Michelin Guide 2014 for UK and Ireland

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

This is the tenth year that Benaras, the
first solo restaurant by Atul Kochhar,
has retained its Michelin one-star rating 

SIX INDIAN restaurants, all in London, have retained their one-star status in the just-released Michelin Guide 2014 for UK and Ireland — none other Indian establishment elsewhere in Europe, in fact, has yet qualified for a Michelin star. These include the self-owned restaurants of the first two Indians to get Michelin stars — Atul Kochhar of Benaras and Vineet Bhatia of Rasoi, both of whom, incidentally, are ex-Oberoi, or XO. Also on the list is Tamarind, the first Indian restaurant in the UK to be bestowed the honour (when its kitchen was presided over by Kochhar). Tamarind is now headed by the ex-ITC Maurya hand, Alfred Prasad, who’s been acclaimed for his fish and seafood preparations.

The other three Indian stars are Amaya Belgravia, which is run by MW Eat Group, the company that owns the historic Veeraswamy, Chutney Mary and the mass-dining Masala Zone restaurants, and is famous for its dramatic show kitchen with live grills; Quilon at Buckingham Gate, the ‘south-west Indian coastal’ restaurant of the ex-Taj star, Aylur Sriram, who gave up his law studies to become a chef and then earn his spurs for his work at the Taj Bangalore restaurant, Karavalli;  and Trishna, the Marylebone  Village outpost of Trishna Mumbai, which got its first Michelin star last September. Delhiites may find the last name interesting, given the way Trishna’s Delhi foray met with an ignominious end opposite the Qutab Minar.

Atul Kochhar was only 31 when he got his first Michelin star in 2001 for Tamarind, where he was head chef, and Benaras, his first solo venture, is now 10 years old. The latest Michelin star must be a sweet tenth birthday gift for Benaras and Kochhar, who now also owns two other Indian restaurants.

It was also in 2001 that Vineet Bhatia, who is two year older than Kochhar, got his first Michelin star for Zaika at Kensington High Street. A year after Kochhar opened Benaras, Bhatia set up Rasoi, which has been winning awards and accolades every year, and has critics eating out of his hand.

The Michelin Guide 2014 has made news this year for the promotion it has given Heston Blumental, whose Fat Duck continues to retain its three stars, for Dinner, which opened at the Mandarin Oriental in Hyde Park in 2011. Dinner has just got its second star and another Blumenthal restaurant, Hinds Head, which like Fat Duck is in the sixteenth-century village of Bray in Berkshire, has one. That makes Blumenthal the fortunate owner of six Michelin stars.

The other restaurant to be upgraded to a two-star rating is The Greenhouse, the Mayfair restaurant run by French chef Arnaud Bignon, but there’s been no new entrant in the elite three-star club, which continues to have Fat Duck, Alain Roux’s The Waterside Inn, also at Bray, Gordon Ramsay at Chelsea and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Mayfair, as its four luminaries. The one-star list has seen a sizeable increase with 15 new names, including Lima, the first Latin American restaurant in the UK and Ireland to get a star.

For Indians, the next big thing will be the elevation of at least one of the one-star restaurants. Till that happens, we still have six good reasons to celebrate.

Seven Michelin-Starred Chefs to Dish Up Eight Days of Feasting in Delhi & Mumbai

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Non-profit Creative Services
Support Group founder Anand
Kapoor had orchestrated a
memorable nine-course charity
dinner accompanied by music
at The Oberoi Gurgaon last year

HAVE you fancied having canapés suspended from helium balloons floating at your nose level? If you did nurture such a dream, you can spoil yourself when the French arts group La Cellule unveils its floating buffet on October 1 in one of a series of charity events being organised by Anand Kapoor, the powerhouse behind the non-profit Creative Services Support Group (CSSG), between September 28 and October 5 in Delhi and Mumbai.

Kapoor says he’s “going mental” — well, he’s not exaggerating, for he has a full-time job in New Delhi with a UK-based, BAFTA Award-winning design house and CSSG is the organisation he runs in his spare time to provide skill development opportunities to talented young men and women from economically marginalised families.

Seven Michelin-starred chefs from England, Scotland and Spain and two of Australia’s top ‘hatted’ chefs are participating in this year’s CSSG Summit 2013: Food and Art Edition. The programme includes four dinners and breakfasts curated by the visiting chefs in Delhi and Mumbai; a day of ‘food art installations’ in Delhi to accompany talks by actor Nandita Das and Golf Australia’s brand ambassador and acclaimed chef Ian Curley; two days of master classes at the restaurant Le Cirque; a gala dinner in Delhi featuring a performance by the singers of Glyndebourne, the 600-year-old opera house in Sussex, England; and the release of a book of recipes by the international chefs associated with the CSSG’s initiatives.

Kapoor informs me that the tickets to the gala dinner took just half an hour to sell out! The master classes, too, have been snapped up by the Australian High Commission (September 27) and the Delhi Gourmet Club (October 2). Also engaged in this mega-celebration of food and philanthropy are Delhi’s most talented chefs Manish Mehrotra, Ritu Dalmia, Nira Singh, Sabyasachi ‘Saby’ Gorai, Jatin Mallick, Mickey Boite and Avanti Mathur.

Last year, Kapoor had organised an unprecedented charity dinner where he had seven international celebrity chefs, including UK-based Vineet Bhatia and Anjum Anand, prepare a nine-course meal served to the accompaniment of music presented by B.L.O.T. at The Oberoi Gurgaon. The money he raised from the event was used to support four young men, who spent their childhood growing up homeless in the New Delhi Railway Station, realise their life’s ambition of becoming chefs. These aspiring chefs, whose further career development, up to a stint with Michelin-star restaurants in the U.K., is being supported by the Delhi Gourmet Club, are working with the restaurant Tres, the patisserie chain L’Opera, the French eatery Chez Nini and pastry chef Avanti Mathur’s Sweet Nothings.

The chefs you’ll see in action this year are:

Frances Atkins, The Yorke Arms, Patley Bridge, North Yorkshire (Michelin Starred), who’s one of only six women chefs in Britain to have a Michelin star.

Ian Curley, The European, Melbourne (Hatted), who’s a celebrated chef famous for teaching cooking to the homeless and working for the rehab of alcohol and drug abuse victims.

Mark Best, Marque, Sydney (Hatted), who’s a former electrician, a brilliant exponent of French cuisine and has worked with such global maestros as Alain Passard and Raymond Blanc.

Alyn Williams, Alyn Williams at The Westbury, London (Michelin Starred), who’s been Marcus Wareing’s head chef at The Berkeley and is the youngest in this lot of seasoned hands.

Michael Wignall, The Latymer, Surrey, (Michelin Starred), who’s an extreme sport fanatic when he’s not running his Michelin two-star establishment.

Roger Pizey, Marco’s, Stamford Bridge, London (Michelin Starred), who’s an acolyte of Albert Roux and Marco Pierre White and has reignited the British passion for traditional pastry treats.

Laurie Gear, The Artichoke, Buckinghamshire (Michelin Starred), who’s a largely self-taught chef, having started his career washing dishes, but he’s a fine exponent of European cuisine.

Marcello Tully, Kinloch Lodge, Isle of Skye, Scotland (Michelin Starred), who’s a big promoter of sustainable eating, slow food and British farm products.

Fernando del Cerro, Casa José Aranjuez, Madrid (Michelin Starred), who’s famous for his culinary creations with the produce of Aranjuez’s historical vegetable garden.

A treat awaits Delhi before it goes into the Navaratra mode and steers clear of all that’s good to eat and drink.