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.

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.