DINING OUT: Swiss Comfort Food to Warm Delhi’s Heart

This review first appeared in Mail Today on 18 October 2013.

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=18102013

It is difficult to produce a simple dish — you understand why when you savour the delicately balanced flavours and textures of Heinz Rufibach's roesti served with emince Zurichoise

QUICK FACTS

Swiss Gastronomy Experience

WHERE: Café, Hyatt Regency, Bhikaji Cama Place

WHEN: Till October 20. Dinner Buffet: 7 to 11 p.m.; Sunday Brunch: Noon to 3 p.m.

DIAL: 011-26791234

PRICE PER PERSON: Rs 1,550++ for dinner buffet; Rs 2,100++ for Sunday Brunch with unlimited soft drinks or champagne

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

HEINZ RUFIBACH is the master of what he describes as the “Alpine-Mediterranean style of cooking”, which got him 15 GaultMillau points (the equivalent of a Michelin star), and he has designed the menu for the first and business classes of SWISS International Airlines, but at the Café of the Hyatt Regency, Bhikaji Cama Place, he has opened a window to the home-style comfort food that has travelled from his country to across the world.

Heinz Rufibach has turned Swiss comfort food into
a gastronomic experience at the Cafe, Hyatt
Regency New Delhi, Bhikaji Cama Place

For a country famous for being the receptacle of world’s ill-gotten wealth, Switzerland has a simple yet wholesome home cuisine. Potatoes, cheese, sauerkraut and sausages are the four legs of its daily table, the decorative elements being chocolate and the array of desserts, of which the Swiss roll is only the ornamental tip. As the Hyatt Regency’s Swiss executive chef, Marin Leuthard, expressed it, “We are a simple people with traditional tastes.” And Rufibach is Switzerland’s celebrity ambassador of everyday cooking.

The genial visiting chef, who has fallen in love at first sight with the Taj Mahal, lives and works at Zermatt, the Alpine ski resort town with over 35,000 rooms in 132 starred hotels across a radius of 3.5km (that is more, by the way, than the inventory of the entire Delhi-NCR!). Tourists (Indians included) outnumber the residents of this village many times over as they come to admire the majestic beauty of the Matterhorn, standing in dignified isolation with its crown of ‘banner clouds’ a little distance away. It is in this busy picture-postcard village that Rufibach presides over the kitchens of Alpenhof Hotel, which is famous for its Le Gourmet restaurant.

At the Hyatt Regency’s Swiss Gastronomy Experience, start with the wintertime staple, raclette, which Rufibach scrapes off lovingly as the cheese melts slowly and temptingly, serving it with two pearl potatoes, pickled gherkins and silver onions. Move on to the Munder saffron soup, which is named after Mund, Switzerland’s famous ‘saffron village’ in the Rhone Valley to the southwest, whose annual production every October is a mere 1.3 kilos. Of this princely amount, a gram of which is priced at 42 Swiss Francs (Rs 2,840 at the present exchange rate), the allocation for Rufibach is 3gm — he’s among the fortunate few, for the village is very picky about whom it gives its saffron to.

You can’t go for a Swiss meal and not have roesti, which is simply pan-roasted boiled and grated potatoes, a poor man’s dish that can be elevated with limitless variations. You could have roesti wrapped in an omelette, or roesti with bratwurst (“Switzerland’s street food”), or roesti with the heart-warming emince Zurichoise, or sliced veal (chicken at the Hyatt Regency) and button mushrooms in silky white sauce. It is difficult to produce a simple dish — you know why when you savour the delicately balanced flavours and textures of the emince. And of course, no Swiss experience is complete without fondue — a “family dish”, explains Leuthard, it is made with grated gruyere and emmental boiled in white wine on a pan brushed with a garlic clove, and finished with a generous helping of kirsch, the dry, colourless brandy extracted from dark morello cherries.

Also on the buffet are smoked pork loin; gravlax, or spiced preserved salmon (remember the excitement around the world in 2008 when Switzerland saw its first salmon in 100 years at the Basel stretch of the Rhine?); spaetzle, a gnocchi-type pasta, but made with egg, flour and water; and beer-battered fried fish served with a remoulade sauce made with preserved cucumber, gherkins, silver onion, mayonnaise, parsley and dill.

And yes, you can’t miss the desserts — Swiss rolls; carrot cake from Aargau, the carrot canton up north; rye bread mouse with blueberry sauce; and the nut cake from Engadine valley, which is famous for its playfield of the rich and famous, St Moritz. The Swiss have turned simplicity into a gourmet experience.

Swiss Gastronomy Week at Hyatt Regency New Delhi & Then La Piazza’s 20th Birthday

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Heinz Rufibach, Zermatt's Alpenhof Hotel, will steer the
Swiss Gastronomy Week at the Hyatt Regency New Delhi

ZERMATT is a little village in south-western Switzerland that owes its big reputation to four neighbours — the four tallest peaks of Europe, including the majestic Matterhorn. In this village resides a culinary star with a warm-hearted smile and his name is Heinz Rufibach. He presides over the restaurant Le Gourmet at the popular Alpenhof Hotel at Zermatt and the eatery, which has notched up 15 out of a maximum of 20 GaultMillau points, the equivalent of a Michelin star. And Rufibach is no stranger to those who have flown first or business class on SWISS, the airline that we knew as Swissair, for he has designed the menu served to them at 35,000+ feet above sea level.

Why am I going on and on about Rufibach? It is because the gifted chef is on his way to New Delhi to steer the Swiss Gastronomy Week starting from October 14 at the Café, Hyatt Regency, Bhikaji Cama Place. The chef, who describes his style of cooking as “creative, honest, market-oriented and Alpine-Mediterranean”, will team up with the hotel’s Executive Chef (who’s also Swiss), Marin Leuthard, to present popular items such as raclette, fondue and bratwurst as well as Swiss classics. The Swiss buffet has been priced at Rs 1,550 plus taxes (quite reasonable by five-star standards!) and the Sunday brunch with free-flowing champagne on October 20 will be yours for Rs 2,100 plus taxes per person.

Rufibach comes from a part of Switzerland (Canton Valais) where French, German and northern Italian gastronomical influences coalesce seamlessly to produce wholesome fare. Canton Valais is also Switzerland’s most important wine-producing regions and critics rate some of its wines to be as good as the best of neighbouring France (Rhone Valley, to be precise). Its pear brandy, Williamine, which comes with an entire fruit in the bottle is also the stuff of modern legends.

What I like about the chef’s culinary philosophy is that it is rooted in the market reality. People are increasingly moving away from the complications of traditional French gastronomy. Modern European cuisine is all about taste — extracting the most, and best, of it from fresh, locally sourced produce. To his Le Gourmet guests, Rufibach gives a peek into his cooking philosophy when he says, “Through regional and Mediterranean cuisine, we want to pass on our pleasure to you, and to bring a holiday mood onto your plate. Enjoy the moment, and the wide range of delicious food and excellent wines.”

The critical words are: “Enjoy the moment.” A great proponent of simplicity, the chefs says, “Genius lies in simplicity, and, in cooking, everything starts very simply. An idea, a top motivated team, and food of the very best quality.” His philosophy will now be put to test at the Hyatt Regency.

Talking about the Hyatt Regency, which I saw coming up in the months leading up to the 1982 Asian Games, the hotel is gearing up to celebrate the 20th anniversary of La Piazza, one of the country’s most successful and profitable restaurants (I have named it the “Bukhara of Italian restaurants”) with a reunion of all those who worked there in all these years.

The other day I met Sreenivasan G, Executive Chef of the Radisson Blu Plaza, NH-8, New Delhi, and Vikas Kapoor, General Manager of the Radisson Shimla, who started their careers as commis and steward respectively at La Piazza. Sreenivasan was remembering the restaurant’s first chef, an Austrian (who’s being located for the reunion), who had banned Tabasco and chilli flakes from the restaurant. The stewards therefore had to surreptitiously carry bottles of each items in their pockets and offer them the banned items as if they were peddling drugs!

Those were the days when Sreenivasan would start cleaning the pizza oven, square inch by square inch, from 5 in the morning. “I have known every brick of that restaurant — literally,” he said, “and I am so happy to see very little has changed in all these years.” The restaurant then would produce 400 pizzas a day, Sreenivasan recalled, and ten chefs would work in a relay to ensure that the guests did not have to wait for too long for their order to materialise. Remember, that was a time when pizzas were a genuine novelty. And the closest we came to one was the Pepperoni Pizza that Nirula’s dished out with amazing consistency of quality.

We’ll hear more about La Piazza in the weeks to come. Till then, enjoy the flavours of Canton Valais.

Indigo Delhi Opening to be a Part of Urban Renewal Project Across Hyatt

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A PATCH of land across the road from the Capital’s Hyatt Regency hotel, skirting a busy road that’s called Africa Avenue, overlooking an old colony of government officials (where yours truly grew up, is transforming into a retail and entertainment zone where Rahul Akerkar’s celebrated Colaba restaurant, Indigo, will have its first outpost in Delhi.

Heritage real estate developer and chartered accountant Sanjeev Batra, who gave the cowlands of Mehrauli a new chic identity by turning around the stables of an old haveli into a restaurant space where Delhi’s first Olive Bar & Kitchen opened about a decade ago (and blueFrog more recently), acquired the patch of land from the Delhi Government about four years ago. Overlooking the busy Ring Road and Bhikaji Cama Place business district, it was a meeting point of anti-socials, with an open drain on one side, a sleepy Coffee Home run by the Government of Delhi-NCT not far from it and a beehive of car workshops behind it. It took Batra months to clear the area, but with the firm back of the Delhi Government and civic agencies, he was able to turn it around.

That was the project’s first phase. Batra had envisaged it as a recreated heritage zone, but then came his son, Samegh, after his higher studies abroad (University of Essex, UK) and turned the idea around to make it a contemporary space for young people to hang out. Apart from Indigo, the space will have fashion retail and handicrafts outlets, a performance area for art, fashion, theatre and music, and a park where families will be encouraged to have Sunday picnics with food hampers provided by Indigo and carts operated by the restaurant will sell hot dogs. There will also be a 200ft blackboard on the boundary wall for children to doodle on.

Rahul Akerkar makes his first foray outside Mumbai since
he opened his Colaba restaurant in 1999.
Image: Courtesy of www.foodindigo.com

“We want to create a space for citizens to savour the open-air pleasures that we enjoyed as children before the mall culture overtook the city,” says Sanjeev Batra. “The project will set the pace for the proper use of public spaces and the government has really backed us on it.” Samegh, his son, is the Managing Director of the House of Sunrydge, the company steering this urban renewal project.

Sharing his vision for Indigo Delhi, Rahul Akerkar, the man who opened the widely acclaimed restaurant in Mumbai in 1999, says in a media release: “Just as in Mumbai, Indigo in New Delhi  will be a ‘back-to-basics’ address that will serve up eclectic modern European fare, coupled with an expansive bar and a private dining section.”

Sanjeev Batra at his first development,
One Style Mile, Mehrauli, where Olive
Bar & Kitchen opened a decade ago

On his food, says the self-taught chef and entrepreneur, who got bitten by the restaurateur’s bug when he was dishwashing at a French bistro to pay his way through college in the U.S.: “The food is fundamentally ingredient-driven and contemporary in construction with strong and distinct flavours, with Indian and Asian influences.” Olive Bar and Kitchen loosened up the city’s stuffy dining culture when it opened at One Style Mile, Mehrauli. Indigo will complete this process of transformation.

Significantly, Indigo’s Rahul Akerkar and Olive’s AD Singh were once working together, running Just Desserts many moons ago in Mumbai, where Akerkar met his wife Malini. They have since gone their own ways, but now, they are in one city, so look out for the wheels of change working overtime.