From Rome with White Truffles and Michelin Star Touch

This review first appeared in Mail Today on November 29, 2013. I am reproducing it now because a number of my friends, professional contacts and readers missed it in the newspaper.

Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I HAVE often wondered why certain chefs get Michelin stars and the rest of the world doesn't. Is there a massive PR machinery or a gargantuan corporation that propels a chef into this exclusive club? Or do they earn their greatness as a result of the sheer brilliance of their talent?

After having a meal prepared by Francesco Apreda at Travertino, The Oberoi's Italian restaurant, which is these days redolent of the aroma of the season's freshest white truffles from Alba, I am convinced that it takes a powerhouse of skills and imagination to get a Michelin star. Apreda, whose tall, lean athletic frame makes him look more like a footballer than a chef, presides over the Imago restaurant at the Hassler, the classic hotel that stands tall on top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Francesco Apreda presides over Imago,
a restaurant offering a 360-degree view
of Rome from the top floor of the Hassler
perched above the Spanish Steps

Perched on Hassler's topmost floor, Imago is famous for the amazing 360-degree views it offers of Rome's histoic landmarks, but Apreda ensures that the meals with a view are remembered as much for the gastronomic experience and the artistry on the plate. What makes him doubly interesting is the mastery with which he melds Japanese elements -- from miso and shichimi to sake and seasonal flowers -- into his modern Italian cooking style.

He's also the first Italian chef I have known who carries a test tube filled with a blend of peppers from six different geographical regions, including Thalassery (Tellicherry), and ground sesame, which he uses to lend his risotto a well-travelled flavour. Marco Polo would have loved Apreda's risotto. Japanese chefs have incorporated French influences to create the much-acclaimed Japonaise cuisine. Apreda can legitimately claim that he's the inventor of the Italo-Japanese cuisine and he knows his Japanese ingredients very well because he has worked for many years in Japan.

Insular Italian chefs may find it difficult to digest the blasphemy of this cultural cross-pollination, but Apreda's cuisine is all about bringing diverse aromas and flavours to the global table. And to raise the oomph value of his menu, he has brought with him his personal hoard of white truffles from Alba. This has been a good year for truffles because of steady showers throughout Italy's summer, so the prices are in the 'manageable' range of 4,000-6,500 euros for a kilo. Last year's crop, which had been hit by unseasonal rains, started at 6,000 euros.

So when Apreda brings a truffle covered in a bell jar and shaves it delicately into your onion and wild mushroom soup with a touch of red miso, goat's cheese and a herb tempura, treat it with respect. See how the shavings transform a humble fried egg served with a delicate cauliflower dressing, toasted almonds and celeriac. And taste the difference the combination of white truffles and shichimi, or togarashi, the Japanese chilli-hot seven spice mixture, makes to Parmesan ravioli served in a cold tuna broth spiked with bonito flakes and craft beer. It's not for nothing that truffles bring back memories of torrid sex.

But you don't need truffles to give you that sense of wow when Apreda presents his sake-glazed black cod with a purple foam and flowers of the same hue. It's a masterpiece. When it was presented to my host, Henry Moses, Country Manager, Qatar Airways, he whipped out his Galaxy to take pictures. "You can't eat this work of art without shooting pictures of it," he said. Henry looked visibly happy that the airline has partnered with the white truffles promotion by flying Apreda in.

The Italian master is an equally accomplished dessert chef. Like a good Italian son, he has reinterpreted his Napolitan mother's shell-shaped pastries, sfogliatelle, by giving them the samosa look, and serving cherry sauce and green tea ice-cream on the side with white truffles. He raises the bar even for the vanilla bean ice-cream by presenting it like a tapestry with caramelised hazelnuts, Valrhona emulsion, salt crystals and white truffles. You don't get a Michelin star for nothing.

The Claridges Sees Changes at the Top and Hosts Spanish Michelin-Starred Chef at Sevilla

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

THE CLARIDGES in New Delhi is in the throes of transition. Oliver Martin, the quietly efficient regional general manager who had kick-started a major turnaround of the hotel, has left the organisation and been replaced by Atul Lall, for whom it's been a homecoming.

After heading signature hotels of The Oberoi and Taj groups, Lall was appointed general manager of The Claridges New Delhi in 2005, but he left the hotel in 2007 to become the COO-International of Berggruen Hotels, an operator of mid-market hotels known for its Keys brand in India, and then he successfully opened the country's first Fairmont in Jaipur.

The Majorcan Michelin-starred chef, Andreu Genestra,
will present his native specialties and the genre-defining
New Catalan cuisine with his own twist at Sevilla

In the middle of these changes, the hotel's much-acclaimed al fresco Mediterranean restaurant, Sevilla, will see a 30-year-old Spanish Michelin one-star chef unveil his culinary genius on December 10. He'll be the second Michelin-starred chef to arrive in Delhi after Francesco Apreda, who came from the Imago restaurant at the Hotel Hassler in Rome to The Oberoi last month with a bag full of enticing white truffles and his own brand of Italian cuisine with a Japanese touch. (See my review of Apreda at Travertino that first appeared in the Mail Today edition dated November 29.)

Starting as a dishwasher at the age of 16, Andreu Genestra has interned for two seasons at Andoni Luis Aduriz’s iconic Mugaritz restaurant, worked at the home of Juan Mari Arzak, one of the masters of New Basque cuisine, and with Ferran Adria at El Bulli and the Alsatian-born celebrated Barcelona restaurateur, Jean Louis Neichel. This varied exposure has given Genestra the skills and the breadth of vision to straddle the worlds of both his native Majorcan kitchen and the genre-defining New Catalan cuisine.

He is now the chef-owner of his eponymous restaurant at Hotel Predi Son Jaumell in the Majorcan town of Capdepera. The restaurant is as famous for reviving the indigenous low-gluten Xeixa wheat variety in the attached farm, and using it to make breads, cakes and even its own beer, as for what the Michelin Guide calls its "enticing" set menus.

The Guide, in its short review, has this to say about Genestra's establishment: "A restaurant with a delightful porch-covered terrace and a pleasant dining room, whose decor is restrained yet elegant. The à la carte is very much contemporary in feel and based around local and organic ingredients. Enticing gastronomic set menus."

A TripAdvisor reviewer from England narrates his experience: "Four of us tried the 35€ dinner menu, which was both original and creative. The fish course arrived in its cooking bag. The setting inside was a bit minimalist but the service was most attentive. We plan to return and next time shall try the à la carte menu, which has more choice."

The restaurant remains shut from November 16 to February 14, which is when Genestra travels around the world. His peregrinations have taken him to Brazil, France, Russia, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S., and also to Kuwait, where he managed the royal family's kitchen and consulted with Lazurd, the upper-end caterer of the Middle East. Interestingly, his current menu features Coconut Rice with Brown Crab, Anchovy Dough and Kuwaiti Black Lemon Sauce.

Genestra's travels have gifted him an evolved worldview. Last month, he joined other Majorcan top chefs in the spectacular Hotel Castell Son Claret to prepare a fund-raising dinner for the benefit of the victims of Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in the Philippines. For the big-ticket event, he prepared goat cheese gnocchi with consommé of sopas mallorquinas, which are thin slices of the Majorcan bread pan payes, and caper and truffle jam. And he served a mix of yoghurt ice-cream with apricot and cinnamon prepared with a traditional ice-cream maker.

Like all capable chefs, Genestra lets the ingredients, sourced from his backyard, do the talking. At his restaurant, he says, the vegetables are picked daily at the farm when they are at their flavourful best and the fruits still have the early frost of the morning. The olive oil is made with olives picked from the trees growing in the farm, the hens are fed with Xeixa wheat so that they benefit from the cereal's qualities, and soon, the restaurant will have its own wine produced from its own grapes.

The young chef is an ardent practitioner of the locavore philosophy of sustainable dining, but above all, he's a talented chef who promises to bring his brand of excitement to Sevilla, where evenings turn magical in these winter months.