Dried Ants, Chillies Galore and Much More at The Leela Gurgaon's Fiesta Latina

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Leela Gurgaon's Executive Chef, Ramon
Salto Alvarez, has put together Fiesta Latina, which
is being billed as India's first Latin American food
festival. It features celebrity chefs from Colombia,
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru.

WHEN Gerardo Vasquez Lugo landed in Delhi a couple of nights ago, he had no change of clothes in his baggage, for there was room only for ingredients he had flown in from Mexico for what is possibly Delhi-NCR's first exposure to the vast wealth of Latin American cuisines at The Leela Gurgaon.

When The Leela Gurgaon's good-humoured general manager, Michel Koopman, brought in Ramon Salto Alvarez, the jolly Catalan chef who started out as an apprentice at Ferran Adria's El Bulli in 1993 and was heading Austrian-American super chef Jean Georges Vongerichten's restaurants at the W Doha before moving base, we knew there would be lots of action.

It took Chef Ramon, whose Latin American connection is his Colombian wife, four months to conceptualise a celebration of food and wine to coincide with the Fiesta Latina dance festival. It took a presentation made by him over breakfast to convince ambassadors of the 19 Latin American countries represented in New Delhi that they were on to a good thing. "Five of them hadn't even been to Gurgaon till that day," Koopman said with that unmissable twinkle in his eye. "It was like the Wild West for them." After Fiesta Latina, which will be on from April 5 to 19 at the hotel's all-day multi-cuisine restaurant, Spectra, Gurgaon will cease to be a stranger for Delhi-NCR's Latin American community.

The results of Chef Ramon's hard work are there for all of us to see, all labelled and stacked neatly on open shelves in his office. These are ingredients that have travelled half-way across the world with five visiting chefs from countries whose food not many of us have had the chance to sample. Chef Ramon's shelves have dried ants, chantaduro (peach palm) and panderito biscuits waiting to be used by the Colombian chef, Vicky Acosta, who's young and bubbly but already a celebrity in her home town Cali. She draws her ingredients and influences equally from the Pacific Ocean and her country's African heritage.

The shelves are also filled up with 25 kilos of pastes of different kinds of chillies, which have come with the ambassador of Peruvian cuisine, Javier Ampuero, whose magical bag has quinoa in eight different colours and ingredients such as purple sweet corn paste and papa seca (dried potatoes), which he requires to showcase his country's Nikkei cuisine, which marries the cooking styles of his country's Peruvian and Japanese communities.

Javier Ampuero, who's regarded as Peru's
culinary ambassador, will present his brand of
Nikkei cuisine, which marries Peruvian and
Japanese gastronomic traditions. Peru has a
large Japanese community and has even
elected a president of Japanese origin.

Chef Gerardo, with whom I started my story, has come with about a dozen different kinds of chillies plus bags full of nopales (prickly pear cactus), poblano chilli peppers, avocado leaves and dried persimmon powder. Amaranth and chia seeds are the other goodies in his bag, and he's ready to reveal how far they can go  And yes, the first thing he did after landing in Delhi was to go and buy a wardrobe for himself at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, followed by Dilli Haat. "You wouldn't have had chillies without Mexico," the chef said with a gentle smile, underlining the culinary links between two great ancient civilisations that know so little about each other.

Just like Chef Gerardo, the guru of traditional Mexican cuisine, who draws his inspiration from the culinary legacies of the ancient Olmec, Mayan, Zapotec and Purepecha cultures, Ines Paes Nin ('Chef Tita') from the Dominican Republic is the young pioneer of the New Dominican Cuisine, which has brought local produce and traditional cuisines back in fashion in her Caribbean island nation, where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 to start the saga of the New World.

Likewise, Chef Felipe Rivandeneira from Ecuador is the quintet's other young gastronomic guru. The chef still had his carry-on bag with him when I met him and heard him talk excitedly about New Andean Cuisine and the unique gastronomic tradition of the enchanted island of Galapagos, where Darwin had found the evidence he needed for his theory of evolution.

Delhi has had infrequent exchanges with Latin American culture. New Delhi is the only city in the world outside Mexico to have a street named after one of its nation builders, Benito Juarez. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, who lived in Delhi as Mexico's ambassador to India in 1962-65, completed two of his acclaimed works -- El mono gramático (The Monkey Grammarian) and Ladera este (Eastern Slope) -- during his stint here and had a profound impact on the Bengali poets and writers who called themselves the 'Hungry Generation' or 'Hungryalists'.

In an earlier stint in India, when he was first secretary at the Embassy of Mexico in the early 1950s, a lesser-known Paz had facilitated a scholarship for Satish Gujral to study under the Mexican masters, Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros, and the young painter was an eyewitness to the combustible relationship between Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, with the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky also choosing to fish in these troubled waters.

The closest we got to experiencing Latin American food was courtesy of Saeed Sherwani, now the president of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), who opened what must have been the country's first Tex-Mex restaurant, Rodeo, in Connaught Place, in 1994. In the early days of the restaurant, the Mexican chefs Roberto Treves and Sergio Snyder -- two gentlemen whom I won't ever be able to forget -- kept showing up at regular intervals at its kitchen, and they were the ones who were introduced us to the mole poblano, with which they cooked chicken.

Delhi never quite fell in love with Mexico's national dish, but 20 years on, with our taste buds having evolved dramatically and with Nobu putting Peruvian Nikkei cuisine on the world map, we seem to be ready for the fiesta that Chef Ramon and the five Latin American chefs now in residence at The Leela Gurgaon are about to lay out for us.

Kunal Kapur Launches His Must-Have Cookbook For 'A Chef in Every Home' At Diya

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHEN Kunal Kapur was a kitchen trainee under the redoubtable Chef Arvind Saraswat at the Taj Palace, New Delhi, he had the most unnerving experience on the day each member of his batch was to present a three-course meal for evaluation by their guru. An eager-beaver, who made a mark on his first day at IHM-Chandigarh by being the only student to be able to identify the spices that are common to every kitchen, Kunal was the first to present his three-course meal, starting with a dahi ka shorba, to Chef Saraswat. He was expecting to earn brownie points for being the first, but he, for reasons that he could not fathom, only managed to send the master chef into paroxysms of anger.

The MasterChef India co-host and Executive Sous
Chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal Kapur, with his
identically dressed son, Ranbir, at the launch of
his book, A Cook in Every Home (Random
House India). Image by Marryam Reshii

Chef Saraswat cried out in rage and flung the bowl of soup at Kunal. "It barely missed my head," Kunal recalled with his characteristic shy smile, and then he revealed why he had incurred the chef's wrath. He had served soup without a spoon! With the industry's expectations from chefs changing over the years, and with chefs no longer expected to be faceless masters of the back-end, it was important for one who aspired for a place in the kitchens of Taj hotels to get his basics right. Chef Saraswat was conveying this message to Kunal -- albeit in a way that unnerved the rookie to the point of making him want to cry.

Now famous as the co-host of MasterChef India and executive sous chef of The Leela Gurgaon, Kunal shared this blast from his past, even as he cooked the most aromatic prawn moilee, at the launch of his truly family cookbook, A Chef in Every Home (Random House India), at Diya, the Progressive Indian restaurant at his hotel. The choice of venue was appropriate, for Kunal earned his spurs at Diya, as the famous restaurant critic and Editor of the Times Food Guide, Marryam Reshii, reminded us. Kunal joined the restaurant after a stint at Made in India, Radisson Blu Hotel Noida, where he met his other mentor -- Arun Tyagi, who was then executive chef. Tyagi brought out the best in Kunal -- unlike Saraswat, he focused on his acolyte's strengths, not his weaknesses.

"He has a way with the imagination," Marryam said in her introductory remarks. She was right on target. Kunal's debut cookbook, which took him more than a year to complete (and which I have reviewed earlier), makes it abundantly clear that he not only has imagination, but also the ability to feel his audience's pulse. Unlike Chef Saraswat, who propagated lighter but difficult fruit-based sauces in The Gourmet Indian Cookbook, without paying the least attention to the lifestyles and needs of his audience, Kunal shares recipes that can easily be replicated by the home cook, especially a working mother, and her weekend 'chef'-husband.

At the launch, Kunal made bruschetta, prawn moilee and baked yoghurt, even as we talked about the state of hospitality education in the country, and Kunal's son Ranbir (his wife's called Ekta, which makes them quite a Bollywood Kapur khandaan!), sitting on an inverted pot like his father on the cover of the cookbook, kept ordering him to not stop stirring the moilee. Kunal's boss, The Leela Gurgaon's General Manager Michel Koopman, said he had been to a dozen hotel management colleges across the country and was shocked to find that their textbooks were at least 20 years behind the times. Reshii, at this point, remarked how the hotel management students were still being taught how to make cona coffee.

Koopman said F&B was becoming a key distinguishing factor in hotels, so culinary education should be in sync with the changing times. "A room is a room, is a room, is a room -- and is a room," he said to emphasise his point. Well, Koopman should know -- The Leela Gurgaon's earnings from F&B have touched Rs 88 crore, with Rs 46 crore coming from banquets. With the hotel notching up a revenue of Rs 220 crore, F&B accounts for a healthy 40 per cent of the pie. Of course, Koopman couldn't help saying how wherever he goes, people ask him whether he's from Kunal Kapur's hotel! Being as F&B proud as he is, Koopman just loves it.

A journalist asked Kunal whether the stardom that chefs seem to enjoy today has made any real difference to the attitude of people towards the hospitality industry. Not much has changed, Kunal admitted, and he was supported by the other panelist, the scriptwriter of the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani, novelist and OCLD graduate, Advaita Kala. Kunal recalled how the doctor parents of a young man, who were fans of MasterChef India, came to him with the request to dissuade their son from joining a hotel management institute. He refused to accede to their wish. "I couldn't be expected to dissuade someone from joining my own profession," Kunal said proudly, but he admitted that popular attitudes are still stacked up against the profession. Star chefs, by becoming role model for the young and ambitious, should be able to change all that. I hope and pray they succeed!