Ghaas phoos to fine dining: Top desi chefs give the world a taste of inventive Indian veg cooking

Vegan chef Nina Curtis’ imaginative menu combining American ingredients with Indian accents for the Modi dinner may have been all over the news recently but for quite some time now, many top Indian chefs across the world have been showcasing the country’s own robust tradition of inventive vegetarian cooking, and serving up a kadahi full of cultural diplomacy alongside.

As plant-based-diets get mainstreamed in America, Europe and culinary capitals of the world — even the Michelin Guide awards green stars — many are realising that Indian’s deep culinary traditions has delicious meat-free lessons for all.

In New York, dosas are quite the rage. “It’s pop appeal is now at par with pancakes,” says chef Vipul Gupta of Moghul caterers, the largest Indian catering company in North America. Not only are all sorts of dosa diners packed, but how to ferment the batter videos, blogs and social media posts are all pervasive too. Chef Hari Nayak’s gruyere cheese dosa with a filling of edamame-potato at Priyanka Chopra’s restaurant Sona has acquired a cult status while Gupta’s own ‘dosa-tacos’ are sought after for cocktail receptions and events.

“We do more than 200-220 weddings and other events a year, and our live dosa-taco counters are a big hit. People in the US earlier associated Indian food with just tandoori, chicken tikka masala, chaat and samosa, but now South Indian food is big, also since much of it can be vegan,” Gupta says.
Presented like the Mexican tacos, the mini dosas come with not just typical aloo filling, but black bean and corn, cheese, and even Asian spring vegetables. Even traditional sadhyas and full-fledged banana leaf meals are gaining popularity. Gupta made 21 Tamil vegetarian dishes served on banana leaves to 300 guests for an Iyengar wedding at a ranch which was appreciated by both Indian-origin and non-Indian guests.

Like him, several other Indian chefs globally are going back to their roots, literally and metaphorically, creating vegetarian dishes that take inspiration from India’s diverse regional cuisines but are experimental, clever, and complex —sometimes dazzling and perplexing palates used to meals dominated by a single animal protein.

At Indienne in Chicago, chef Sujan Sarkar’s latest restaurant, the nine-course tasting menu comprises dishes such as passion fruit pani puri, sweet potato-karambola chaat, and butternut squash sambar with medu vada donuts, not to mention apple bebinca! “The West Coast produces great quality vegetables all year round,” says Sarkar, whose attempt is to make gourmet Indian dishes from local seasonal produce.

In fact, such inventiveness using local fruits and vegetables but cooking these in ways where a specific flavour profile is created and flavours layered via spicing instead of one “main” ingredient is intrinsic to Indian gastronomy, where the same dish gets recreated dozens of times with tweaks as one goes from one region to the other. Chefs like Sarkar are now globalising this inventive, creative and not-so-structured style of Indian cooking.

Even restaurants that are not meat-free are focusing on creative vegetarian dishes. In Dubai, at the much-awarded Tres Ind Studio, chef Himanshu Saini has done away with the idea of dishes centred around a particular protein, an idea entrenched in restaurant kitchens with roots in French gastronomy. “Instead, of thinking meat, fowl or fish, my courses are defined by what is the flavour combination I want to create,” he says, “so even if it is lobster in corn curry, the flavour of the corn curry is more important for me to get right, the charred lobster only supplements that note of layered sweetness.” At the studio, Saini’s 16- course tasting menu has nine completely vegetarian courses, his idea being to champion “the way we create flavours with a diversity of lentils, flower, fruit, vegetables.”

Tres Ind’s sister restaurant in Dubai, Avatara that opened last year, is solely vegetarian, building in nuances of ayurveda into its highly-inventive and stylised tasting menu with 16 courses that can be accompanied with wine. The restaurant bagged a Michelin star just last month, and is helmed by a young Indian chef from Rishikesh, Rahul Rana. Rana takes inspiration from his mother’s cooking, childhood memories of chole bhature and humble seasonal ingredients like lauki to shatter prejudices around vegetarian food. There are dishes like ghee roast karela, mango sambar gelato with dosa crisps, jackfruit momo with seabuckthorn thupka, turnip steak and berry pulao, not to mention horse gram curry, ragi bhatura and jhakiya aloo, a course paying obeisance to the chef’s pahadi roots.

Meanwhile, Indian street food dishes and beloved fries made with humble shakarkandi, bhindi or okra and even onion bhajiyas are enjoying their own globalisation. In London, Camellia Panjabi’s new, sprawling Masala Zone at Piccadilly Circus that opened this June has an Indian high tea and strikingly good-looking onion bhajiyas that are being lapped up by guests. However, as we celebrate these delights, Panjabi cautions: “After the pandemic, people are more aware of their health and paying attention to agricultural practices but knowledge of how to cook a wide variety of vegetables has not increased as much as it ought to. It would be beneficial if catering schools paid more attention to vegetarian,” she points out. A school for vegetarian Indian cooking may just lead the way globally in this new world.