This chef cooks records in his 1.5-tonne kadhai

On a sultry Saturday evening, Nagpur’s celebrity chef Vishnu Manohar is busy overseeing the preparations to set a record at his packed open-air restaurant. Come morning, they will cook 2,500kg of chivda, a Maharashtrian savoury mix that’s customary around Diwali. “The chivda will be packed and distributed among the needy right into the interiors of Gadchiroli,” he says.
Sunday morning sees Manohar surrounded by visibly humongous paraphernalia.His iron kadhai with a steel inner coating weighs around 1,500kg. The otherwise light-footed chef himself tips the scales at 115kg, and the ladles he wields for mixing and stirring weigh 35-40kg. The beaten rice and other ingredients amount to slightly more than 2,500kg.
As family, friends and admirers begin to fill the lawn, local singers belt out some of his favourite Hindi songs to ease the pressure. The early morning downpour has not dampened the mood, and by 12. 30pm Manohar has accomplished what he set out to do.
This is not the maverick chef’s first record in his 35-year career that started with a small outdoor catering business in 1986. In 2000, he rolled out a 5-foot paratha for “both eyeballs and footfall”. He got both. Next came a 32kg puran poli – a sweet paratha with a filling of sugar and chana daal, at Mumbai’s Andheri Sports Complex.
“It was tricky as I could have rolled the dough and stuffed it, but placing it on the tawa and then turning it could have been its undoing,” he recalls. He came up with the idea of placing 4mm wooden planks under and over the puran poli and delicately pushing it on the tawa. Both planks had handles to make the placing and turning easy.
In 2007, Manohar made a 9-footlong vegetable seekh kebab in Nagpur. “It was long and very thick, and I had to ensure that it cooked evenly. ” The solution was to spread the mince mix over a long and hollow iron pipe. “Burning charcoal was filled inside the pipe to ensure the kebab was properly cooked,” he says. But the pressure of creating records can be exhausting, so Manohar took a 10-year break from it and concentrated on his restaurant as he had failed at the business thrice. He didcookery shows at different events in the city, gave out printouts of recipes “and the women loved this,” says the chef who is not professionally trained but charms all with his wit and the ability to handle attention.
“A couple of women I knew liked the artistic manner in which I prepared and served food. They encouraged me to do a cookery show on television,” he says. His reality show started in 2004 and ran for 14 years on a regional channel. It also helped him land roles in six Marathi films.
The itch to create another record returned in 2017 when he made his way into the Asian Book of Records with a 52-hour non-stop cooking feat. “For a record like this a doctor’s certificate is essential to show that I can pull through. I had to train extensively and so I would cook in my restaurant and then the entire night at the railway canteen to check and build my stamina,” says Manohar. He had committed to cooking for 51 hours, but went one over.
That feat got him an invite to set a baigan bharta record in Jalgaon. “Jalgaon is famous for brinjals and I thought that if the Middle-Eastern dish baba ghanoush can be on international menus it’s time to give the Jalgaon brinjal a push. ”
The target was 4,200kg of bharta. A special kadhai worth Rs 4. 5 lakh was crafted at Kolhapur, Maharashtra’s kitchen utensils hub, and loaded with a crane on a truck. “The district magistrate of Kolhapur was present to see it off,” says Manohar.
Since then the kadhai has gone places. It came to Delhi in 2019 for making 5,000kg samrasta khichdi, to Pune in March 2021 for making 8,000kg missal, another Maharasthrian bean sprout dish, and is now ready to travel to Assam. “This kadhai is sacred to me and I have decided that I will never sell anything that is prepared in it,” says Manohar as an expression of gratitude.
He is ready to spread his wings now. “So far, I stuck to Maharashtra and its cuisine as I am not proficient in Hindi or English. It’s also why I have not been able to keep up with the competition. ” Odd, coming from the author of 52 cookbooks. But he’s brushing up his Hindi and working on a YouTube channel he launched in 2009. There’s a lineup of cookery shows on TV too, he promises.