The face of Indian foods looked drastically different just a decade ago. If you wanted to step out for a “nice” meal, your options were generally limited to restaurants serving East Asian or Italian food, usually at a 5-star hotel and, consequently, at the prices they commanded. The food might have been good, but it was hard not to notice the gaping India-shaped hole in the industry. There has always been a rich culture of Indian street foods, quick-service and fast-casual establishments serving regional cuisines across our metros; but if you were looking for a more celebratory spot that focused on great food, ambience and service, Indian cuisines remained conspicuously absent.
That was a driving factor in our decision to open Masque in Mumbai in 2016. As someone afforded the privilege to travel widely, it was not lost on us that we were missing an opportunity to celebrate our country’s many cuisines across different styles of restaurants, carrying them into the present.
By 2015, we knew that whatever shape the restaurant took, we would only use ingredients available to us locally. We made it a point to seek out producers that were doing the same, from cheeses and olive oils to miso. By 2016, we knew we wanted to serve only tasting menus – we offered 3 options of various lengths – a decision that, personally, felt the riskiest of all. No other restaurant at the time served only tasting menus, doing away with a la carte entirely; it was not a concept many diners at the time were used to, nor comfortable with. Today, we serve a single, ingredient-driven ten-course tasting menu, and that menu is dictated by the produce available to us: as the seasons change, so does the menu.
The kind of food we serve has changed over time. I would be remiss to say we got it right from day one: our dedication to Indian ingredients remained strong, but something about the output felt confused at times, like it was lacking in direction. Then somewhere down the line, things changed: more and more, we began turning inward for inspiration, learning and cooking from the wide repertoire of recipes that were available to us via our own families and backgrounds. It sounds cliché, but in hindsight, it’s clear – this is when we found our stride. Our team comes from all over India, and in that diversity, there is strength. It brings to the table so many cuisines from around the country – and I very specifically say many cuisines, and Indian foods, because the sheer diversity of them renders the umbrella term “Indian food” pointless; here, cooking changes every hundred kilometres, varying widely between villages, cities, and states.
Today, our tasting menu spans the Indian subcontinent, picking up on inspirations from around the country. It’s not traditional by any means – on the contrary, we find ourselves now part of a larger, growing movement of modern Indian food. For us, that means revisiting traditional cooking and ingredients and building on them, discovering the many ways in which these can build cross-cultural bridges. We learn from age-old methods and practices and find ways to adapt them in our own context. For so long, the industry here looked to the rest of the world to lead the way, mimicking trends that simply didn’t translate in our environment. And why would they? Those were ideas that worked well in their own setting, where they had their own roots. Here, there was an underlying belief that Indian foods couldn’t match up to a certain level of fine dining; it was a ‘casual’ food, relegated second fiddle to Western cuisines.
When you think about it, this is counterintuitive. Indian cooking can be incredibly complex – it is layered and nuanced, and very often the product of long and rich histories. There is also very little formal documentation surrounding it, which makes it even more challenging, but equally impressive: these cuisines are the result of generations of oral tradition, passed down from family to family, each with their own distinctions and almost all dependent on circumstance. Zero-waste cooking, eating local, and seasonal produce have been fundamental tenets of Indian cookery, long before they became international buzzwords.
This makes it all the more exciting to see this school of thought gain traction: the belief that Indian foods cannot be elevated to the same level as Euro-centric ones is rapidly disappearing. Restaurants around the country are now spotlighting regional Indian cooking – some traditional, others modern, but all working towards changing a homogeneous notion of Indian food. International recognition of this is growing, too: this year, more restaurants than ever before were featured on the extended list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants. None of this is to say that these are the only worthwhile restaurants in the country: there are a slew of establishments doing a truly excellent job serving cuisines from around the world, and I hope they will only increase in kind – diversity and variety is both welcome and necessary. What is exciting is to see the rising number of restaurants doing the same with Indian cuisines, and of young chefs cooking from a place of pride, dedication, and the same level of interest that was once only afforded to other cuisines.
Aditi Dugar is the founder of Masque, an ingredient-driven restaurant in Mumbai, currently ranked at #21 on the list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants. Under the banner of hospitality group Urban Gourmet India, she also runs catering company Sage & Saffron, bakery TwentySeven Bakehouse, and the kitchens at Seesaw Café and ARAKU Café.
Courtesy The Sublime India Issue by Vissionaire
To see more articles related to this topic, follow this link.