Chef Sarfaraz Ahmed was in Kolkata to serve the city, the best of his progressive Indian dishes, brought all the way from Tresind Mumbai to Ruh-B-Ruh, the newly-opened diner at The Westin Kolkata. The chef is not only a pro in bringing his imaginations onto plate, but also believes that a chef might be comfortable cooking with a set of ingredients, but should also keep adding ingredients to his/her bio, and there’s no limit to this process. Excerpts from a chat:
How do you study the pulse/palate of the city?
I’ve been to Kolkata a couple of times. My paternal aunt has her roots in Bengali, so she was an inspiration. Also, time and again I have been surrounded by Bengalis.
To bring dishes across India to life, the first thing I do is not to replicate the dishes. I get inspired by them. My team and I learn about the food and culture through books and other printed sources, we incorporate local flavours in our recipes, and then it’s our take on how we want to do it. When my dish is finally ready, I will probably go on to taste the actual dish. For example, at Trisend, we do a Kolkata beetroot chop, with a stuffing of some peanut butter, has a kasundi chutney base, and has a beetroot carpaccio to top it up with. This one is a big hit, and trust me I tasted a Kolkata vegetable chop almost five years later, when I visited Kolkata.
You were born and brought up in Shimla, studied in Lucknow, now work in Mumbai, and all have distinctively different cultures, food choices, and flavour profiles. How does it reflect in your creations?
It’s always a journey and whatever you live up to, it will get inculated in your senses and that is what you put when you are cooking. My dad is from Punjab, the Himachal side, and my mom from Kanpur. So my growing up days were all about kadhi chawal as well as korma. Till my school days, it was more Punjabi food, Himachali food, and Awadhi food. And when I travelled from Lucknow to Delhi, I was forced to a different era of Mughlai and all the Punjabi style Delhi food, chole bhature, and things like that. That also got inculcated into me.
Next, when I moved onto Bengaluru, it was almost a 50 per cent shift since it is a metropolitan city. There you have to find your own comfort food. But honestly, the game changer was when I got transferred from Bengaluru to Kerala. It was like living in a foreign country. The culture and food habits are completely different — you don’t understand the language, nor do you understand the lifestyle. So, the dishes like the butternut kootu, Malabar tamarind curry, vada, all come from that part of the country.
Since you said that you refer to books to get an idea of the local, regional dishes, how do you make it taste authentic?
If it had been a decade back, I would probably not be able to do it. But after a certain level and years of experience, you start getting a sense that you are going in the right direction. Say like five-seven years back, I will say if I imagined one dish,I would probably have made only 40 per cent of it, since my imagination and practicality were not in sync. But in the last three years since we started off having too much creativity, it has now become much easier for me and for the team as well. Now, if I imagine something, I know how to bring it onto the plate.
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