Chef Prateek Sadhu is in Bengaluru and Chennai for a pop-up, presenting food from his globally renowned restaurant Naar!

Chef Prateek Sadhu has been in the news ever since he launched Naar, a 20-seat restaurant nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh. Touted as, “India’s most ambitious destination dining experience,” by several critics, the chef is also known for his stint as executive chef and co-owner of Masque in Mumbai. Born in Kashmir, the chef has always felt, “mountains are home to me,” and will now be travelling to the city to present a curated menu as a part of an exclusive culinary tour in collaboration with The Leela Palaces and Conosh. We catch up with him to find out what you can look forward to at the pop-up.

Since your food is so terroir specific, how do you make it travel well?

We’re travelling with the idea of Naar and that’s what we want to tell our diners. We’re also travelling with a lot of ingredients and it’s true, you can’t replicate the entire experience of Naar anywhere else in the world, but we are really trying to be as authentic in our approach as possible. For example, we’re doing skewers that use pine from Kasauli and we’re ensuring we’re going back between each of the pop-ups to get the pine as fresh as possible. It is a small effort, but makes a world of a difference.

How would you like people to perceive Himalayan food or cuisine, considering it is so diverse?

I mean, that’s the beauty of Indian food. It’s so diverse, right? I keep saying this, this is the most exciting time for Indian food because the conversations have changed from people perceiving India as all about butter chicken or naan; to now, conversations evolving to where we are talking about micro foods of India or micro regional cuisines. When we talk about the entire Himalayan range, there’s so much on offer from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh. What we’re trying to present is the exact same idea — that there’s so much diversity in the mountain food of India and to understand that, we are showcasing foods like indigenous sausages from Ladakh or this classic native noodle dish from Uttarakhand.

On that note, what’s the most exciting ingredient that you’re going to be bringing to Bengaluru and Chennai?

There are a couple of them. The entire menu has little nuances, for example, right from your local ragi to foraged seabuckthorn and exotic spices like timru — which is a local sichuan kind of pepper grown in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and even in the Arunachal region — there’s a lot of different new ingredients that we’re bringing to these pop-ups.

Bengaluru: INR 11,000 onwards. Dinner only. September 20 & 21. At Le Cirque Signature, The Leela Palace Bengaluru, Old Airport Road.
Chennai: INR 7,999 onwards. Dinner only. September 27 & 28. At The Leela Palace Chennai, MRC Nagar.

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