Do you remember a time when chefs talked about fusion cooking? This was supposed to be food that combined Indian dishes with any kind of foreign influence. So, if you put Boursin cheese on a paratha, this was fusion. Or if you rubbed Indian spices on a lamb chop, this too was fusion.
It all seems quite tame now but, at the time, it would get chefs very agitated. Some would say things like ‘fusion is confusion’ and get self-righteous about it. In a sense our chefs were reflecting global prejudices of the 1960s and 1970s. Any French chef who used an unfamiliar spice had to explain himself to the critics.
But by the 1980s all that had changed. Joel Robuchon borrowed freely from Spanish cuisine. Jean Andre Charial installed a tandoor at his three-star restaurant. And even the grand master Michel Guerard came back from China and started making rice flour dim sum-style pancakes with Chinese mushrooms.
Indian chefs missed these global developments, of course. Just as they missed the reality: What they called fusion was happening all around them on the streets of India.
Indian Chinese food is the ultimate fusion cuisine using Chinese soya sauce with Indian masalas. Even the modern chicken tikka (murgh malai kabab) is based on generous application of processed cheese in the cooking process. And on the streets, nobody cared about whether fusion was confusion. Amul butter (not Indian white butter) became the backbone of pav bhaji. People started grating processed cheese on dosas.
At the Taj group, chefs made some attempt at creating a nouvelle Indian cuisine not realising that with chilli cheese toast they had already created the first great Indian ‘fusion’ dish. Chefs abroad grew more daring. At Tabla in New York Floyd Cardoz created a style of cooking that used Indian flavours even if all the dishes were not obviously Indian. At Rasoi in London, Vineet Bhatia started putting truffles on naans. The breakthrough may have been Gaggan Anand in Bangkok whose food is just food; he does not hand out passports to his dishes and Indian flavours co-exist happily with Japanese and Thai flavours, all of them backed by solid modern food technology.
I was reminded of all this when I ate last week at Revolver in Dubai. The chef Jitin Joshi started out at the Oberoi Raj Vilas and then went to London to work with the legendary French chef Eric Chavot at the Capital Hotel. When he returned to Indian food, it was at London’s Gymkhana, Karam Sethi’s vastly successful London restaurant. (It now has two Michelin stars.)
Jitin has worked in Dubai before but his international training has increased his range to the extent that he can confidently reach into the techniques and ingredients of any cuisine and make them his own
So, Revolver, the restaurant he now runs, may have Indian roots but the shoots have spread all over the world. We chatted over the counter at dinner service (he cooked, I ate) and I was surprised to find that despite the international nature of his experience Jitin is a bit of a cheerleader for Indian food. “In terms of our spices and our understanding of how and exactly when to put what into the pan, we are far ahead of most other cuisines,” he said. “Our food is much more complicated than people outside India realise.”
Certainly, at Revolver the global traditions of Indian cuisine are celebrated. Take the Scotch egg. It started out life as our nargisi kofta till the Brits took it back to their island. They took the dish downmarket substituting cheap sausage meat for the freshly chopped goat that marked the original. Its journey downmarket continued till nasty industrial Scotch eggs wrapped in cellophane began to be sold at service stations.
Top British chefs rescued it. The Hind’s Head in Bray usually gets the credit for making a version which left the egg yolk runny. And for a brief period, it was a trendy dish with Scotch quail eggs becoming a popular canapé and Bruce Poole at La Trompette making a full size version with panko bread crumbs and truffle flavours.
The first Revolver in Singapore where Saurabh Udinia was the opening chef reclaimed the dish for India with wagyu keema and Indian spices. The Dubai Revolver has taken it an unexpected step forward by curing the egg and adding a new layer of flavour. And you can add caviar as a topping if you like.
So, what is this? Indian food? Fusion? A new take on a British favourite? I really don’t know.
And I don’t think it matters. That old parochial view of food is dead. Chefs can now order the best ingredients from around the world and they have the skills to cook them anyway they like. National classifications don’t help; they may actually be a hindrance.
I was looking at Jitin’s menu for Revolver and was struck by how eclectic it was, picking Asian classic ingredients and sometimes giving them an Indian treatment and often just the slightest sprinkle of Indianness.
A Japanese style hand roll is spiced with Goan balchow. A wagyu flank ateak comes with a mayo built around a nihari gravy. Lobster manchurian, a huge hit on the Singapore menu as well, takes a ‘Chinese dish’ originally invented in Colaba and uses top notch ingredients to elevate it.
A king crab leg is paired with the sort of crunchy papaya we associate with the Thai som tam. A duck bao comes alive with Chettinad spices. Nobody at Revolver worries too much about the national origin of rendang (a dish brought to Indonesia and Malaysia by Islamic visitors from further west in Asia which is still the subject of battles over its ownership in South East Asia) but Joshi turns rendang into the base for an excellent clay pot rice.
Often trendy western dishes are given an Indian twist. The current favourite of fried chicken and caviar appears here (without the KFC type batter that is often used) as a piece of chicken marinated in Indian spices, lightly dusted with potato starch and then fried. The caviar goes on top. As a dish it has more in common with chicken 65 than say, Korean fried chicken.
Revolver is already a success in Dubai a city packed out with top Indian restaurants probably because it does not try to be self-consciously Indian. Instead it shows us how far Indian food has come that our chefs now have the freedom to incorporate the best elements of world cuisine.
I am hoping it is the beginning of a trend. Indian chefs have already demonstrated that they can cook any cuisine under the sun. So why not mix it up and have a little fun with our food?
