Even as Selvaraju, the executive chef of Graze (the fine dining European restaurant at Vivanta by Taj), sautees a slice of fresh foie gras in butter, serves it up with a flourish along with some balsamic vinegar reduction, his mind is on the dish of fish curry waiting for him at home. “That’s meal I’ve been looking forward to all day,” he says.
Back home in Trichy, his mother used to make a similar fish curry—tangy, seasoned with curry leaf and doused in coconut milk. Eaten with steamed rice and dollop of coriander chutney. “It’s my favourite. I must have it at least once a week,” he says, remembering how the spices were finely blended on a grinding stone and the fish gently simmered in an earthen pot.
A finicky eater as a child, Nimish Bhatia, the regional executive chef at the Lalit Ashok, grew up in Kashmir. His mother would tempt him with exotic creations inspired by magazines and recipe books. “One day she made rajma chawal , and that has topped my list ever since,” says the chef who just planned and executed a ten-course meal for the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, an international gastronomic society headquartered in Paris, “It’s simple and completely satisfying, made with whitish beans called chitra , lightly cooked with tomato and garlic. Eaten with steamed rice and maybe some anardana chutney on the side,” says Bhatia.
As close friends arrive at Jean Michel Jasserand’s home, the former executive chef of the Leela (now with his own chain of restaurants) is busy steaming a batch of cous cous and putting the finishing touches to a large pot of vegetables, lamb and chicken simmered in Morrocan spices to go with it—a monthly ritual that takes him back to his childhood in the south of France. “Cous cous was my mother’s piece de resistance . I make it especially for family and close friends,” he says of the dish that he calls his all-time ‘comfort food special’.
Abhijit Saha may run two upscale restaurants serving Mediterranean and European food but his first choice (being Bengali of course) is macher jhol . “Fish curry—rahu cooked with jeera, green chilly, onion, garlic and ginger, seasoned with mustard oil and thickened with mashed potato. But that’s not all; growing up in a boarding school in Darjeeling, steaming hot momos were quite the treat. We had ‘Daju’— a security guard by night, tuck man by day—who brought them from home. Eggs are another favourite; you can eat them anytime, turn them into fluffy omelettes or softboiled with salt and pepper. They are nature’s comfort food— and a bachelor’s best friend, says Saha.”