Many of you may know me as a sommelier and some of you may even know that before I studied wines, I was a trained chef. Sadly, I never stepped behind the grills as much, - maybe I just couldn’t take the heat, pun intended. But what my training did leave me with is an earnest adulation for all chefs who hone their craft and strive to make meals filling and fun for all they serve.
My training was largely in French kitchens where the art of cooking was distilled down to a science. Every sauce had a fixed recipe and portions were measured to the last gram. Later on, when I was living in Italy, I realised just how different the food here, “just across the border”, was. For one, sauce wasn’t always needed; many places served up a steak sans sauceboat and initially I found it rather frugal. Also, the way Italian food was presented left me wondering if Gaston from the Beau Peep cartoon strip was handling plating in the back area!
Over time I realised that truly great Italian fare was never about just the stuff on the plate. It was a lot more emotional. One needed to connect with not just the dish or its recipe but rather its story and how it got there on the menu. And this is precisely what made my meal at (La) Bella Cucina at Le Meridien in Gurgaon so appealing.
If one were to walk into this fine dining space and simply pick up the menu, it may seem a bit of a smorgasbord. The dishes, although set in order, don’t follow any central theme. But then the newly appointed chef Roberto Apa will walk up to you and start talking about food and life in general. Each anecdote he has about his journey has been interpreted through dishes—from the first cake he baked as a six-year-old to the aunt who encouraged him to join a culinary school, from the dish he calls “ugly but tasty” on his menu to how he serves up food that isn’t flamboyant but more rooted in the reality of the region he comes from (Napoli). His mixed seafood platter, for example, doesn’t serve up prawns and calamari. “Those were what the restaurants bought, that and the big, expensive fish.
My grandfather would hold my hand and we would walk to the fisherman boats slowly. Once the big buyer crowd had cleared, we would get these small fish, the anchovies and such which incidentally got caught in the nets and were considered worthless. These were literally doled out for free by the fisherman and this is what the average family brought home to fry and eat.” “Today,” he continues, “all these may be fashionable but back in the day, nobody wanted them. Which is why when I did the seafood platter here, I decided to go back in time and do it the way I remembered it.” This was but one of the many stories I was regaled with over a breezy easy lunch.
By the time I left, I had sufficiently eaten two meals’ worth but more pertinently, I had learnt a lot more about Italian food, no, scratch that, about the Italian way of eating, than I had known before. Definitely a star addition to the National Capital Region dining scene, I recommend Roberto and his restaurant highly for all Bella Cucina enthusiasts.
The writer is a sommelier. mail@magandeepsingh.com