BackGaggan in Mumbai
Noma's Garima Arora will helm the India outpost of the world's leading Indian restaurant
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“Ghar ka murgi is so damn tasty, you just need the right perspective," she had told us in December last year. Well, come 2016, Garima Arora—last employed as a chef de partie at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that changed the way the world looked at food—will be putting her words to test. Arora will be helming the Mumbai outpost of Gaggan, Bangkok, the world’s no. 1 Indian restaurant (according to a Restaurant magazine listing), when it opens a year down the line, owner-chef Gaggan Anand told us.
“Garima is a young chef, she has to get to know India all over again. For the next year or so, till we are ready to launch, she’ll be working with me in Bangkok," Gaggan (who prefers using one name) said.
There was ample evidence during our conversation last year that India was never far from Arora’s mind, even after years away from Mumbai, her home. “Growing up, I never gave Indian food the credit I should have," she told us. But the exposure to new culinary trends, coupled with homesickness-fuelled food memories, led her to experiment with old desi favourites at Noma’s closed-to-the-public ‘Saturday night projects’. Be it the street staple sev-batata-puri or the humble kadhi-chawal, Arora used fermentation, dehydration and other techniques to reinterpret the dishes into something fresh and new.
Perhaps unknowingly, she was moving parallel to the path paved by Gaggan, who famously took two-and-a-half years to break down the dhokla and put together a new age version using a nitrogen bath.
And now, in the first partnership of its kind, the Ferran Adrià-trained Gaggan will be working with the René Redzepi-mentored Arora. The horizon just exploded for Indian food.
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